This post was created in partnership with Sprout Social

Brands have more data than ever, but most of it remains untapped. What’s missing isn’t more data. It’s the signal that tells teams what to do.

During a Social Media Week session co-hosted with Sprout Social, the idea of turning social intelligence noise into action was explored. Sabrina Barekzai, director of social media strategy at Slack, joined Brittany Hennessy, VP of social intelligence evangelism at Sprout Social, to discuss how teams can identify meaningful signals, act on them quickly, and connect social insights to business impact.

Defining social intelligence

Hennessy started by defining social intelligence as “getting all the data you have, getting it out of the content spreadsheet, and into insights that your business can actually use.”

She outlined a clear system for turning data into action. It starts with conversation—what audiences say, react to, and engage with across platforms, trends, and culture. Then comes detection, where teams filter noise and identify what matters. Interpretation follows, translating signals into meaning. Activation turns insight into action, and outcome measures the impact on the business.

While the framework appears linear, Hennessy explained that it’s a loop. “Once you have that outcome, you’re going to take that data, and you’re going to bring it back to the conversation,” she said. “The more effectively you can move through this, the quicker you can respond.”

Treating social like a coworker

Barekzai expanded on Hennessy’s commentary by explaining how Slack approaches social interaction.

“We want to be intuitive, we want to be human, we want to be participatory, and we want to be pleasant,” she shared. [4.04] Slack treats social media like a coworker—someone you tag in a joke or pull into a conversation.

“I like to say comments are the new currency,” Barekzai added. That means showing up proactively and participating in conversations and cultural moments.

This method has driven strong performance, with 485 LinkedIn posts over the past year and a 6.2% engagement rate, while the industry average is about 2%, she said.

Spotting signals and acting on them

The real test of social intelligence is how quickly teams act on signals.

One example came from Slack’s “Seasonal Delight” campaign, which included holiday and seasonal-themed status updates. The campaign was originally launched as a one-time feature for Halloween, but the team quickly saw demand.

“We immediately saw the signal,” Barekzai shared. “We went to our product team and said, ‘Hey, we think there’s something here. The comments on social are amazing. How can we take this and make it a product commitment?’”

What started as a limited release turned into a product opportunity. The team used social feedback to push for expansion into more holidays and other moments.

Listening is the strategy

The conversation closed with Barekzai suggesting a mindset shift. Instead of asking what to publish next, teams should focus on what audiences are already saying.

“When we stopped asking, ‘What should we post?’ and started asking, ‘What are people saying back to us?’ That led to creating that social intelligence loop, collaborating with other teams, and coming up with really fun ideas,” Barekzai said.

This post was created in partnership with Brandwatch

Marketing data exploded when traditional search engines took over the internet, providing brands with fresh insights into consumer interests and habits. But times have changed, and another kind of search is becoming more powerful for brands: social media.

During a Social Media Week session co-hosted with Brandwatch, Eric deLima Rubb, VP of customer success and insights, discussed how social search provides more detail into consumer decision-making and how brands can leverage this information to better understand purchasing trends.

The gap between traditional and social search

Rubb began by defining how consumers use traditional search engines to find facts about upcoming purchases. He gave an example of buying a car and how a buyer might search, “Is a Honda CR-V an all-wheel drive car?” The search engine will simply return a fact as an answer: Yes.

According to Rubb, 82% of traditional search results are people looking for facts like specs, prices, features, and dimensions.

Social search, however, provides a more robust picture of the same car buyer because the buyer is using social media to ask their community for advice about specific questions. Using the car example, he highlighted a social media post of someone who went shopping for a car and how the dealer tried to convince them to buy the 2025 model instead of waiting for the  2026 redesign. In their post, the buyer was asking the community if the dealer could be trusted, which therefore gave a deeper picture of what the buyer was really thinking.

“Search shows you questions that people can answer with a fact,” Rubb explained. “Social search shows you questions that other people need help answering.”

Rubb calls this the “critical gap” for brands and agencies.

“If you’re not designing engagement messaging and strategy to address this kind of comparative shopping, then you’re missing an opportunity to engage with the community voice,” he shared. “The gap is not volume. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the psychological and emotional drivers into how people make decisions.”

A new way to describe the consumer’s journey

Rubb and his team came up with a new phrase to describe the consumer’s journey along social search: visible evaluation journeys through community interaction.

