Narrative is infrastructure.
We cover it like one.

The Media & Narrative desk tracks the business of attention. Legacy publishers, streamers, social platforms, creator economies, ad-tech, live sports rights, and the algorithmic shifts that decide which stories get oxygen. Plus the narrative economy itself: how a company, policy, or category acquires and loses reputation across a news cycle.

This beat matters for two reasons. First, media is a large industry in its own right with real margin pressure, structural disruption, and clear winners and losers. Second, narrative is an input to every other beat. A brand crisis is a Companies story filtered through the Media desk. A regulatory hearing is a Policy story amplified or killed by coverage choices.

Coverage spans Disney, Netflix, Warner, Meta, Google, TikTok, ByteDance, the New York Times, the FT, News Corp, Axel Springer, Bertelsmann, the live-sports rights market, the shrinking linear ad pool, the subscription economy plateau, and the AI-content saturation fight. Plus the creator-to-brand transitions that are rewriting celebrity economics.

The desk is where Briefed is most reflexive. A media business is covering media businesses. We try to flag our own priors when they matter, and we try to care more about the incentive structure than the drama.