As legacy news organizations struggle to reach increasingly fragmented and distrustful consumers, a new wave of solo journos and upstart outlets are offering alternative sources for independent news—and new opportunities for aspiring journalists. Hear from journalism innovators and entrepreneurs who are navigating the turbulent information ecosystem to create thriving news brands.
Oliver Darcy, Founder and Author, Status
Oliver Darcy is the founder and author of Status, the definitive nightly briefing that informs readers about what is really happening in the corridors of media power. Status is widely read by those in the media industry, including news chiefs, Hollywood studio bosses, and technology executives.
Prior to founding Status, Darcy was CNN’s senior media reporter. At CNN, he authored the acclaimed “Reliable Sources” newsletter and reported for CNN across both television and digital platforms.
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Oliver Darcy is the founder and author of Status, the definitive nightly briefing that informs readers about what is really happening in the corridors of media power. Status is widely read by those in the media industry, including news chiefs, Hollywood studio bosses, and technology executives.
Prior to founding Status, Darcy was CNN’s senior media reporter. At CNN, he authored the acclaimed “Reliable Sources” newsletter and reported for CNN across both television and digital platforms.
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, Founder, Writer, and Editor at Hearing Things
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is a Xicana writer, editor, and co-founder of Hearing Things, a worker-owned music and culture publication. She was formerly the top editor at both Jezebel and The Fader, and over the past 25 years has written for Hell Gate, Flaming Hydra, Vogue, Vibe, Rookie, The Guardian, and many more. Her forthcoming book from Penguin, Vaquera, is about growing up Mexican American in Wyoming and the myth of the American West.
Marisa Kabas, Writer & Reporter, The Handbasket
Marisa Kabas, a Brooklyn-based independent writer and reporter. After watching the journalism infrastructure crumble over the last decade, I decided that I needed to have a place where I could share my work and thoughts no matter what. Thus, The Handbasket was born.
When I launched in June 2022, it was a side project—somewhere to publish more personal stuff or pieces I knew corporate outlets would never take. But in the summer of 2023, I decided to bet on myself and go all in on making this space a success.
I’ve deeply covered former Congressman George Santos, the police raid on a small Kansas newspaper, Elon Musk’s antisemitism, and the lived experience of being an American Jew while war rages in Israel and Gaza.
John Ourand, Sports Correspondent, Puck
A two-decade veteran of Sports Business Journal and the consummate industry insider, John covers the intersection of sports and business, from the leagues and the agencies to the media deals, marketing apparatus, and titanic egos fueling it all.
Nick Pinto, Founder, Worker-Owner, and Journalist, Hell Gate
Nick Pinto is a journalist living in Brooklyn and a founder of Hell Gate, a worker owned local news site that launched in 2022.
Moderator: Brian Stelter, Chief Media Analyst, CNN
Brian Stelter is the chief media analyst for CNN Worldwide and the lead author of the Reliable Sources newsletter.
He is also the host of Vanity Fair’s weekly podcast Inside the Hive. He is the author of three books, most recently “Network of Lies,” which examined Dominion’s blockbuster defamation case against Fox News.
Stelter began his career in 2004 by creating the TVNewser blog while he was a freshman at Towson University. He sold it to Mediabistro.com six months later, but continued to edit and write for the blog during the next three years until he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Mass Communications with a concentration in Journalism.
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In 2007, he joined The New York Times as a media reporter and helmed the Media Decoder blog. In 2013, he published The New York Times best-seller “Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV,” about the competitive world of morning news shows. He is a producer on the Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show,” which is inspired by the book.
From 2013 until 2022, Stelter was the anchor of CNN’s Sunday morning media analysis program “Reliable Sources” and a correspondent on the network.
In 2020 Stelter published “HOAX: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth” and executive produced the HBO documentary, “After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News,” directed by Andrew Rossi, who featured Stelter in his 2011 documentary, “Page One: Inside the New York Times.”
Stelter is a recipient of the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism and a two-time recipient of the Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism.He is on the board of Baltimore Student Media, a nonprofit that publishes Towson’s independent student newspaper, The Towerlight.
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