“We call it visible because you can see it—it’s in public. We call it evaluation because, yes, it’s opinion seeking, but it’s also decisions. They are journeys because you can track them like a story. And it’s community because it’s people with people. It’s not someone alone in a search bar somewhere,” he explained.

He also emphasized the importance of community in social search, saying that communities are visible but, more importantly, they are contagious. An individual is making purchases, but decisions are being made with information from communities centered in social media.

“Social search is where people are making decisions,” he said. “Social search is where people are evaluating who they want to be based on what they learn from others.”

This post was created in partnership with Respondology

AI is changing how brands interact on social media. Increasingly, the real action is happening in the comments—where conversations unfold, and brand perception takes shape in real time. And AI tools can help manage those interactions

During a Social Media Week panel co-hosted with Respondology, industry leaders explored how AI is helping teams manage scale and engage more meaningfully—without losing the human touch.

Where AI is improving social teams

Danica Calderhead, SVP of revenue at Respondology, opened by framing the challenge. “Teams are incredibly stretched, very, very thin. There’s only so much you all can do,” she said. To manage that pressure, teams are rethinking how the work gets done—and where AI fits in.

Cameron Curtis, VP of multi-platform strategy and digital media at Warner Bros. Discovery, said her company uses AI as a comment moderation tool.

“If we’re able to suppress a lot of the content that is not super conducive to those conversations, our fans feel like they can interact with each other and engage with the content in a more efficient way,” Curtis shared. 

Kate Kenner Archibald, founder and fractional CMO working across beauty and CPG, described a different application. For her, AI is most valuable in identifying where brands should show up in the first place.

“We have used AI for a discoverability standpoint,” Archibald said. “There’s a really great, authentic way in which brands can get engaged while leveraging AI to discover where they should be and what conversations they should be a part of.”

Maintaining connection as communities grow

The conversation shifted to how brands maintain a sense of belonging as their communities grow.

Archibald pointed to direct engagement as an effective way to build that connection. She shared the example of a founder spending a month responding to community questions, as well as an example of an influencer who hosted a small karaoke night with followers, creating an offline connection.

Archibald also noted that many brands now aim to respond to comments and DMs within 24 hours, which can create a new challenge. As volume grows, maintaining that level of responsiveness becomes difficult to sustain manually.

This is where AI can help. Tools can help draft responses and manage volume, allowing teams to stay active without losing their voice.

Authenticity and creativity are still the differentiators

As the panel wrapped, the conversation turned to what comes next. Archibald emphasized that authenticity and creativity are more important now than ever, especially since AI is not coming up with core creative ideas.

Curtis echoed that point, saying AI can help ideate, but audiences can quickly spot content that feels artificial. “Your brand and your POV and how you talk to your consumer is very specific,” she explained. “Audiences are smarter than we give them credit for.”

AI can help teams move faster. It can surface insights, draft responses, and reduce manual work. But the core of social engagement—how a brand shows up, responds, and builds trust—still depends on human judgment.

This post was created in partnership with Viral Nation

Data is at the center of social media marketing’s shift to AI. As social media generates an unprecedented volume of signals, brands need the right tools to build the intelligence infrastructure to turn that data into decisions and those decisions into measurable commercial growth.

During a Social Media Week session co-hosted with Viral Nation, Joe Gagliese, founder and CEO of the social media marketing and creator agency, shared real-world examples of what’s possible for social media data using AI.

AI tools for large social media data sets

Viral Nation has 11 years of social media data. It’s ingested 1.4 million hours of social video, processed 34 million posts, and used multimodal intelligence and filtering to capture attributes.

Gagliese shared that Viral Nation now has one of the largest data sets in the world and uses it to run and build AI tools.

“AI is not a concept. AI is in full delivery, meaning large organizations like Viral Nation and others are already in market with large tools and big data sets,” he said. “That’s exciting, but the data is the most important piece to how you start to unlock the signals and social necessary to help you to win.”

Gagliese shared three of Viral Nation’s AI tools that help its customers leverage social media data.

Creator discovery intelligence

Gagliese explained that creator discovery is still largely manual today, relying on keyword and hashtag searches across millions of creators.

Viral Nation created a database of over 100 million creators globally. A campaign brief is uploaded, and the system qualifies creators using filtering and data points to find the right ones for a specific campaign.

Gagliese shared that since sourcing talent is a hard task, using AI to place creators for campaigns is a massive milestone.

