A few months ago, I invited Vox Media C.E.O. Jim Bankoff on my podcast, The Grill Room, to hear his vision for the future of his once-trailblazing company. A decade earlier, of course, Vox had achieved a $1 billion valuation as part of the generation of traffic- and scale-driven media startups. Alas, the balloon eventually and famously deflated: Vice went bankrupt; BuzzFeed is currently valued below $40 million on the public market. And, hell, they’re doing a lot better than the rest. The Huffington Post is now a subsidiary of BuzzFeed. Remember Mic? PandoDaily? It was a Wild West of eager V.C.s and opportunistic entrepreneurs, and no one made real money besides Henry Blodget.

But Bankoff was always considered the adult in the room during the digital media era, and often for good reason. He was a far more competent C.E.O. than Shane Smith or Jonah Peretti, and he managed to acquire and build a portfolio of solid mid-market brands—some of which, like The Verge and Vox, generated real market momentum. The company’s 2019 acquisition of New York magazine and its own portfolio of digital sub-brands signaled that he was committed to try to build out the sort of Time Inc. for the consumer internet era that he’d promised his investors. Subsequent, slightly head-scratching deals followed: Punch and Group Nine, which moved The Dodo under Vox rule. And yet no executive engineering can outrun secular economics. In 2023, Bankoff sold a 20 percent stake in Vox to Jay Penske’s Penske Media Corporation that valued the company at half its high-water mark.

It now seems like Vox Media might finally be coming to the end of that road—or at least to a juncture that will fundamentally alter its business and identity. Throughout our conversation, Bankoff repeatedly touted the Vox Media Podcast Network as the company’s central growth engine. The podcast business was “on fire,” he told me, and was a “more lasting and durable medium … than social or even websites at this stage.”

At the time, I took note of Bankoff’s vibe shift, which jibed with his recent sale of Polygon, one of his portfolio brands. This week, Axios’s Sara Fischer broke the news that Bankoff and the Vox board have discussed spinning off their podcast network entirely and separating it from the publishing business. Those discussions, which sources confirmed, could affect all aspects of Vox’s business, from Pam Wasserstein’s New York to Kara and Scott’s Pivot podcast.

Bankoff’s own pivot reflects a renewed surge of interest in the podcasting space—especially amid the growth of video podcasting on YouTube and Spotify, and new appetite from major players like Netflix—as well as a broader transformation of the business toward talent-based franchises. (Ahem.) Bankoff told me that Vox could offer talent a full suite of services, from distribution to advertising, events, subscriptions, and even commerce and merchandise. This may revolve primarily around podcasts, but Bankoff thinks of the future business as “an A.P.I. stack that [creators] can plug into.”

However it’s defined, this stand-alone business would certainly be valued at a higher growth multiple than the declining publishing entity. As one media banker explained to me, it would also offer Bankoff a much more appealing universe of potential buyers. Meanwhile, sources said Penske is already interested in taking the publishing assets off of Bankoff’s hands and adding them to a portfolio of once-august brands that includes Rolling Stone, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, SXSW, and Dick Clark Productions. (Penske Media did not comment.)

This split may indeed be the best-possible exit for Vox, though there are reasons to be dubious about how it plays out on both fronts. The current frothiness around podcasting and talent-based franchises is driven in part by the appeal of low overhead—give a couple talking heads some mics and computers, and you can potentially build a massively lucrative advertising and events business. The trouble is that, much like the magazine industry itself, even hit podcasts rarely generate the profit margins that can subsidize a broader slate of less-popular shows. Also, it’s worth noting, hits are the exception in the podcasting industry, not the rule.

As it stands, even Vox’s marquee talents—Kara and Scott, Esther Perel, etcetera—still exist in that liminal space between niche stardom and true celebrity. That’s fine for their own personal economics, but it’s not enough to sustain the lesser-rated podcasts hosted by the likes of, say, Preet Bharara or Andy Roddick, or especially a Cynthia Graber or Nilay Patel. Bankoff has structured his talent deals to incentivize performance: In May, he re-signed Kara and Scott to a four-year deal that entitles them to 70 percent of their revenues with no money upfront. Not only does this cap Vox’s potential upside, but it also doesn’t solve for the broader portfolio challenge.

As for the publishing business, well… one need only look at Penske’s existing titles to get a sense of the trajectory a magazine like New York might take under his watch. New York can still punch above its weight to achieve some vestige of the cultural power it once had under Clay Felker and then revived in the storied Adam Moss years—defining the city and its inhabitants in a piece about, say, the “West Village Girls.” Alas, in an era of hyperspecialized media fragmentation and increasingly rare monocultural eruptions, New York might be both too niche and not niche enough. In any event, if Rolling Stone or THR are any guide, one imagines that a PMC-owned New York would drift further still from its place in the media firmament.

Are you depressed yet? Don’t be! Indeed, the Bankoff spin is probably more evidence for his reputation as a clear-eyed executive. He presumably took a nice chunk off the table during the $200 million capital raise from NBCU in 2015, and isn’t incentivized to extend the journey any longer. You might even imagine that he could stick around to help the spin and then hand the podcasting business over to Ryan Pauley, Vox’s president of revenue and growth, who has been considered future C.E.O. material and will then get his shot at a liquidity event.

In so many ways, the Vox journey embodies the complex, shape-shifting, and schizophrenic brief history of the digital media industry—the decade-long journey from unicorn status to acquirer to Penske target and splitco. And you’ve got to give Bankoff credit for staying in the game.