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For most of his career, Scott Brown has operated at the crossroads of Hollywood and the creator economy. After first breaking into digital media during the early days of web series, Scott went on to work across a wide swath of the modern media ecosystem. His résumé includes producing hundreds of hours of Larry King programming for streaming platforms, helping Dwayne Johnson launch a YouTube channel that quickly surpassed a million subscribers, and even producing large-scale stunts for MrBeast. Throughout that journey, Scott developed a front-row seat to how digital platforms were steadily reshaping the economics and creative possibilities of entertainment.

Today Scott believes the next major shift is already underway: the rise of microdramas—short, vertically shot scripted series designed for smartphones and often monetized episode-by-episode inside dedicated apps.

In our conversation, Scott explained how he stumbled upon the emerging format, why he believes it represents the first truly native form of scripted storytelling for phones, and how his own microdrama projects are helping push the medium toward higher production quality.

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Pat Walls didn't originally set out to build a media company. In 2017, he was simply interviewing founders as a side project while working a full-time job, hoping the conversations might spark his next startup idea. But those interviews—published as detailed case studies on a blog called Starter Story—slowly evolved into something much bigger. Over the next eight years, Pat bootstrapped the site into a media business built around thousands of founder stories, growing its audience through a series of distribution pivots that ranged from Reddit to SEO to YouTube. That journey culminated recently in a major milestone: the sale of Starter Story to HubSpot Media for what Pat describes as a "life-changing" amount.

In a recent interview, Pat explained how Starter Story transformed from a scrappy side project into a profitable media brand, why video ultimately became the company's biggest growth engine, and his decision to shift away from advertising toward higher-priced products and boot camps.

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Founded during the pandemic, the The News Movement set out with a simple but radical premise: what if journalism were designed entirely for the platforms where younger audiences already consume information? Rather than trying to pull readers back to a website, the company built a newsroom that publishes directly to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts, translating the conventions of traditional reporting into vertical video, carousels, and other native formats.

In a recent interview, editor-in-chief Rebecca Hutson explained how the outlet approaches platform-first journalism, why its reporters function as "triple-threat" video journalists who can shoot, edit, and publish their own stories, and how the company tailors coverage differently for each social platform.