Kevin Roose is leaving the New York Times and Casey Newton is stepping down from the paper's AI podcast "Hard Fork," both planning to launch a new media company. The Times, per SF Standard reporting, spent more than half a million dollars on a video studio for the show that remains unfinished.

Kevin Roose and Casey Newton announced Thursday that they are ending their run as co-hosts of "Hard Fork," the New York Times' weekly AI and tech podcast, with their final episodes airing in August. Roose is departing the Times entirely; Newton, who also runs the SF-based tech newsletter Platformer, is stepping down as a contributor. Together they plan to launch a new media company with a new AI-focused podcast.

The announcement arrived one week after "Hard Fork" staged a sold-out live show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where $150 tickets bought attendees nearly three and a half hours of content — including, per multiple attendees who spoke to the SF Standard's The Waggle column, a sponsored IBM segment that left some feeling "held hostage."

The financial context behind the departure is harder to wave off. According to a source cited by The Waggle, the Times spent more than $500,000 converting a San Francisco conference room into a video studio for the podcast. That studio is still not finished.

Sources told The Waggle that deputy managing editor Sam Dolnick had pushed Newton and Roose to produce two episodes per week, but didn't meet their compensation requests to make it worthwhile. Newton, reached on vacation, disputed that as the driving force: "The main thing was just that Kevin and I wanted to start a company together. Platformer has been really fun and we think this will be too." Roose declined to comment.

Dolnick and Times tech editor Pui-Wing Tam reportedly told staff the paper will "immediately" seek new hosts and that the show will continue. People familiar with the situation expect internal auditions and a name change.

The gap between the departure and the stranded studio investment captures something real about how the Times — and legacy media broadly — has tried to keep pace with independent AI journalism. Newton built Platformer into a serious outlet from scratch; "Hard Fork" gave that credibility institutional reach. What the Times bought with its studio budget was the appearance of permanence around a franchise that was always built on a friendship and two freelance-adjacent arrangements. That's not a foundation you can rebuild by posting an opening.

What's unconfirmed: the exact terms of their new venture, any investors or business model behind it, and whether Roose's departure includes any noncompete restrictions. The new company's name hasn't been announced.