Community management intelligence

Gagliese explained that  AI works by turning community management into intelligence, intelligence into signals, and signals into sales.

“Viral Nation is now starting to hit momentum where we’re creating more revenue for our customers in community management than they’re paying us to do it. Because community management is where the people are. It’s where the customers are,” he said.

Its community management tool analyzes the comments sections across thousands of conversations to identify intent in real time. Every comment is assigned an urgency level and a recommended action.

AI to measure and increase ROI

Gagliese shared that the reality is social works, but marketers just didn’t know how to show that it was working.

So, Viral Nation developed a tool that measures creative variables and how a product is demonstrated directly against sales. It’s found that user-generated content is 46% more efficient than cinematic content at driving sales. Data proves awareness is converting more efficiently than anything else.

“So, now imagine how empowering it is for me to walk into a room with a CMO of a Fortune 500 company and be able to literally show them that they’re making more money from awareness creator campaigns than from creator campaigns that are meant for sales,” said Gagliese.

This post was created in partnership with Dash Social

As the algorithm that permeates social media evolves to prioritize more personalized content and user engagement, foundational metrics like follower count are now less important for brands. But what has replaced them?

Industry leaders discussed the evolving landscape of social media marketing during a Social Media Week panel co-hosted with Dash Social, and offered advice on new ways to consider what constitutes a successful social media campaign.

Follower count has been dethroned

Ryan Sasaki, chief product officer at Dash Social, kicked things off by discussing the original social media metrics: followers. This metric, he said, has lost some of its importance, especially for brands.

“It’s not out of the ordinary for more established brands to actually see followers going down,” Sasaki said. “In the old days of social, a consumer had to follow a brand in order to see their content. Of course, with the algorithms, that has all changed.”

People are still engaging with brand content, but they are discovering it through features like TikTok’s “For You” page, he said. And on Instagram, he’s seen a 2X increase in non-follower views across the board. For Addie Hearn, senior social media manager at Free People, the metrics to watch are views and shares.

“That’s the biggest point of excitement for us. Views and shares mean that we’re getting eyes. Engagement is harder to come by. It’s harder to get someone to ‘like’ something than to just get their eyes on it,” Hearn explained.

As new metrics overtake old ones, Dash Social developed a metric called Total Social Impact (TSI). According to Sasaki, it’s a way to “evaluate your social media footprint holistically across earned and paid efforts.”

Hearn shared that she loves the idea of TSI because it allows her to see where she and her team need to balance out their efforts. While TikTok and Instagram account for a majority of Free People’s social media efforts, TSI points to where they could grow.

“This number really explains that social isn’t just about this one post or this one week or this one day. It’s a whole different ball game,” she said.

A cohesive social media marketing structure

If there’s a secret to Free People’s triple-digit social media growth this past year, it might be because its organic and paid social media teams work together, rather than being siloed like most social media teams.

Hearn leads the organic side, while Coleen O’Hara, senior social media marketing manager of Free People, leads paid. And they work together closely.

O’Hara explained that Hearn and her team are the “creative and content pros,” choosing content that’s more community-led or engagement-driven. Then O’Hara’s team reviews that content to determine how they can balance it out on the paid side.

“When we come to the end of a campaign, and we’re looking at a recap, it’s not just what organic saw, but what organic and paid saw together,” O’Hara explained. “There’s a ton of learnings we then share back across our two teams, and that’s been really helpful.”

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign and subsequent win for New York City mayor last year has become a case study in how politicians can use social media.

At ADWEEK’s Social Media Week, a trio of people behind Mamdani’s social videos—including the creative duo of creative and production agency Melted Solids and Donald Borenstein, director of video at the Zohran for NYC campaign—broke down what made the mayor’s videos break out. Melted Solids is made up of co-founders and executive producers Anthony DiMieri and Debbie Saslaw.

Throughout his campaign, Mamdani stuck to his social video strategy instead of treating it as a one-off, said Borenstein. The strategy was to “model and self-advocate things people actually watch, things that reach people on social media but without bending too far from what you want the message to be or how we want to create a message.”

Don’t overthink the message

A core part of Melted Solids’ work with Mamdani during the mayoral race was letting the politician riff a bit in front of the camera, and then later developing content based on what happened while shooting.

“Don’t go in stuck on the deliverables you thought you were going to do—maybe something appears during the day that is its own video,” DiMieri said.

