There is no single path into media. That’s the first thing you learn when you talk to enough people who’ve made it.
One future TV anchor drove across the country in her mom’s car, sleeping in it between interviews. A future magazine editor-in-chief sent her resume to the same office three times before they finally said, “All right, come in already.” The founder of one of the internet’s most influential music publications cold-called record labels as a teenager to pitch his online magazine, and most of them had no idea what he was talking about.
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These aren’t outliers. They’re the norm. Ask anyone with a long career in media how they got started, and the answer almost always involves some combination of luck, stubbornness, and a willingness to take a job that wasn’t the one they wanted.
Over the years, Mediabistro has interviewed hundreds of media professionals about how they built their careers. We went back through the archive and pulled 25 pieces of advice from people who started at the bottom of publishing, television, advertising, and digital media and worked their way to the top. Their specific paths are all different. Their advice is remarkably consistent.
What follows is organized by theme, because the same lessons kept surfacing across decades, industries, and job titles. Whether you’re trying to land your first editorial assistant role or figuring out your next move after 10 years in the business, these are the principles that the people ahead of you wish someone had told them earlier.
On Getting Your Foot in the Door
The biggest barrier in media is the first one: getting someone to give you a shot. Every person we talked to found a different way through, but all of them had to push. And for most of them, the path that worked was one they hadn’t originally planned on.
Hoda Kotb, who would go on to co-anchor The Today Show, didn’t start with connections or a polished reel. “I do think if you are tenacious, somebody will hire you,” she told us. “I was literally driving around the country in my mom’s car in the same outfit. I slept in that car.”
That image is worth sitting with. One of the most recognized faces in American television spent her early career sleeping in a car between auditions. The gap between where you are and where you want to be can feel enormous, but everyone at the top has a version of that story.
Ryan Schreiber launched Pitchfork as a teenager in the mid-1990s, when most people didn’t know what an online publication was. “I was calling up labels out of the blue like, ‘Hi I have this music magazine on the Internet,’ and people were like, ‘On the what?'” He kept going anyway. Within a decade, Pitchfork was one of the most influential music publications in the world. The people who laughed stopped laughing.
Keija Minor, who became editor in chief of Brides, left a law career to pursue magazines. She wasn’t subtle about it. After sending her resume repeatedly to the same office, she finally got a call: “All right, come in already. I’ve gotten your resume three times.” The job turned out to be an internship. She took it. That willingness to start over at a lower level, in a completely different industry, is something most people talk about but very few actually do.
Kai Ryssdal, host of Marketplace, took an even less conventional route. “Starting at the beginning, U.S. Navy … U.S. Foreign Service. Then I managed to get myself an internship at KQED. I stuck around long enough, they finally put me on the radio, and 10 years later, here I am.”
Dominic Chu got into TV journalism through an open audition at CNBC for people with Wall Street experience. “They held an open audition for people who had Wall Street experience to come in for a possible career in media,” he told us. “They ended up going through this whole interview process with an audition at the end and selecting people to come on. I was one of them.” Sometimes the door opens in a place you weren’t looking. Ryssdal and Chu both came from worlds that had nothing to do with media, and both ended up building prominent careers in it. Transferable skills mattered more than a traditional resume.
On Persistence When Nothing Is Working
Getting in is hard. Staying in long enough to build something is harder. The people who made it all had stretches where nothing seemed to be moving. What separated them from the people who gave up was a stubborn refusal to take “no” as a final answer, combined with enough self-awareness to know when to adjust the approach.
Amanda Hocking, who became one of the first self-publishing success stories, spent nearly a decade getting rejected before a single book sold. “I worked really hard at this for my entire life. I was trying to get published for nine years before I started selling books, and I have been writing literally since I could write.” Nine years. Most people would have quit after two. Hocking kept writing, kept submitting, and eventually found a path that the traditional publishing industry hadn’t offered her.
Harvey Levin, the founder and executive producer of TMZ, built an entire editorial philosophy around refusing to accept dead ends. “The key to this job is looking for 10 ways around the word no. That, to me, is the essence of what we do and makes a difference in the way we do our job.” That mindset applies well beyond celebrity journalism. Any career in media involves hearing “no” constantly, from editors, from hiring managers, from clients. The question is whether you treat each one as a wall or a redirect.
