Content Creation: The brand of “one”?

The COIL

Just over one year ago, Andrea Seabrook left a brilliant career as a Congressional correspondent for NPR and host of the weekend edition of All Things Considered to re-define political reporting by starting her own podcast, DecodeDC. Rather than go hat in hand to another set of vested interests, Andrea successfully crowdfunded the venture garnering more than $100,000 by appealing to her listeners with a simple value proposition: “Washington is broken. You are not. Help DecodeDC report stories that really matter” As a dizzying array of distributors, miners, and aggregators galvanize their resolve to commoditize content, there is a growing push back from content creators. The long held stigma of self-published books, self-released music, and independently produced film/video has all but disappeared as DIY has hit the mainstream hard. Unlike most of the disruptions to legacy business models, this one is truly individual-centric. This has caused both traditional and VC backed organizations considerable difficulty in establishing a model to support their necessary levels of profit and growth. Andrea joins Fred and Howard on The COIL to share insights on truly independent media, crowdfunding for change, and on being the brand.