How Pop-Up Magazine grew into a nationwide events series
It started in 2009 in San Francisco. A couple of journalists got the idea of putting together a magazine, but instead of setting it to print, they would perform it live. Pop-Up Magazine, as the event was called, was a huge hit, and the founders had to seek out larger and larger theaters in order to meet demand.
In 2015, they decided to take the show on the road, touring Pop-Up Magazine across several major cities.
I recently sat down with Chas Edwards, co-founder and president of Pop-Up Magazine. I asked him about the logistics of creating a live magazine from scratch, how the company makes money, and what the future holds for it now that it’s been purchased by the Emerson Collective.
To listen to the interview, subscribe to The Business of Content on your favorite podcast player, or you can play the YouTube video below. If you scroll down you’ll also find a transcript of the interview.
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Simon Owens: Hey Chas, thanks for joining us.
Chas Edwards: Nice to be here.
So you’re the publisher for Pop-Up Magazine. And then you have another publication called California Sunday Magazine. What’s your 15 second elevator pitch for what Pop-Up Magazine is?
It’s a live magazine performed onstage by prominent writers, photographers, filmmakers who are performing all original stories, never before seen. It’s a multi-media experience. Film and animation, illustration and photography are projected onto a giant screen on the stage and each of the stories is being live scored by our house band onstage next to the contributor.
And in some cases that band is creating original compositions that coincide with the storytelling on the stage.
That’s right. Almost entirely. Almost all of the music you hear from the band is original composition developed to compliment the live journalism on stage.
There’s always a person on the stage. Sometimes you guys have created a live animation, so while that person is narrating there’s this really cool photography or animation that’s going along, timed perfectly along with the speech that they’re giving on the stage.
When the contributor is a photographer, what’s on the screen is often that photographer’s work. You’re seeing original photography and the audience is experiencing a live photo essay. If it’s a filmmaker we’re very often using film from some project they’re working on. But to your point, if there’s a writer or a radio producer who may not have photography or film associated with that story, Pop-Up Magazine will commission original artwork, illustration, animation to be the art layer for that story.
It’s uncommon that Pop-Up Magazine is pressing play on an animated film at the beginning of a piece and the contributor at the microphone is having to stay synced up with that. It works the other way around. The contributor, who is always a journalist, is working from a script, and then in the tech booth at the back of the theater, the Pop-Up Magazine team is firing up photos or animation or other multi-media elements that key off of the contributor’s pacing. We don’t require that the writer has to pay attention to what’s going on on the screen. That’s something we mix live on their behalf.
You basically created a scalable version of This American Life’s live shows. I’ve been to some of the live shows they streamed to movie theaters, and it seems like what you’re doing is very close to what they would do.
That’s right. We make a new show, a new issue of our live magazine, several times a year. And when we do it, the way we achieve scale is a couple of ways. One, in markets where the audience is growing, we go to bigger and bigger theaters. When we’re in New York, for example, we’re at the opera house in Brooklyn. In the San Francisco Bay area, we perform at very big theaters, like the Paramount theater in Oakland. So one way we’re able to scale is that as the audience grows bigger, we get bigger theaters and sell tickets for people to be there.
The other way that we’ve accomplished scale is that when we make a new show, we tour it around the country. We go on the road with all those contributors and with the band and visit six to 12 cities over the span of a few weeks.
Yeah, This American Life probably does this once every few years. Pop-Up Magazine is constantly making new content for different cities and taking it on tour. What you guys are doing is a much larger undertaking than what This American Life does.
The origin story for Pop-Up Magazine is kind of interesting because it’s intertwined with this sister publication, The California Sunday Magazine. You played a founding role in both. Can you talk about how these two things originated?
Pop-Up Magazine started first. It started in 2009 here in San Francisco. It wasn’t even a company at the time. It was an idea, the brainchild of a couple of my more creative colleagues. They came up with the idea of taking inspiration from a magazine, but turning it into a live show.
So in 2009 at a little theater here in San Francisco, the first Pop-Up Magazine happened. People showed up purely by word of mouth and didn’t know what to expect. People liked what they saw. After the show when we were mingling and having a beer with the contributors and everyone who came to the show, they asked us when we were doing the next one. At the time, we didn’t have plans for the next one, but we struck a chord with some people, so we began to create a new Pop-Up Magazine show twice a year, once in the Spring and once in the Fall. We just performed it in San Francisco. But every other show we put on, we had to triple the size of the theater that we rented to do the event.
