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CEO/Founder, Skift, travel intelligence company. Founder, paidContent. New Yorker, Global Soul.
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On this blog: travel, building businesss, media, life, and such...

My Biases In Media Business: A Primer

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Me with my Tweets, visualized.

For those who have followed my career, many try to decipher biases in my media business writing/analysis/rants (aka Tweets), especially those on receiving end of them. Certainly I have my share of media people I have pissed off with my Tweets, and many who assume I am out there just to slash and burn.

So, I’ll try and explain.

I have been a media operator for 16 years now, have built two boutique media companies, have spent 10+ yrs as media business reporter (haven’t been one since 2010) and have gone through every up & down you can imagine in media, as a journalist and as an entrepreneur. And as an immigrant in America.

I am a media operator, hence I critique.

I am biased against unearned privilege in media (which is sadly a majority of media owners and executives) and the essential bullshitness of the whole ecosystem around “future of journalism/media,” so much of which media founders and executives inhabit as an act.

I am biased against scenesters in media, a category in which majority of digital media startups (and founders) fall, with little long term conviction of the discipline required to build something long lasting in media.

I am biased against over-complication of media, biased against those who claim to be reinventing media with their new companies, biased against those claiming supposedly new business models in media. All of which is bullshit.

I am biased against the valuation chasers in media, also the majority of digital media startup founders.

I am biased against media companies/founders/executives pretending to be tech companies, also a surprisingly high number.

I am biased against momentum/herd venture investors in media, with little understanding of the long term nature and nurturing of media and nature of returns.

I am biased *for* the media operator, the one keeping their heads down and executing.

I am biased for the underdogs in media, of which many exist but don’t get the spotlight.

I am biased for what I call the “Small and Mighty” media companies, companies and people with deep impact in their domains.

I am biased for those creating media with a confident worldview and understand the primacy of it – and primacy of editorial - above all else, in building a media company. Conviction is a very under appreciated talent in media.

I am biased for the older entrepreneurs in media, those reinventing their careers, those proving the skeptics (many times me amongst them) wrong.

I am biased for journalists-becoming-entrepreneurs, it is amongst my only evangelizing functions in life. Sadly many of them become future-of-journalism types, those I am biased against.

I am biased for those media entrepreneurs betting on longform text, the past, the present and future of media, instead of running after every new formats and pivots emerging.

I am biased for those creating finite, packaged media in an age of overwhelm.

I am biased for those media entrepreneurs & executives who see opportunities outside the general catch-all media, pick the right topic & own it. No surprise there, I have lived all my life in vertical media after all.

Above all, I am biased for those *always, always*, doing their own thing in media.

Hope that explains it!

4 notes

  1. rafat posted this