TheWrap launched just over 15 years ago, when the world was reeling from the financial crisis and the media was on the brink of radical change. Sharon Waxman, founder of the independent Hollywood news site, saw an opportunity in the disruption “anyone with some guts and smarts could seize”. She spoke to Adri Kotzé about new media opportunities in another time of disruption, the threat of big tech, and Hollywood trends.
Elon Musk is not the kind of person you want running a media platform, Sharon Waxman declares. We are at the Mx3 Barcelona Innovation in Media event, and she has agreed to an on-the-record, on-camera interview. Several delegates – among them industry big-hitters – are hovering around to get her ear. She has just flown in from the Oscars and the vibe is all Hollywood.
Musk is “certainly not what I would call a very stable thinker,” she says, adding that the owner of X, formerly Twitter, “may be a genius in some facets” but “has a real problem behaving like an adult more than a moment at a time”.
Sharon is as frank as in her gripping conversation with media sage Colin Morrison earlier on the podium. All on-stage interviews at the event were off-the-record and Sharon promptly entertained the audience with a delicious tidbit of fresh Hollywood gossip. The founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of the Hollywood and media business news site TheWrap has a reputation for talking straight and having insider industry knowledge. (Sharon is an author and award-winning journalist. By award-winning, I mean she writes intimidatingly well. She was a foreign correspondent in Europe and the Middle East – Sharon speaks Hebrew and Arabic – and then Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times and the Washington Post.)
“I think he [Musk] has encountered something very different to what he’s accustomed to. He’s dealing with content, news, shaping public opinion.”
However, Sharon warns, Musk is not the only or last tech billionaire who poses a threat to the media. There’s a group within big tech that wants to create their own media properties but who “certainly does not come from the land of professional ethics that have been developed over many generations within the professional news community”.
“They’re going to create a world in which they get to elevate their own voices… and then the voices of people who kind of reinforce their own worldview, which often is a very libertarian point of view, a very Ayn Randian point of view. And one, most of all, which kind of validates their own position, their own power, their authority, and their ability to just continually be in this reinforcement loop around that. And that is not good for news at all.”
Media is a very seductive category, Sharon says.
“Once you already have more money than you can spend, what you really want is power and influence. And you can either get that by running for office, or you can get that by owning or running media and shaping public opinion. So those are the two places to do it. Because money only take you so far. And I do think that is a very important frontier for the tech guys to try to control.”
Hollywood trends
In Hollywood, Sharon says, the trends are “clearly consolidation”.
The big studios, which used to be stable and the sources of all the money and power, are consolidating how big tech companies like Apple, Amazon and Netflix are taking over the studio system, she explains.
“So, what we knew as the studio system is kind of giving way to this very hybrid echo system. There is very little room for independent production and independent distribution.”
It is hard to stand out and make a quality film. The Oscar-winning “Zone of Interest”, for example, barely had a theatrical release and there are still people who haven’t heard about it.
The small distributors and producers keep getting squeezed, Sharon says, so they are no longer able to make risky choices or take big swings.
News always finds a way forward
To celebrate TheWrap’s 15th anniversary, Sharon recently wrote about its “dizzying and unexpected journey”.
“In the short and endless time of 15 years, many other media companies have risen and fallen. Some have risen to great heights, only to crash and burn. More have been bought and neglected or shuttered. Others raised many millions and spent the cash, only to shut down,” she wrote.
“We continue, steady and focused, through the chaos.”
I ask her about the “chaos”, and if terms like “publisher’s apocalypse” and “mediapocalypse” are justified.
The news media is indeed “terribly challenged”, Sharon confirms, especially mass-readership, consumer-facing news.
The problem is that mass news media has been commoditised. There is little brand loyalty, and people probably do not care if they read it on their Apple news feed or in the Daily Mail.
Publishers have tried a lot of models and none has really worked as a definitive business model for news media, Sharon says.
“So we’ve tried to pivot to video, and we’ve tried partnering with Facebook, and we’ve tried content farms, and we’ve tried a lot of different things.”
But news always finds a way forward, Sharon emphasises.
While news organisations may not be as easily available or as obviously reliable as they were for a long time, she predicts they will still be around.
Sharon says opportunities will be in smaller communities, where people will identify one another as having a common purpose and look for a place to find reliable information.
Having quality content is “the main thing” in a difficult environment where artificial intelligence will replicate what used to be white-collar work, she emphasises.
“Original reporting and original information gathering and then how you deliver that in storytelling and narrative storytelling, using great images and great graphics and video to enhance things and charts and all that stuff will be the differentiator that will make a reader loyal to your brand.”
Watch our interview with Sharon here:
