The Media Frontier
Five writers, and one collective, chart a new path into the wilds of internet media
In November of 2022, Foster Collective set out to rebuild its media strategy from scratch.
We're about to witness a tsunami of generative AI media, flooding through every corner of the internet. It will shake up the digital media and creator economies in ways none of us can predict or control. The only thing anyone seems to agree on is that the future of media is going to be very, very strange.
Our goal is to become fluid and adaptable in the uncertain years ahead, and truly be the change we wish to see in digital media. It's easy to talk about the ways internet publishing is broken. It's easy to throw stones and score points for being cynical. But it's much harder to envision a healthier, more human future for media, and then fully embody it in our work. But dammit, we're going to try.
The Media Frontier is the first edition of our new digital magazine. It's a proof of concept. In this inaugural edition, you’ll find six essays. The first five come from members of the Foster Collective core team. We tasked ourselves with writing personal essays about our relationship with internet media, and the futures we’re fighting for. The goal with these essays isn’t to be Experts™ or to make bold, generalized predictions. It’s to be fully human, and weave together our personal experiences into stories that AI cannot replicate.
In the sixth and final essay, we'll share our new media strategy. We want to be transparent with how we're navigating the strange new world of AI, and how we’re baking courage, experimentation, and self-renewal into our media operation. If it inspires you in any way, please feel free to steal our strategy, or adapt any part of it for your own media ventures.
We don't know what the future holds, but we trust that it can be shaped by courageous explorers. The media frontier awaits.
Lead Editor & Writer: Rob Hardy
Contributing Writers: Minnow Park, Sam Houghton, Sara Campbell, & Dan Hunt
Inside Edition One
We're all living on the frontier now - Rob Hardy
The story of how Foster Media's new strategy, and this first edition of the publication, came to be. Rob shares his early experiments with generative AI, along with a personal account about learning to let go of rugged individualism, and truly belong to a collective.
All we have is our truth - Minnow Park
When Minnow wrote about his relationship with his dad, he was expecting it to be therapeutic. What he didn't expect was that sharing it with others would open the door to a vibrant new world of connection.
The future of internet media will look like the past - Sam Houghton
There was something special about the early days of personal blogging. Before everything on the internet had to be optimized and monetized into oblivion, we could be ourselves fully, and we could connect openly. Maybe, just maybe, we can recapture some of that early magic, and weave it into the future we're creating together.
The second mountain - Sara Campbell
When Sara's startup fell apart in 2018, it left a void. From that place, she started writing—truthfully, honestly, courageously—about the peaks and valleys of life. Five years later, her newsletter Tiny Revolutions has blossomed into something unexpected and life-affirming.
Dreams of co-creativity - Dan Hunt
The labels we apply to ourselves, along with the cultural stories about what those labels mean, shape our sense of who we are, and what we're capable of. Dan Hunt, Foster's CEO, is tired of labels like "founder" and "entrepreneur." They're too limiting. Instead, he's stepping into a new role, that of dreamwalker.✨
Steal our media strategy - Rob Hardy
The inside scoop on how we've rebuilt Foster Media to navigate the emerging frontier, and how we're embodying the change we want to see in digital publishing. If any part of this strategy speaks to you, please steal it.
Seeking courageous writers & editors | Safety not guaranteed
The frontier ahead is vast and unknowable, full of opportunity and peril. We're looking for like-minded creatives to forge ahead with us and help us shape the future of internet media. If you'd like to build Foster alongside us, help writers tell their stories, and make the internet more human, we humbly invite you to apply to join our collective.