The Mediator explores the structural changes reshaping the media industry and what they mean for the media business, culture, and society. There are a lot of good (and some great) Substacks and newsletters about media. So, why subscribe?
Glad you asked. Here’s why:
A Living, Breathing, Mental Model
Media gets a lot of coverage, but most of it dissects the daily news, yesterday’s earnings report, or the latest rumor about who said what about whom. Instead, I focus on the fundamental, structural trends.
The central premise underlying The Mediator is best captured by something I wrote in Price Deflation in Media:
I’m a little bit obsessed with this question: how do you know what’s important? As the volume of information increases, it’s an increasingly hard problem.
If you’re a student of anything that could be considered a system (like companies, industries, ecosystems, value chains, markets, networks, economies, culture, and geopolitics), part of the answer is to have a good mental model of that system. It should capture the most important concepts, assumptions, and causal relationships and explain how the system behaves and is likely to evolve over time. It gives you a filter to make sense of the daily deluge: does this support, contradict, or refine my model — or can I discard it as noise?
Putting it on paper keeps you honest. It exposes logical flaws and knowledge gaps. It encourages you to keep distilling it or, to paraphrase Einstein, to make it “as simple as possible, but no simpler.” It also forces you to revisit your assumptions and conclusions as facts change. The model should be a living, breathing thing.
The Mediator functions as my living, breathing mental model of the media business. Based on the feedback I get, many readers agree that a better understanding of the structural changes affecting media will help them make better decisions. I hope it’s helpful for you, too.
Three Decades Connecting Dots
I’ve been in and around media for nearly 30 years, in a few roles. For over a decade, I was an Institutional Investor-ranked Wall Street analyst, covering stocks up and down the media value chain. Then I worked at Time Warner, also for more than a decade, where I ran investor relations and international and corporate strategy. My last job at Time Warner was as Chief Strategy Officer of Turner, heading corporate strategy, data strategy, and research. In the last several years, I’ve been consulting, writing, speaking, and advising.
Across my roles—analyst, operator, and advisor—I’ve had the same core job: filter a lot of information, figure out what’s important and how it fits together, forecast what’s coming, and figure out what to do about it. Pattern recognition, synthesis, forecast, call to action. That’s what I’m doing in The Mediator, too.
Different Perspectives
Wearing different hats has given me different perspectives. I understand the pressures of being a professional investor and trying to generate returns. I also understand the challenges of running a business day-to-day: making critical decisions with incomplete information and balancing many, often misaligned, constituencies. I’m an avid consumer of media, too, like most people. But my time overseeing research provided me greater appreciation for how consumers make decisions and what makes them tick.
Curiosity as a Service
Some people write to impart what they know. I write to learn. The Mediator is driven by my curiosity, desire to get to the “frontier of knowledge,” and passion for the media business. I focus only on questions that I believe are interesting and unanswered. Of course, both interesting and unanswered are in the eye of the beholder, but that is my intent. By following The Mediator, you benefit from my curiosity. Call it Curiosity as a Service (CaaS).
Empirical
In all my jobs, it was necessary to support conclusions with data. Some of my posts are more conceptual than others, but I support my arguments empirically whenever I can. A lot of these analyses are proprietary work that you won’t see anywhere else.
All Signal, No Noise
We’re all drowning in noise and it will only get worse. As attention has become scarcer, it often seems that the loudest, most extreme, and unrelenting voices win. Today, noise trumps insight. I have no desire or ability to play that game. Also, I believe that as the cost to create content approaches zero and the volume of information increases exponentially, trusted curation will be more important and valuable than ever.
I aim to be that trusted curator, guided by my experience and curiosity. My goal is that when you receive an email from The Mediator, even if you don’t have the time or inclination to read it, you’re at least compelled to skim the main points.
That’s why I always include a tl;dr (too long; don’t read) summary at the top of my posts: so you can quickly determine my message and decide whether it’s worth your valuable time to read.
Not Just Signal, Early Signal
One of the good and bad parts of writing online is the trail of receipts. As I wrote above, I’m trying to get to the frontier of what’s known and not known, so being wrong is part of the territory. For instance, a few years ago I was a little overzealous that crypto would yield real non-financial utility, which hasn’t happened yet.
But if you follow The Mediator, you’ll also get early signal.
In 2020, you would’ve had early insight why streaming is structurally less profitable than traditional TV, years before the big media companies came to the same realization.
In late 2023, you would’ve started thinking about the implications of the falling costs of content creation, led by GenAI, on media economics, long before that question moved to the mainstream.
You also would understand why the distribution of popularity is becoming more extreme; why the creator economy will invariably keep taking share of media and entertainment time and money; and why the consumer definition of quality is shifting in media, away from high production values.
I Hope You’ll Become an Active Member of the Community
Writing is great for structuring thoughts and realizing how much you don’t know. But I believe that only through a dialog with other engaged people can we collectively become smarter. I encourage you to ask questions, challenge my assumptions, and share your insights in the comments. I read them all and respond when I have something to add.
So, sign up and become an active member of the community!
