From the moment of its founding by Glenn Beck in 2010, TheBlaze has strived to be a disruptive force in media. From addressing a market opportunity comprised of an enormous underserved conservative audience, to launching one of the first and arguably most successful direct-to-consumer subscription video offerings, TheBlaze was always challenging itself to stretch beyond its comfort zone. Powered by this discipline, TheBlaze enjoyed exponential growth. But then we became complacent. We began living in the past instead of Blazing towards the future. The market was changing while we stood still. And then, as many businesses unfortunately do, we placed our revenue above our people in order to feed the beast, so to speak. And instead of enjoying Glenn as a source of rocket fuel for TheBlaze’s growth, TheBlaze began to feel like a brand extension of Glenn rather than a standalone media company in its own right.
TheBlaze was never intended to be about Glenn Beck.
It was created to serve you, our audience.
Today, TheBlaze is emerging from a period of transition where our future was constrained by our past. We aspire to dream bigger, to anticipate where the media industry is headed, and imagine how we can lead the way. Over the last year or so, we have installed an entirely new Leadership team with the sole objective to evaluate everything about our business, and act to take it to the next level.
We at TheBlaze are intent upon making a clean break from the past and signaling a new era in our development. To realize this goal and better serve you, our audience, our partners, and our advertisers in a consistent and credible way, we are making some important changes in the way TheBlaze does business. This begins with where TheBlaze does business.
At one point, TheBlaze had two headquarters (New York and Irving) with multiple satellite offices (Ohio, LA, DC). Our Leadership team believes it is essential to our success to have everyone (or nearly everyone) in a single location. So this week we are consolidating our company’s geographically-dispersed operations into a streamlined and centralized model based in TheBlaze’s Irving, Texas studio headquarters. This effort is the first step in a comprehensive program to strengthen our core business and company culture, and optimize TheBlaze for accelerated growth and exciting innovation.
This week’s move is critical to TheBlaze’s transformational journey from a traditional network to a new kind of multi-platform content ecosystem, designed to better cater to our audience’s conservative interests, multi-tasking lifestyles, and aversion to that which is inauthentic or pandering. The move is also a reflection of our intent to open up a genuine conversation with our audience, and once again invite them to be a part of what we are building.
Over the next several months, you will begin to see a new product emerge. One focused on (1) enhancing user experience and community engagement, (2) implementing a more defined and purpose-driven brand direction for TheBlaze, (3) featuring new content across all of our integrated touchpoints, and (4) evaluating and implementing the latest technology trends and opportunities — only if they are additive to our audience’s relationship with TheBlaze.
Our future is one that is “digital-first” and places our audience above all else.
More exciting developments to come!
