Welcome to The Turnaround
A weekly column on where media, platforms and AI are turning next, from someone who has had to turn with them.
At the bottom of Powell Street, where it meets Market, there's a turntable. Every cable car that makes the trip down the hill rolls onto it, and the operators push it around by hand so it can head back up. It's one of the oldest pieces of working infrastructure in San Francisco, and it's also a pretty good picture of how the media business works. Everything eventually turns. It pivots, gets realigned, hops back on the track and starts heading back up the hill. The question is who's doing the turning, and which way it's pointed when it starts climbing again.
I've spent my career on that turntable.
At E! I watched entertainment news move from a TV show you tuned into at a set time to a feed you checked forty times a day, and we rebuilt the E! News social operation around that bet. At NBCUniversal I built the Digital Lab, a studio that took the DNA of E!, Bravo, Oxygen and NBC News and remade it for Snapchat, Instagram and whatever came next. Since then I've worked across sports, clean energy and the nonprofit world, and for the last few years I've been rebuilding a marketing operation around a simple question: what can only people do, and where can AI, used thoughtfully, help that work go further?
What this column is
Every week I'll take a few things that happened in media, platforms and marketing and say what I think they mean. Not a news roundup. You have plenty of those. More like the conversation I'd have with you if we were standing at the turntable watching the cars come in.
Expect three recurring threads:
- Platforms. What the big feeds are rewarding right now, and what that means for anyone making content for them.
- Studios. How content actually gets made at scale: the teams, the costs, the formats, the tradeoffs nobody puts in the press release.
- AI at work. Not the hype cycle. What happens when a small team actually hands real work to models and agents, what breaks, and what gets better.
Why now
The industry is on the turntable again. Distribution keeps fragmenting, creators are competing head-on with networks, and AI is changing what one person with a clear idea can produce in a week. Those are the kinds of turns I've spent twenty years making, and I'd rather write about them in the open than keep the notes to myself.
If something here is useful, send it to someone who'd argue with it. If you think I'm wrong, tell me: bryce@powellstreetmedia.com.
See you next week.