Mamdani was also open to shooting videos in unconventional locations, such as food trucks, to drive home messaging about his campaign. For example, one video focused on “halal-flation” and the rising costs that street vendors have to pay for the permits needed to sell food.

“This felt like it evolved and boiled up out of the culture itself,” said DiMieri.

The video follows a formula Melted Solids has made core to its work: asking people on the street about how policies impact them and letting what they say steer the direction of the final video.

Another campaign video filmed in a bodega focused on Mamdani’s proposed plans to help small businesses navigate rising costs like rent and food.

While the video was posted on Instagram’s vertical-oriented Reels, it was not filmed vertically, Borenstein said. By filming it horizontally, the team hoped to better establish a sense of place in a local store. The video also leans into the harsh overhead light in the bodega. Mamdani’s face is also centered so that he is making eye contact with the viewer—a crucial step that most brands mess up, Borenstein said.

“These are conversations—they’re one-sided conversations, but that conversation is still happening on the other end,” Borenstein said.

Learning charm

Going forward, Melted Solids is hoping more political candidates will lean into authentic social video. Part of the reason Mamdani’s content resonated is because of his own charisma, which is a trait that can be learned, argued Borenstein.

“A lot of it comes down to both practice and coaching, but also understanding who you’re talking to while you’re making these videos—thinking about the actual audience,” Borenstein said.

Even with charisma, every politician needs to be steered a little, Saslaw said.

“Because we are all filmmakers, directors, and have professional experience in and out of the ad world, we know that even the most charismatic politician has to be directed, even just where you’re standing for focus,” Saslaw said. “That’s what we’ve tried to bring to the table and will continue doing. Some of the political media coming out that is trying to copy what Donald pioneered is lackluster.”

For brands, connecting with diverse audiences in resonant ways requires sustained community building. More than ever, that starts with giving more power to the people in those communities.  That’s what experts at Social Media Week 2026 said onstage Thursday. 

“Brands can’t own culture—even if they want to, they can’t. People own [culture], and actually, people own brands, because at the end of the day, we are buying, we are consuming, we are the audience, so we make the decisions at the end of the day,” said Alejandra Salazar, founder and CEO of the women-led creative agency Croing. “So when a brand really wants to be part of the community and participate in the culture, what they need to try to do is get themselves immersed into that culture.”

And the fast track for brands to become part of a specific culture or community, Salazar said, is to lean on the experts: the creative people and leaders shaping that space. “But [marketing decision-makers] need to care enough to then listen to you and understand what you’re saying.”

One of the voices shaping culture within the deaf community—and far beyond it—is Jackie Gonzalez, a deaf content creator with 1.9 million Instagram followers, known for her viral lip-reading videos of celebrities. She echoed Salazar’s emphasis on leaning into and trusting key voices within specific communities. “Take a step back and just let the culture be, let whoever you’re bringing on be one voice for that culture, allow them to have input.” 

Gonzales believes brands need to partner with their creators. In her experience, Gonzalez said, it can be difficult to navigate brand partnerships when brands are overly prescriptive, whether by trying to dictate to her how to behave as a deaf person or demanding a specific number of brand mentions within a video. In those kinds of negotiations, she said, “the best I can do is say, ‘okay, well, in my experience, that may come off like this,’ and then, it’s up to the brand to take that and decide what they want to do next.”

Brands should feel empowered to embrace specific cultures, but in a way that is well-meaning and authentic to their own ethos, said Joy Ogunneye, global innovation and brand comms lead at Aveeno Face, Sun and Hair. 

“We can smell when [a brand] is trying to create culture, and so it’s important for brands to ensure that it’s in line with who they are as a brand,” she said, adding that “it’s a fine line” between investing in a culture to appropriate or extract from it and investing out of a genuine commitment to “make a difference.”

Brands are rethinking the traditional social media playbook, trading reach for credibility as they look to crack Reddit.

The shift comes as the 21-year-old platform draws renewed interest from marketers, driven by a mix of user growth, ad demand, and its growing role in shaping how content surfaces in search and AI-generated answers.

Onstage at ADWEEK’S Social Media Week, Reddit’s global head of insights Rob Gaige laid out how brands like Netflix, Dove, Nike, and Philadelphia Cream Cheese are finding traction, often by doing less. 

“If you post more than three times a week, your brand sentiment falls off a cliff,” Gaige said, citing internal research. “Reddit was never built around the people you know. It was built around what people say.”