Just through word of mouth and people telling their friends, and social media, and no conventional marketing at the time, Pop-Up Magazine was reaching more people and that continued for several years until we started to realize that selling out a symphony hall of nearly 3,000 seats in 10 or 15 minutes, it was bigger than a hobby. It was bigger than something we could do in our spare time outside of our regular jobs. So in 2013, Doug McGray and I quit our day jobs and decided to try to build a company around this that would allow us to do a couple things: one was make Pop-Up Magazine more often, and each time we made a show, could we build the infrastructure around it so we can tour to other cities? We speculated that there was nothing unique about the cultural climate of San Francisco, it’s a show that attracts creative, curious people who love stories, and we knew there were those kinds of people in a whole lot of cities beyond San Francisco.
We decided we wanted to do more Pop-Up Magazine and do it in more places. And at the same time we knew there was always a limit to how many people you could fit into any given theater on any given night. Pop-Up Magazine is always done at night after work. It’s a nice leisure time in your day. You’re not being interrupted by meetings and phone calls. You can turn off your phone. You can lose yourself in stories for a couple of hours and be very immersed in journalism. And we recognized that the other time of the week that’s a similar open space for people is the weekend.
So we decided in 2013 that we would start touring Pop-Up Magazine, and we’d launch a new print and digital title targeted to the same audience with the same kinds of stories and the same sensibility, but deliver it to audiences on the weekend onto their phones or laptops and also in a beautiful print edition for people who prefer reading on paper.
I feel like we could do a whole other episode on California Sunday Magazine. I seem to remember listening to a podcast interview where someone talked about how in order to save money, you approached the LA Times and had it delivered as an insert in the weekend paper, and that somehow saved you guys money and got you your initial print audience.
It’s the LA Times and also the San Francisco Chronicle, the two major metro papers of the West Coast, of California. Around the time we were launching at the end of 2014, that was a time when those big metro newspapers of the West had very big Sunday distribution, big readership, but at the time they were all pulling out of doing their own weekend magazine that would be similar to The New York Times Magazine. And so we saw that as an opportunity for us to reach a large audience very quickly, and we also saw it as an opportunity for those papers to deliver a compelling weekend magazine product to their audiences that they weren’t doing on their own.
You had some interesting stops on the way leading up to Pop-Up Magazine. You were both at Digg and Federated Media. I read that you helped develop the native ads on Digg. I actually remember these. It’s probably not a coincidence that Pop-Up Magazine has a very heavy native advertising component.
I’ve spent most of my career doing media startups. I started at magazines like Ziff Davis and then spent a lot of time at web publishers like CNET and Digg and Federated Media. Particularly the time I spent at Federated Media and Digg, it was a very dynamic time in the world of digital media and how brands might engage with audiences on blogs and across social media. We had an opportunity at Federated Media and Digg to do some interesting early experimentation in inviting sponsors to the party, if you will, in a way that was very transparent that it was sponsored content, but to develop sponsored content that was as engaging, as interactive as any of the editorial material on those same publications.
It was a great experience, and it certainly informed everything I’ve done since. As a media company, you only exist to serve an audience with unique and wonderful experiences. That includes editorial experiences, but it also includes the advertising and sponsorships that are touching that audience as well. If you stop delighting your audience, or if your sponsorship and advertising products aren’t as delightful as everything else, then you’ve got nothing.
One thing that’s always repeated in every show is that you guys say that this isn’t recorded, it’s going to disappear once this performance is over. Why did you guys decide to do this? When you look at things like the Moth and how already-existing podcasts do live shows where they record them and distribute them as podcasts — it seems like there’d be a great distribution strategy there for you to create a hit podcast. What made you decide not to take that avenue?
The place we started with is that if you make media on a stage in a room with an audience sitting together in the dark, a live magazine presents opportunities that are totally unique and totally original and can’t be replicated on other platforms. We wanted to make shows that felt magical, that took advantage that everyone had driven over to the theater and sat down and was going to spend an evening with us.
