It used to be easy to find the most promising young talent in the media business. All you had to do was search among the interns at The New Yorker, Harper's and The New Republic, the news clerks at the New York Times and the Washington Post, the pages at NBC, the mailroom assistants at Williams Morris.
An entry-level job at one of these powerful institutions was all but a required résumé line for anyone who fancied himself or herself an editor in chief, publisher or network president in the making. Lowly as they were, those who grasped the bottom rung at one of these places comprised the next generation of industry leaders.
Back then, getting ahead meant climbing the ladder. In 2014, it's all about building your own ladder.
Of the 34 men and women on the FORBES 30 Under 30 in Media list, 22 are sole or cofounders of their companies, a stat that underscores just how much the news and information business has changed over the past decade. (Why 34? you might be wondering. It's because we treated cofounders from the same company as a single entry.)
Within that diverse group, you'll find Tumblr creator David Karp, who graced the cover of last year's 30 Under 30 issue and five months later sold his company to
Proving that the art of reading is alive and well, you'll find not one but two founders of next-generation literary magazines, Uzoamaka Maduka and Rachel Rosenfelt. Maduka's title, The American Reader, is something of a throwback, using print as its primary medium, while Rosenfelt's New Inquiry is digital-only. You'll also find two guys trying to do for novels what
Matt Galligan (Circa), Dan Fletcher (Beacon), Jake Horowitz and Chris Altchek (PolicyMic) and Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon are all, in their different ways, trying to tackle the problems facing news outlets: What forms of news work best on a mobile device? What about in a social media stream? How do you fund all this?
Then there are those who set out to meet the evolving needs of marketers. Shane Snow of Contently and Jason Stein of Laundry Service are among those helping to meet the fast-growing demand for branded content, traditional advertising's more innovative cousin. Nikhil Sethi and Garrett Ullom started Adaptly to give advertisers a way to manage their campaigns across the ever-expanding constellation of social platforms.
But the spirit of entrepreneurship isn't restricted to the group of 22. Elsewhere on our list are the "intrapreneurs" -- the folks striving to build new businesses within existing ones. Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein has already constructed a mini-franchise in his Wonkblog, and is reportedly looking to expand it into new directions, either inside or outside the paper, much as Nate Silver did by taking FiveThirtyEight to ESPN. Fernando Vila is part of the launch team for Fusion, a joint venture of Univision and ABC News and the first English-language TV network for Hispanics. Sterling Proffer launched Vice's massive YouTube channels, while Dan Koh is helping run HuffPost Live, the Huffington Post's ambitious video news network.
That's not to say the Harper's interns and NBC pages of today won't be among the media leaders of tomorrow. But those résumé lines won't count nearly as much as the one that says "founder."
The FORBES 30 Under 30 in Media was compiled using nominations from a variety of sources, including a small number of trusted nominators and social media crowdsourcing. Judges for the media category were Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, Vice Media co-founder Shane Smith and ABC News president Ben Sherwood. Special thanks to them and to all who nominated candidates.