That distinction is forcing brands to rethink how they show up. Unlike other platforms, Reddit doesn’t reward follower graphs or algorithmic reach.

“It all starts at zero,” Gaige said. “It is not about who’s following you. It is about how good your contribution is to the community.”

Credit where it’s due

Philadelphia Cream Cheese offered one example of how brands are adapting to those norms. When a user known as “ChiveLord” went viral for documenting daily attempts to perfect chopped chives, the instinct on other platforms might have been to replicate the trend.

Instead, the brand took a lighter approach, referencing the moment in an ad: “Some heroes chop chives every day until Reddit says they’re perfect. We whip ours into cream cheese.”

“If you were a brand like Philadelphia Cream Cheese, you might have said, ‘I’m going to chop chives too, and I’m going to show how great we are at chopping chives.’ That’s not how it works on Reddit,” Gaige said. “Instead, you acknowledge what they did.” 

Brands are welcome here

Other brands are leaning into Reddit’s participatory nature. According to Gage, 81% of Reddit’s roughly 121 million daily active users say they enjoy when brands engage in conversation.

When Netflix relaunched Unsolved Mysteries, it shared unused footage and case files directly with Reddit users, inviting them to investigate further.

“They said, ‘Here are the files. Let’s see what you can do with it,’” Gaige said. Rather than pushing viewers to watch the show, Netflix gave fans material to engage with—tapping into the platform’s tendency toward collaboration and investigation.

Despite its authority in fitness, Nike avoids positioning itself as the expert in Reddit threads, instead prompting users with questions like, “What are your best training tips?” and “What would be your advice if you’re getting back into running?”

The goal, Gaige said, is to “let the community be the hero.”

Dove has pushed even further, incorporating both positive and negative Reddit commentary into its campaigns—an approach that reflects the platform’s openness to debate.

“You’ve got to let Redditors have both sides of the story. That’s also what helps LLMs (large language models)—they like seeing a well-balanced positive and negative, they’re more likely to cite those posts and comments,” Gaige said. 

Elias Weiss Friedman started The Dogist Instagram account in 2013 to photograph dogs on the streets of New York as a passion project. Today, he’s expanded from photography to video and platforms like YouTube, photographing about 50,000 dogs.

The success of The Dogist is a result of Friedman leaning into his niche. Shortly after starting the account, The Dogist started getting press. Within a year, Friedman scored a book deal and hit 1 million followers. The Dogist now has more than 10 million social media followers.

“Whatever it is you like about the world—even if it seems a bit obscure—follow that, and you’ll find your people,” Friedman said on stage at ADWEEK’s Social Media Week. 

Scaling your passion

Friedman grew up wanting to be an artist and had a darkroom in his house. He liked the idea of having a gallery but struggled with how to scale it. Instead, he started the account just as Instagram was starting to gain traction as a platform for photos, effectively creating a “virtual gallery.”

“I just had a feeling that it would work, and I think I was ready,” he said.

Plus, dogs made for authentic and candid subjects. And in photographing the dogs, Friedman found that dog owners were more likely to open up, too. 

“[Dogs] have no sense of ego, and I feel like that rubs off on people as well,” Friedman said. “There’s something about being able to talk freely and share something real, fun, and identifiable with other people in the world.”

Today, Friedman sees The Dogist as the rare example of authentic content that doesn’t change. He also keeps himself from chasing new social trends by maintaining control of the content.

“I have a team of people who help me with everything and they have a lot of great ideas, but ultimately I feel like I’m still in the driver’s seat,” Friedman said. 

Expanding to new platforms

Now, Friedman is growing The Dogist beyond its Instagram roots to YouTube. He’s also producing more content that features himself as opposed to being the one filming.

On YouTube, The Dogist has a series called Dogs With Elias Weiss Friedman where he walks around with celebrities and personalities like Kane Brown and Zooey Deschanel.

The switch to putting himself in front of the camera reflects how creators are increasingly turning themselves into brands on TikTok and Instagram.

“I sort of had to get out of my comfort zone, and I had to face myself in a way—that was a bit scary at first,” Friedman said. “One of the mantras I’ve been telling myself recently is if I’m having fun, then you’re having fun.”

Friedman is also experimenting with cooking videos as well as nutrition and wellness content about dogs.

“I’ve learned all about the trends and themes of the stories people tell me—unconditional love, they don’t judge you, a lot of other things,” he said. “But [now I’m] getting to know about dogs, their health, where they come from, and instincts.”

