The sit-down interview with Time magazine, that quadrennial ritual in which presidential candidates submit to the lens and the tape recorder, dates to 1940. Last year, Kamala Harris skipped it.
She went, instead, to Track Star.
That a candidate for the highest office in the land would bypass one of the most venerable titles in American journalism for a digital media company most people over 40 have never heard of is the sort of thing that might once have occasioned hand-wringing about the death of serious discourse. But Gus Wenner, the newly appointed executive chairman of Track Star's parent company, Public Opinion, sees it somewhat differently. He sees an opportunity.
Mr. Wenner — yes, that Wenner, the son of Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner — closed a seven-figure investment in Public Opinion in January, joining forces with Jack Coyne, the company's founder and chief executive. The deal marries old media lineage to new media mechanics, a combination that has been attempted before with mixed results. (The annals of digital media are littered with ventures that promised to be "MTV for this generation," a phrase that has by now been applied to so many companies it has lost all descriptive power.)
What makes Track Star interesting, at least to Mr. Wenner, is the gap between its cultural reach and its operational scale. The company commands an audience that includes sitting senators and presidential campaigns, yet remains, by traditional media-company standards, a modest enterprise. Whether that gap represents inefficiency to be corrected or a feature of the new economics remains to be seen.
The biggest names in the creator economy are hiring chief executives and courting Wall Street, which is one way to know the boom is maturing.
It is also, historically, one way to know the complications are about to begin.
Original story published in adweek.com: "MTV for This Generation: Track Star Is What a Media Company Looks Like Now"