How Media Makes Money Today (It's Not Easy) with CEO of The Meteor Cindi Leive

In Reality

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I’m Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

We talk a lot about the economic challenges, not to say cataclysm, that news media has been through in recent decades. Even the most storied brands have found themselves striking advertising deals they’d never have considered a decade before, or scrambling for scraps of revenue in dark corners like Award programs? Branded content? Paywalls? Today’s guest, Cindi Leive, former editor in chief of Glamour and Self has ridden the media revenue roller coaster from the big-spending peak of women’s glossies through the grueling disruption of the digital era. Now she’s starting over in this new environment leading The Meteor, a feminist-forward for-profit collective focused on storytelling for social change, where she needs every bit of her revenue gathering skills.

In this interview, recorded live at the University of Chicago’s Graham School, Cindi and Eric dive into the unraveling of legacy business models, the rise of programmatic advertising, and the existential question of who owns the future of journalism. As she jokes at the beginning of the session she expected to be talking about easy questions like freedom of expression and the First Amendment. Instead we’re dealing with a much more wicked problem: How media companies can make money today.

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm
Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com
Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com