This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here.

When the news media startup Caliber first launched in October 2022, I was initially skeptical.

Originally called The News Movement, the brand embraced a commercial and editorial strategy that knowingly ran counter to the prevailing wisdom of the time. 

Rather than shepherding social audiences toward owned-and-operated websites, it was content to meet them where they were, deploying vertical video that met followers in their feeds. It eschewed any form of subscription revenue, offered no newsletters, and barely produced any written material.

Three-and-a-half years later, the company has evolved, though only a bit. 

The News Movement launched a holding company, called Caliber, to house its growing portfolio of media brands, which now includes The Recount, the lifestyle newsletter Capsule, and its creative studio Caliber Collective. 

One of its cofounders, Will Lewis, also left the company to become the chief executive of The Washington Post, a departure that felt like inauspicious at the time but now appears to have been a blessing in disguise, given his uninspiring tenure at the publisher.

But other than that, the core mission of Caliber remains unchanged. 

The media brand believes that traditional news organizations have for too long worked to bend consumers to their legacy modes of output, rather than create content that people actually want to consume. 

That creed made Caliber an early and fervent adopter of vertical video, which has become ubiquitous in the years since its launch. Now, nearly every major news outlet has a dedicated tab on its app devoted to scrollable video, a concept Caliber embraced from the outset. It might have taken a while, in other words, but eventually the industry caught up to Caliber.

So when Ramin Beheshti, the cofounder and CEO of the company, invited me to their office in Flatiron to demo an early version of its new vertical video app, SaySo, I tried to be less skeptical this time around.

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The product, which Beheshti teased last fall, presents users with a daily Digest, a collection of vertical videos designed to surface content tailored to the interests of users. A separate Explore page allows users to find new creators on their own accord. 

At launch, only 30 or so creators are participating in SaySo, a small number but one that reflects an important element of the product, which is that all of its content creators are vetted by Caliber.

These creators, whose followings range from 200,000 to 4 million, do not yet create content exclusively for SaySo; instead, when they are distributing their vertical videos, they can upload them to SaySo as another point of distribution. While the number of categories covered will expand, at launch most of the content deals with politics, climate, lifestyle, and urban planning.

Critically, the Digest product presents users with a finite number of videos—for me, it was around 12 per day. The point, per Beheshti, is not to keep users glued to their phones, but to inform them quickly and in an accessible fashion with news content from trustworthy sources. (Notably, the endless scroll itself has lately come under legal scrutiny, following landmark legal cases against Meta and Google in recent weeks.)

SaySo has no immediate monetization plans; while it focuses on fine-tuning its product and growing its audience, it will probably not generate any revenue this year. 

When it does come time to flip the revenue switch, the primary product will likely resemble a freemium model, with users paying for additional features, like more Digests or enhanced access to creators. Rather than traditional display or native advertising, certain product features might be underwritten by sponsors, similar to the Apartment Therapy model.

The concept behind the product is compelling enough, but adoption will likely still be challenging. Most people only use around six apps on a daily basis, Beheshti admitted, so spurring user uptick will present its own set of hurdles. Caliber has a small advantage in that it can use its other brands, including TNM, The Recount, and Capsule, to promote SaySo, but its ability to amass users will largely depend on the degree to which its creators promote it.

The creator base, which the company aims to grow to 100 by the end of the year, will be incentivized to promote SaySo because it offers them a share of the revenue generated, according to Beheshti. While platforms like TikTok and Instagram are great for exposure, they typically offer meager payouts to all but their most popular creators, an oversight that SaySo hopes to use to its advantage.

Regardless of its success, the launch of SaySo shows Caliber is doubling down on its core thesis, which holds that companies need to serve content in the ways their audiences prefer to consume it. If leaning into vertical video was the first iteration of that, then this deeper embrace of creators is the natural step in that evolution.

Of course, Caliber is not completely alone in its effort to work more closely with creators. Across the media ecosystem, news brands have been reassessing their relationships to renegade newsgatherers. 

Some, like the Vox Media Podcast Network, have built creator networks that complement their core businesses. Others, like Morning Brew, have experimented with turning their corporate staff into talent, while outlets like Wired, Bloomberg, and The New York Times have worked to treat their reporters more like talent, hiring on-camera coaches and launching franchises attached to top attractions. 

But few have so openly welcomed external creators into their company as Caliber will with SaySo. 

