My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/

For decades, Diane Salvatore helped lead some of America's most recognizable magazine brands, including Consumer Reports, where rigorous product testing and consumer safety were core to the mission. Now, as executive director of the MedShadow Foundation, she's applying that same watchdog mentality to one of the most opaque corners of the marketplace: prescription and over-the-counter drugs.

In a recent interview, Diane walked through how MedShadow operates as a nonprofit investigative newsroom, its expansion into social media video, and its plan to build a donor-supported model that funds independent health journalism.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/

For today's episode I spoke to Jim Louderback, the writer behind a newsletter called Inside the Creator Economy

Jim is a longtime media veteran who started out in magazine publishing and then eventually made his way over to the Creator Economy. He spent several years running Vidcon, the annual event where the world's biggest YouTubers connect with their fans, and he now helps organize creator economy events all over the world, including the 1 Billion Followers summit in Dubai.

In our discussion, we covered a wide range of media topics. We discussed whether media companies were overreacting from the threat of Google Zero, why athletes are the new super creators, and how YouTube will slowly devour Hollywood.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/

Kit Chilvers started posting memes on Instagram when he was 14, treating the platform like a video game and obsessing over what made posts take off. A decade later, that experimentation has turned into Pubity Group, a bootstrapped social media company with roughly 170 million followers and hundreds of billions of annual views.

In a recent interview, Kit broke down how he cracked early Instagram growth, why wholesomeness turned out to be a massive business opportunity, and how he's trying to turn platform-native virality into durable media brands, original franchises, and real revenue.