Katie Couric's New Media Venture Looks for Partner Companies With 'Ethos'
*By Madison Alworth*
Katie Couric is all in with new media. Since the journalist left Yahoo roughly one year ago, she's expanded her own production company, Katie Couric Media, joined forces with theSkimm newsletter, and entered the fight for gender equality.
“I’ve sort of been staffing up, and we are doing a number of interesting projects," Couric, a seasoned vet of the more traditional CBS and ABC networks, said this week in an interview on Cheddar.
"We’re teaming up with companies that have kind of an ethos and social responsibility side that resonates with me. So companies like Procter and Gamble, I’ve been working with them because they’ve been on the forefront of gender equality, and \[chief brand officer\] Mark Pritchard is an amazingly enlightened individual in corporate america. And P&G is a fantastic company, so I'm proud to be associated with them.”
P&G ($PG) is sponsoring one of Couric's first video projects with new media company theSkimm.
"I’m doing a series called 'Getting There' with theSkimm, because it’s really designed to inspire younger women to show how very successful women got there ー from Ina Garten to Issa Rae to Eva Chen to Bozoma St. John to Jennifer Fisher to Bethenny Frankel ー all really successful women in their own right."
TheSkimm, which was founded in 2012, has since grown to [6 million subscribers](http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/11/with-video-and-audio-the-skimm-pushes-further-into-the-daily-routines-of-its-6-million-readers/), according to the latest estimates. The newsletter company expanded into video and audio last year, a natural extension for the millennial-focused start-up.
Once the star of the "Today Show" and the "CBS Evening News," Couric is well aware that media was vastly different at the start of her career. “I always thank my lucky stars I went into television news when I went into television news, because it is completely different today,” she said.
But Couric isn't intimidated by change ー she's inspired by it.
“You have a lot of different platforms, you have to iterate the content to match the platform. I think it's challenging, because it is so fragmented and so niche and there is so much content out there," she said.
"On the other hand, that is presenting really exciting opportunities to do different things. I always like to be forward-thinking.”
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/katie-couric-media).
According to the Federal Reserve, the investment gap between Black and white Americans has remained substantial, with only 34 percent of Black households joining in on the historic rise in the markets. Stacey Tisdale, the first Black woman to have reported from the NYSE and the CEO and president of Mind Money Media Inc., said that the data might not be as disheartening as it seems. "I think that number is very deceiving. That Federal Reserve study is actually from 2019, and it's very important that we all look beneath that number and look beneath the surface because there is nothing short of an investing revolution going on in the Black community," Tisdale said.
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Ed Butowsky, managing partner at Chapwood Investments, joined Wake Up With Cheddar to break down the disappointing takeaways from Spotify's Q4 earnings report, which sent the stock plunging.
Anu Gaggar, global investment strategist for Commonwealth Financial Network, joined Cheddar News to discuss how global supply chains could be disrupted even further by an armed conflict in Ukraine.
Google parent company Alphabet saw yet another successful quarter reporting its final earnings report for 2021 on Tuesday. The tech giant beat Wall Street expectations across the board with much of that success owed to not only the growth of its cloud business, but also its multi-platform advertising. Joanna O'Connell, Principal Analyst at Forrester explains why advertising may be one of the keys to Alphabet’s future success.