The product represents the latest new boundary to have been crossed, with news media now openly directing their audiences to consume content from independent creators. It is a platform play, obviously, so there is an editorial distinction between The Recount, for instance, and SaySo, but consumers are unlikely to be so discerning.

In 2025, I argued that the overarching media trend of the year was the creator-ification of media companies, that in the future the media ecosystem would become indistinguishable from a constellation of creator collectives. We are still several years away from that point, but products like SaySo affirm to me that it is our end destination. 

Consumer trust and affinity for individuals is orders of magnitude higher than it is for institutions, but operating as an individual creator requires that the entrepreneur hold a variety of roles at the same time: producer of content, along with salesman, marketer, insurance haggler, landlord, etc. Few creators want to take on all of those mundane responsibilities, which is why media companies will persist, if only as infrastructure for the creators themselves.

With SaySo, Caliber is betting that the creator model of media will eventually supplant the nameless, faceless monolith that has defined media for decades. Even the Economist is putting its reporters on camera, if you needed any more proof. The question is not whether or not Caliber is right about this prediction, but whether or not it is right about the timeframe. 

Talking Heds

A Banner Day for the Gazette: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, one of the oldest newspapers in America, was set to shutter next month after more than two centuries in operation. But on Tuesday, the nonprofit organization behind The Baltimore Banner announced it had acquired the Post-Gazette, granting the Pittsburgh institution a stay of execution. Immediate reception to the news has been, understandably, positive, but some significant questions remain outstanding. The Post-Gazette was shuttered, in part, after a protracted labor dispute between its union and its ownership, but The Baltimore Banner is not a union shop. Baltimore Banner president and CEO Bob Cohn told me that he plans to “follow the wishes of the newsroom,” so time will tell. Relatedly, The Banner itself has not yet achieved breakeven financial status, now in its fourth year of operation, and is financing the tie-up via a $30 million infusion from the philanthropist behind its nonprofit. Naturally I hope for the best, but neither publisher is out of the woods just yet.

Sporting at The Journal: The Wall Street Journal announced on Wednesday the launch of a new event, The Next Sports Economy, which will debut in July. The move is the latest in a series of experiential launches from the Dow Jones property, but its subject matter is particularly telling. The business of sports has grown perhaps without parallel in recent years: Franchises are now asset classes for private equity firms, the 12-figure price tag of distribution rights are threatening to bankrupt broadcasters, and domestic leagues are increasingly eyeing global expansion. Against this backdrop, The Journal has been relatively conservative in its coverage of the space, ceding the territory instead to upstarts like Front Office Sports, on3, and Sportico. Amongst industry insiders, though, there has long been speculation that The Journal will simply buy its way into the beat by snapping up one of these outlets, but such a likelihood now seems less certain given its decision to establish a tentpole franchise of its own. 

A YouTuber Becomes a Media Co. (EXCLUSIVE): On Friday, the YouTube creator Jesse “Jesser” Riedel launched a new parent company, called JesserCo., whose aim is to house an expanding stable of brands that currently includes a media business and apparel line. The expansion is notable because it offers yet another template for how a YouTube creator might become a media brand. Through his videos and apparel, Riedel reaches more than 45 million followers, has more than 10 billion views, employs 45 full-time staff profitably, and is bringing in at least $20 million in revenue—a healthier business than many traditional media operations—and last month, he signed a deal with Tubi to create original content for the streaming service. Depending on how JesserCo. weathers this expansion, expect to see many more such startups in the near future.

Soccer Outlet Scores World Cup Splash (EXCLUSIVE): You might not have heard, but the World Cup is coming to America this summer. Just about every media company on the continent has a plan to capitalize on the moment, but one—a roll-up of international soccer brands that operates as Footballco.—has a particularly ambitious vision. The company, whose North American business is helmed by the former revenue leader at Bustle Digital Group, Jason Wagenheim, is launching a two-week activation in Brooklyn, called House of Goal, which will see the brand take over an Industry City location and schedule round-the-clock programming for its projected 200,000 visitors. The event hopes to generate a seven-figure revenue and dramatically boost brand awareness of Footballco., whose U.S. outpost only launched two years ago but is on pace to bring in around 20% of its projected $100 million in annual revenue. 

