What's up everyone this is Alex Lieberman co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew welcome back to founders journal my personal audio diary where I give you the

Business Builder the tools you need to think better in order to build better whether that's building a business a team or a new product today

I'm talking about how each of us is a media company in our own right. Let's hop into it

So one of my biggest fears that I always talk to people at the brew about with founders journal specifically is that I spend too much time talking about media

I worry that talking about media is my natural bias because that's the industry that I've grown up in over the last five years and I'll end up isolating some of my listeners that don't care as much about media as I do

But then I'm periodically reminded that I would be doing a huge disservice to my listeners if I didn't talk about media from time to time

With how the world has evolved we all need to understand how media works because in some ways we all work in media whether we like it or not

Why is that well because today you and I as individuals have as much power to build an audience as the employers that we work for

Think about it this way why did NBC CBS Fox ESPN and Amazon pay 110 billion dollars for media rights to the NFL for the next 11 years

It's the same exact reason why Peloton instructors like Ali love Alex Tucson and Cody Rigsby have become celebrities in their own right

In both examples there is a tight grip on massive distribution

And now on the other side of the coin why is it that newspaper advertising revenue is down 77% in the last 13 years

Money flows where the audience goes and we live in an age where individuals can build an audience just like companies can

Which is why one of the most valuable things I can do for my listeners from time to time is to help you understand

That to give yourself the best chance of building a business or a career you need to understand how to build an audience

But why am I talking about this today versus 10 years ago

Well, because today you have an unprecedented number of tools and unprecedented opportunity to get people to listen to what you have to say

That opportunity didn't always exist

If it was 2000 it'd be a totally different story

There'd be no Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, Quora or YouTube

There'd be no pipes that we all have access to to have the chance to get in front of billions of people who have smartphones, tablets and laptops

You'd either have to be a cable company that owns set top boxes in millions of homes, a network like CBS or Fox that gets access to the cable company's distribution of households

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