There are things we can do inside Pop-Up Magazine that you can’t do any other way. We do lighting design in certain stories where the story spills off the stage and is projected onto the walls and ceiling of the theater. We’ve done stories about food where we can use the fact that we’re in a live theater where we can give everyone in the theater something to taste, so that they’re not only hearing and listening to the story and looking at beautiful images on the screen, but they’re actually tasting their way into the story. We did one funny story a couple years ago about karaoke goes wrong, where fights sometimes break out in karaoke bars. We ended up having a reporter from Rolling Stone tell the story and frame it as the top five karaoke worst songs of all time, and because we were live and had a band on stage, as she’s finishing it and names the worst karaoke song of all time, we had thousands of people in these theaters and we all joined and sang karaoke together.
The reason that we haven’t filmed the shows is in part because we didn’t design the stories to be podcasts or videos on YouTube. We want to take advantage of the unique experience of being in a theater to tell stories in a more immersive way and a way that could only be done live.
That’s the starting argument for why we did it that way. Something else has come out of that, which has been interesting to us. The audience and fans that come to the shows recognize that we’re making something just for them that night, so that it’s special. It’s the kind of thing where you have to be there to experience and enjoy it. There’s something rare about that, and something fun about it. When someone comes to a Pop-Up Magazine show at the Warner theater in DC, and a couple of colleagues were out of town or couldn’t make it that night, and they ask what happened — that friend can’t just send them a video of what happened. That friend is put in a position of having to recount their favorite pieces from the show and describe them and pass that story from one friend to another. It creates a real intimacy and excitement around the format that I think makes it more fun next time for the folks who missed the show.
I understand the arguments about the exclusivity of it. I feel like at least 50 percent of the show could translate well to a podcast. Is it an ongoing debate within Pop-Up Magazine about whether you should launch a podcast, or is it pretty much unanimous that it shouldn’t be?
The fact that we create a live show and don’t film it that night isn’t to say we don’t feel that adaptation for stories that we make shouldn’t reach audiences in other formats. Many stories that were born on the stage of Pop-Up Magazine, in some adapted form, have later become a podcast on This American Life or a story on Invisibilia from NPR. We’ve had stories that start on the stage of Pop-Up Magazine, and in a different form, end up as magazine pieces in The California Sunday Magazine or sometimes at The New York Times Magazine or The New Yorker. There have even been stories that started at Pop-Up Magazine and someone from Hollywood production companies approached us and said can I option that story and develop it for television or film.
We very much embrace the idea of adaptation of these stories and bringing them to other formats. The only thing that we believe strongly is that you don’t want to film a magazine piece and call it a TV show. You might take that magazine piece, develop it with a screenwriter, and think about what you can do on television that you can’t do in a magazine. That adaptation process is very important. Great television should always be great television. A great magazine piece should never feel like the transcription from a podcast where you can’t hear the ambient sound. And likewise, when we make an edition of Pop-Up Magazine, we want to do what we can to make each of those stories feel very native and wonderful for the live audience in the room. That might just be a starting point for many of those stories to find audiences in a slightly different format somewhere else.
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In its early days, most Pop-Up Magazine performances were hosted just solely in California. And then you did some early one-off tours where you would do a tour but then go back to California. Then it became a thing where you guys were almost constantly touring year round. What was that evolution?
You’re right. It very much started in San Francisco. From 2009 until the very end of 2014, Pop-Up Magazine was almost exclusively an experience that happened in a theater in San Francisco somewhere. In those early years we did one collaboration with ESPN. It was a sports themed edition of Pop-Up Magazine. But it was one show we did in New York. But outside of that, until 2014, we were exclusively a San Francisco experience. It was at that time, as we started to build a company around this, hiring a staff to do this full time, raising some money — at the end of 2014 was the first time that we tried to perform this in multiple cities. It was in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
It was an experiment to see two things, really. One was what do we need to know to travel one show from one city to another. It was a logistics question. The second thing was we wanted to prove out our theory that there were receptive audiences in other cities outside of San Francisco. At the end of 2014 we had one show performed once in San Francisco and twice in Los Angeles, and it was an experiment that went well. It was a great learning experience for us. Since that time — every time we’ve made a new Pop-Up Magazine show, 2015 to the present — we make a show with the intention of bringing that to cities around the country.
I seem to remember hearing that you customize the shows for each city. How do you do that?
For the Winter tour, for example, there will be a core of stories that travel with us to every market. So if an evening of Pop-Up Magazine has 10 or 11 stories in it, maybe eight of those will be traveling with us to every market. But in addition to that, we almost always do one or two stories that are only being performed at that show in that city. It’s an opportunity for us to find a story that might have particular resonance for the audience in one market but might not be as resonant in other markets.
