A Media Operator

Picture: Rawpixel.com – stock.adobe.com Emily Schario, the 31-year-old head of content and co-founder of The Boston Globe’s B-Side newsletter for Generation Z and young Millennials, is the target audience for her own product. As such, she has a flair for the breezy, influencer-like tone and type of news that tends to connect with young New England professionals.

Jaime Schultheis of Bombora and Liz Irving of Clarion on stage at SISO Leadership in Seattle last month. Courtesy of SISO. When your CRM is “gold,” blasting the same message to everyone is a fast way to burn it. That was the reality facing Clarion Events North America as competition intensified across its markets.

Stock.adobe.com In just six years, MedTech World, the medical-technology conference and exhibition, has grown from a virtual conference launched during the Covid pandemic into a global event ecosystem spanning four annual editions across four continents. It’s a pace of expansion that’s unusual in an industry that typically spends years establishing a single flagship with a tight-knit community before cautiously spreading its wings to other regions. What is your type of business?

Drop Site doesn’t charge readers for its content. That hasn’t stopped them from paying for it. The investigative outlet, sharply critical of Israel and U.S. foreign policy and often aligned with Hamas’s framing of the war in Gaza, turned two in July and is set to close $4.6 million in revenue for 2026. What is your type of business? Job Level Job Function Company Size Revenue Size

Stock.adobe.com The summer season typically brings a slowdown in dealmaking and transactions, but for media publisher Vox, it’s when it announced its first agentic-powered media buy. Vox leveraged an AI “seller agent” built by ad management platform Boostr to receive, negotiate and complete a media purchase. The ad campaign went from brief to live in under two minutes, with humans still in the loop for approvals, according to the announcement release. What is your type of business?

If Puck can close its latest fundraising round from RedBird Capital Partners, it’ll be worth approximately $250 million, which is up from $75 million three years ago. According to Reuters: The deal with RedBird, a well-known investor in media and entertainment, will value Puck at around $250 million and involve the company’s existing institutional investors selling to RedBird.

Courtesy of Jasper Gould Two 17-year-old high school seniors started a charity in 2024 to educate less privileged teenagers in financial markets—they solicited donations from Wall Street They ended up with a 57,000-strong subscriber newsletter devoured by Wall Street bros. Now, college is taking a backseat to further monetizing the newsletter, which is characterized by a Gen Z-perspective that investors would be hard pressed to find anywhere else.

Stock.adobe.com What happens when your legacy is as a media company, but you’ve actually turned into a data business? We saw that play out last week with the announcement of CoStar Group, a commercial real estate data analytics company, completing its $800 million acquisition for Zonda’s data platform.

Picture: Jacob Lund – stock.adobe.com Picture the ideal roundtable session at an industry event: a dozen or so attendees sitting at a circular table in a brightly lit conference hall, facing one another with notebooks open, coffee cups in hand. The moderator starts the clock, introduces a pressing business challenge and opens the floor with a thought-provoking question.

Picture: Vadim – stock.adobe.com Fan conventions used to sit at the hobbyist edge of the events business. Comic cons, gaming expos and cosplay gatherings were consumer shows, a world apart from the B2B trade shows where the professional operators and the institutional money lived. That line appears to be disappearing. Large organizers and investors began pouring serious capital into fan and pop-culture events more than a decade ago, but the push has accelerated in recent years.