S1E10: Hustle CEO Sam Parr & SmartNews Chief Journalist Rich Jaroslavsky on the Future of Media

The Operators

In this episode, you’ll hear from Sam Parr, the co-founder and CEO of The Hustle, one of the fastest-growing email newsletters, along with Rich Jaroslavsky, the Vice President of Content and Chief Journalist at SmartNews, a news aggregation startup that recently achieved a unicorn valuation.

Our discussion touched on some of the most important questions in digital media:

• What opportunities are there for new media entrants
• How it is impossible to start a successful media company today without having a strong grasp of how technology can be leveraged
• How the hardest problems in media today center around distribution and monetization
• Why content creation is actually one of the easier problems to address
• How increasingly the medium is the message: the iPhone changed media consumption and increasingly it looks like how we consume audio is changing the delivery of media, consumption, and monetization
• An analysis on the current state of media and their predictions on where media is headed

Rich Jaroslavsky began his media career as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal before becoming the national political editor as a White House correspondent. He was instrumental in bringing the Wall Street Journal online years ago. For the past 25 years, Rich has been involved in digital news at wsj.com and Bloomberg and is currently at Smart News, where he is Chief Journalist and the VP of Content.

Sam Parr is the co-founder and CEO of The Hustle, a beloved and rapidly growing newsletter, conference convener, and broadening digital media business.