For example, when we’re in Los Angeles, many of the people who come to the shows are people who work in or are connected to the entertainment business. In LA, we’ll do a story that’s being performed by some Hollywood talent or someone who’s a household name in the entertainment industry but may not be as well known outside of LA.
Another example would be when we come to DC. We have a lot of people connected to the federal government in one way or another. There’s an opportunity for us to do a story that covers national politics in a deep and interesting way that might be especially exciting for an audience in DC but less so in an audience in Atlanta.
What is the submission and recruitment process like for these stories?
So we start the process probably five or six months before the first performance on a tour. We have a team of producers at Pop-Up Magazine who are reaching out to their favorite reporters, and filmmakers, and photographers, and illustrators, and animators, and creative people across the spectrum. They check in with them on what they’re working on and explore stories that might be relevant to Pop-Up Magazine. Many of those conversations end up turning into a story pitch of some kind. Over the months leading up to a new Pop-Up Magazine tour, our producers will look at up to over 200 story pitches before they assign the 15 or so stories that we then edit, art direct, compose music for, and take on tour. That’s really the longest part of our process, the outreach to the world of journalism to find great stories and figure out if they would be compelling live experience pieces.
What’s the rehearsal process like? I’m assuming the people are spread out all across the country.
The first phase of the process for us is very much like the editorial process for a magazine that’s not live, meaning our producers are out looking at story pitches, they’re assigning a story, and when they assign a story, that contributor submits a script. Very much like any other magazine where stories are going back and forth between a producer and a contributor, and there are edits and cuts and development areas. The number of words in a story for Pop-Up Magazine are fewer than a feature for The New Yorker. Given that we’re working with live, a long feature for us is nine or 10 minutes long, which is shorter than your average magazine article, so we’re making sure we’re editing a script for a live performance.
From there, once we lock in on a script, that’s when we bring in the art department, who starts to take a look at what materials we have to work with. If it’s a piece where we’re going to be commissioning original photography or art or illustration, the art department is then working with that finalized script to develop that and commission original art. That’s happening in parallel with us sharing the script with the band. We do a table read of the script, so our producers will actually read out loud the story so the band can hear the pacing of it and get a sense of how long it’ll be when being performed on stage.
As far as actual rehearsals. The day before our first show on a new tour is really the first day we have everybody in the same room at the same time. We’re not able to get into the theaters until the day of the show. And so what that means is the day before we do a mock rehearsal here in our office in SF, or if we’re kicking off a tour in LA, we’ll do it in a hotel room. This is the first time the performers are in front of a microphone, standing in front of a screen with their actual art on it. We rehearse the day before, and then we get one dress rehearsal in the theater the morning of.
Let’s talk about some of the logistics. How many employees are traveling around the country putting these on?
Most of the people that you see on stage at Pop-Up Magazine are not staff employees. They’re freelance contributors that are joining for that tour. But when we do go on tour, we have our team of producers, a couple of whom you see as hosts for the show, and then we have our technical team that are in the tech booth at the back of the theater. We have one person adjusting sound. Unlike a movie where everything is pre-mixed, we have a live band, we have one person at a mic, we often have audio or video clips, so mixing sound levels live is pretty sophisticated. We always bring our own person. We also have a tech producer who’s running the show off a computer. I mentioned before that we don’t often just hit play on an eight-minute film, we’re actually mixing a lot of different component media pieces. So we have a technical producer who’s actually running the screen.
It’s probably about eight to 10 people who are traveling at a time.
What’s the smallest market you’ve performed in? I guess the easy slam dunks are San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and DC. How do you guys decide when a city can hit that threshold of being able to make it worth your while to visit it?
We don’t have a great algorithm for this. It’s often a bit of gut and experimentation. There are certain cities that have very big populations, but may not be as interested in what we’re doing. Likewise, there might be small or mid-sized cities that, because they have a really big creative community or a lot of media and journalists and creative types in that market, we can have immediate success in those places.