Food52 Vet Goes Mule (SCOOP): The former CEO of Food52, Erika Ayers Badan, launched a new media venture this week, called Mule Media. The company, which combined with likeminded brands The Local Mom Network and Work Like a Girl, aims to foster a community for women at all stages of their career. The name, which reads somewhat unflatteringly at first glance, is a nod to the intelligence and pragmatism of mules, according to its website. Badan stepped away from Food52 after it was acquired out of bankruptcy in February by America’s Test Kitchen, a turnaround job she took after shepherding Barstool Sports through a multimillion-dollar exit. Mule Media joins a competitive space, competing against ventures like She Media, Female Quotient, and theSkimm, to name a few, but it would be unwise to count her out.

Pulled Quotes

“Virtually all of the time, most Americans are mad at you about the economy and there’s little you can do about it.”
Semafor’s Ben Smith, on the paradox of American politics
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“No one buys hate merch. No one goes to a show if they hate you. No one supports your next venture if they’re not on your side”
Jomboy Media founder Jimmy O’Brien, on why positive media makes money
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“I was thinking about the degree to which the voice of an author is really fiction, because there’s all this editing and moving stuff around, and so you end up with a document that bears little relation to the actual conversation.”
Novelist Ben Lerner, on his idea for a misremembered interview to act as the basis of his book
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“What’s stopping Netflix, which wants more events, to get [Sunday Night Football] for 18 straight weeks?”
MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson, on streamers eating the live sports market
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Quote/Unquote

Andrew Burmon is the founder of the newsletter Upper Middle, a highly original exploration of the psyches and lifestyles of a specific swath of American professionals, whom he refers to as Oat Milk Elites. I met Andrew at a dinner hosted by 1440 last fall, subscribed to his newsletter, and have been following his work since then. 

The newsletter, which launched in September 2024, has around 140,000 subscribers and monetizes its readership, in part, by inviting them to participate in surveys, the results of which are shared in editorial projects and, of course, with the partnering brands. He built the email and website using Claude Code and this week unveiled a sweeping redesign of both products.

Before creating Upper Middle, Burmon helped launch a number of brands in the Bustle Digital Group portfolio, including Inverse and Fatherly. He now lives in rural Litchfield County with his wife and young son.

This interview has been edited.

Mark Stenberg: Where did the idea for Upper Middle come from?

Andrew Burmon: It came from two directions: First, the experience of working in media and the minor ego death that had been my career. The other: My wife is an ER doctor and epidemiologist, so she suffered through Covid in a real way. That prompted me to look around at my friends, many of whom are lawyers or similar professionals, whose careers were not going the way they had envisioned, largely because the economy has been restructured around financialization and the very rich. So I had the idea of: How do we talk to that experience?

Mark: You monetize it, in part, through surveys. How does that work?

Andrew: When you sign up for Upper Middle, you are prompted to sign up for Upper Middle Research. You can make money taking surveys there, which aims to create a culture of survey-taking and data-sharing that informs the whole project. A lot of what I’m trying to do is explain water to a fish, taking this group of urban, well-educated, W-2 employees to step back, think critically about their life experience, and try to understand why they feel the way that they do.

Mark: How much revenue does that generate?

Andrew: Six figures. March was my first month over $40,000. My goal for the year is to top $400,000 and put all of that back into the business.

Mark: You run this entirely on your own, but the design is highly stylized. How do you do that?

Andrew: I use Beehiiv to deliver my emails, but I built an AI wrapper on top of it that helps me move a lot faster. For that I used Claude Code. So instead of entering everything free-form into Beehiiv, I basically fill out a form and it generates the newsletter for me. 

Mark: Every week the newsletter feels very original. Where do you get your ideas from, or do you take inspiration from any other newsletters?

Andrew: In a previous life I was the editor of Spy for Penske—this was not Graydon Carter’s Spy, but still. I think there used to be a lot of publications that were aimed at an effete audience that, frankly, were unapologetic about it; they were having fun with it. I think a lot of media people started to feel that that was unacceptable, and maybe over-indexed on afflicting the comfortable. I think it is important to empathize with people that entered into their personal and professional lives expecting one thing, got something different, and are squaring that with the huge internalized expectations they have for themselves.

Mark: What is the end goal for Upper Middle?

Andrew: I think there are two sides. The first is the basic media side, which is the hope that I grow this to over 500,000 subscribers. North of that, we start to get into the land of the dream. After that, once you have a community of people and the data to prove they are leading similar lives, you can serve them in different ways. In those lines of business the margins are much better, so long term I think I will orient that way.