Each time we go on tour, we tend to add at least one city we’ve never been to before. And we rent a smaller theater and experiment. We see if there’s an audience that came out to a show, did they seem to like it, and is there potential here? And if so, on the next tour we might go back to that city and begin to see how big the audience opportunity in that place is. Austin, TX, doesn’t have a huge population, but we brought Pop-Up Magazine there once and people seemed to just love it from the get-go and tell friends. So at least once a year we go back to Austin.
It’s an iterative process for us where we do some experimentation, generally at a smaller theater. We don’t rent the opera house the first time we go to a new city. We try to meet a community there and spend a little time in advance of the show getting to know arts organizations and journalism departments and performing arts groups, and try to build relationships with the community because those allies in a market can be really helpful at spreading the word for us and introducing us to new folks out there.
How do you choose the venues? I must confess I was one of those loyal attendees who was a little miffed when it switched to a venue that used Ticketmaster, because it increased the price significantly.
Well Ticketmaster is one consideration. You are not alone in that Ticketmaster has much higher fees than anyone else. That’s kind of a strike against a theater when we’re going into a market. Putting together a tour is a game of three dimensional chess where we need to visit a set number of cities that we’ve decided in advance we want to go visit. We don’t want to be zig zagging across the country to do it. So we say that during the first week, if on this tour we want to go to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, then we also want to go to DC and New York and Boston. That constrains us a little bit. We say that we need to string together all of the West Coast tour stops so that they’re pretty close in time. And then we have to jump on a plane and go to the East Coast and finish the tour there.
So sometimes we don’t have all the control that we would want. Sometimes we end up in a market and we say, look, we have to do the DC show on Thursday night because Tuesday night is New York and Saturday night is Atlanta. So we only have one night to do that. And if a theater that might be better for the show is unavailable that night, we sometimes have to go to an alternative venue for that purpose. Sometimes we end up at a Ticketmaster theater and that was really our only choice in the market. There’s a Ticketmaster theater here in the San Francisco area, the Paramount in Oakland, and we just love so much about that venue and its location and its acoustics and its seating capacity that it’s a preferred theater of ours even though it is Ticketmaster.
If you think about the experience of a Pop-Up Magazine show, when we look at a venue, we say we need a stage that’s big enough so that we can have a performer at the microphone at one side of the stage and have room for our four-person band on the other side of the stage. So you sometimes go places that are reconfigured old movie theaters that don’t have a big enough stage for our format. And likewise, the giant screen behind the band and performer is an absolutely essential part of what Pop-Up Magazine is, so we need to select theaters that have giant screens and a high quality viewing experience for everybody in the theater. Sometimes you’ll go to a venue that’s built for musical performances, where it’s all about the sound, and there might be parts of the theater that don’t have good sight lines to the stage or the theater. That would make it not a very ideal venue.
You guys have a very aggressive marketing strategy. I notice you do a lot of social media targeting. Whenever there’s a show coming close I see non-stop ads on Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times. I remember I tweeted a complaint about the Ticketmaster thing and someone reached out to me immediately and offered a discount code. It seems like that’s very important because you’re marketing to different audiences in different cities, so you guys have to have some pretty aggressive local marketing. Can you talk about that?
Our marketing budgets are a lot smaller than you might think. For most of our history, the way we’ve gotten people to shows is organically, through word of mouth. Almost probably the bulk of people who come to Pop-Up Magazine ended up there because a friend of theirs had been to it and said they had to check it out when it comes to your city. People will also join our email lists; we’re not a very active emailer, we really just use our email list to let people know when a new show is coming and how they can get tickets for it. So really word of mouth and social media and email have been the primary ways that we develop audience.
More recently we’ve started experimenting with quite small budgets doing some social media advertising, basically advertising through Facebook and Google. Because of their ability to target people who have expressed interest in the show before, been to the show before, visited our website. You as a previous attendee at a show, you’ve probably visited our website and signed up for our newsletter. The way Facebook and Google work is they assume you’re probably a really good candidate for coming to the next one when it’s in town. And so you end up seeing quite a few ads about the new show coming to DC. But in terms of our investment, the only paid advertising is really with Google and Facebook, at a very localized level, with a heavy emphasis on people that have been before or seem to have a very similar profile to folks who have been before.
That speaks to the idea that you can be ubiquitous to the people who really count. I’m guessing you’re using custom audiences where you can upload your email lists to Facebook or Google and then it’ll target people who have that same email address. Or you’re basically attaching a cookie to my browser when I visit your website and then following me around the internet. Yours is one of the few ads on the internet that I actually see and respond to. It’s a good use of targeting.
That’s great to hear. That’s our intention, partly by necessity. We don’t have big budgets to do it. So we have to try to be judicious with how we spend it and we really just want to make sure people who already like us are inclined to like the experience we have. We want to make sure we don’t come through town and have any of those people not know about it until we’ve moved on to the next city.
Tell me about revenue. Is it mostly through ticket sales and the native sponsorships during the show itself?
Yeah it’s a mix. The fans buying a ticket for themselves and a friend. The other half is coming from the sponsors in the show. You’ve seen the show before, and in between every few editorial stories, just like when you’re turning a page of a magazine and you have a display spread in the print magazine, we have a live event equivalent of that. In between editorial stories, we project on the screen ‘advertisement’ to signal to the audience that this is going to be a sponsored moment, and then we take anywhere from 30 to 75 seconds to deliver branded content, deliver something on behalf of one of the sponsors of the show. And what we found in the early days is that when you talk to a brand or an advertiser, they tend not to have a specialist on staff that makes advertising for live performance magazines because I think we might be the only one that fits that category.
So what that meant is we needed to help the sponsor. Once we convince a brand that they might be a good fit for our audience, that it might make sense for them to be part of our show, and they say ‘that’s terrific news, I’m in, here’s the money,’ and then they’re like ‘oh no, what do I do with the space I bought from you?’ So we have a team in house, a brand studio team, which is a separate group from our editorial team but it’s people with pretty similar backgrounds in a lot of ways. It’s mostly staffed with people who come out of the world of editorial work at magazines and radio. And the brand studio collaborates with the sponsors to develop something that will help convey what that brand wants to communicate about their new product or their brand or whatever it may be, but to do so in a way that feels very organic to the pop up magazine experience.
So for example, Coach, the luxury brand that makes apparel, approached us and said this is the audience we want to reach, but we don’t have any assets that we can just drop into your show. So we pitched them on an idea. We’re going to be visiting seven cities on this tour that you’re sponsoring, and you’ve indicated that your ideal customer is a woman in her 20s or early 30s that lives in one of these metropolitan areas. Why don’t we create a content series that will be performed onstage in the shape of live photo essays, each one will be basically directed by a different cool creative young woman in the different cities we’re visiting. So every stop on that tour when we’re in New Orleans as a part of that tour, we worked with a local photographer and store owner in New Orleans to give us a guided tour of New Orleans in a way that even local residents would benefit from. And we turned that into a photo essay that was then performed on stage as a commercial break. So that’s one example of let’s develop a photo essay that has this same kind of quality and sensibility of a Pop-Up Magazine story, but it’s just serving a different purpose. In this case it’s introducing an audience to something new from Coach.
With our upcoming show, as part of the Winter tour, we’ve been working with a longtime sponsor Mailchimp on a series of short animated films, and we’ll use Pop-Up Magazine as a place to preview this new series of films. The world will not have seen these yet, they’ll launch later in the year, but at Pop-Up Magazine we’re going to take one of those films and play it on the giant screen to give our audience a sneak peek at a cool new content series that’s underwritten by Mailchimp.
You were recently bought by Laurene Powell Jobs, who runs an investment group that’s been investing in media. She also purchased a majority stake in The Atlantic. What does this mean for Pop-Up Magazine?
Emerson Collective, they’ve been a supporter and partner and investor in Pop-Up Magazine and California Sunday since almost our very beginning. In 2014 when we started to tour Pop-Up Magazine around the country and we launched the California Sunday Magazine, right around that time the Emerson Collective invested some money and wanted to support the work we were doing. They’ve continued to be a supporter both strategically and morally, as well as financially over our lifespan. And so it’s been a great opportunity for us to get to know the team at Emerson Collective and to work with them on strategic decision making, thinking about product development questions and the rest of the concerns you have when you’re trying to build a business.
We’ve gotten to know them very well over the last four years. So as Emerson Collective is beginning to do more in the media space, they started talking to us about the idea of partnering more deeply. So we’re now a wholly owned subsidiary of Emerson Collective, but in many ways not that much changes. They’ve been a partner to us, a strategic advisor to us, an organization that shares our values and believes in our mission for quite a long time. And so this is really more a continuation of that rather than a stark change in our relationship to the world or in our relationship to Emerson Collective.
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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.
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