Cathy Hughes, who founded both TV One and Radio One, put it more directly: “Be persistent and be willing to go into a smaller market to get discovered.” There’s a practical wisdom in that advice. The biggest cities have the most competition and the most gatekeepers. Smaller markets give you reps, and reps build the portfolio that eventually gets you into the room you actually want to be in.
Simmy Kustanowitz, who left a VP role at truTV to start his own company, described what that persistence looks like day to day: “It is a nonstop, never-ending hustle. You need to be willing to ask everyone in your life for favors and introductions, and then have the self-awareness to know when to be persistent and when to drop it.” That last part is key. Persistence without awareness becomes annoyance. The best hustlers know the difference.
And Schreiber, reflecting on the years he spent building Pitchfork before it became a cultural force, offered the simplest version of the same idea: “The other thing I would say is to be willing to put in the work for a long period of time for just the love of it.” If the only reason you’re doing it is the payoff at the end, you probably won’t last long enough to get there.
On Doing the Actual Work
Ambition gets you in the building. The work is what keeps you there. The people we interviewed were almost universally unromantic about this part. None of them described a glamorous rise. They described years of grinding, learning on the job, and showing up consistently when it would have been easier to coast.
Laura Brown, who rose through the ranks at Harper’s Bazaar, kept it short: “You have to earn your stripes.” But she also emphasized that the right environment matters. “If you’re good at something and you have an ability, you’re allowed to do it here. You’re not put in a box at all.” Those two ideas go together. You have to put in the time, but you also have to be somewhere that rewards the time you put in. A workplace that boxes people in will burn out even the most talented people eventually.
Bevy Smith, host of Bravo’s Fashion Queens, offered a clean summary of what separates the people who last from the ones who don’t: “What I learned is if you do good work and stay above the fray, you’ll be successful.” It’s easy to get pulled into office politics, industry gossip, and the social dynamics that surround any creative workplace. Smith’s advice is to let the work speak for itself.
Levin described what “doing the work” looks like in practice at TMZ: “I don’t have a lot of down time. I get up at three in the morning and I go to the gym at four. I get to the office by six. I go home at seven and go to bed at nine.” Not glamorous. Effective. You don’t have to copy his schedule, but the underlying point is that the people running successful media operations are putting in hours that most outsiders never see.
Ryssdal framed it as a simple decision: “You have to do whatever makes you happy. You have to be willing to do whatever it takes.” That sounds like a contradiction until you’ve lived it. Loving the work and being exhausted by the work aren’t mutually exclusive. In media, they’re usually the same thing.
On Building a Career That Lasts
Breaking in and working hard are necessary, but they’re not sufficient. The people who built lasting careers in media were also strategic about how they grew. They thought about which skills to develop, which opportunities to take, and which ones to walk away from. Longevity in this industry requires intention.
Peter Kain, creative director at BBDO and one of the minds behind the Snickers “You’re not you when you’re hungry” campaign, gave one of the most tactical pieces of advice in our archive: “The best creatives have skills that go beyond their traditional roles. They can develop insights like a planner, understand and relate to clients as good as an account director, and figure out how to get things done like a producer. If you can start to develop those skills, you will increase your chances of surviving and succeeding.” In other words, the people who become indispensable are the ones who understand the whole machine, not just their corner of it. If you’re a writer who understands analytics, or a designer who can talk to clients, you’re harder to replace.
Simmy Kustanowitz, who went from showrunning Impractical Jokers to running corporate campaigns for Fortune 500 companies, framed it as an investment strategy: “Someone once told me to think of my career not as a ladder, but as a portfolio, and a good portfolio is diversified.” That reframe is useful for anyone in media right now. The industry changes fast, and the people who weather those changes tend to be the ones with skills that transfer across roles, companies, and even industries.
Marvet Britto, president and CEO of The Britto Agency, emphasized the discipline of saying no. “It’s not what you say yes to, it’s what you say no to that builds equity.” She also reframed one of the media industry’s most overused buzzwords: “I actually call networking ‘not working.’ You have to be a great communicator. You have to communicate people’s needs and aspirations.” The distinction matters. Collecting business cards at events is networking. Understanding what someone actually needs and figuring out how to help them get it is communication. One of those builds a career. The other fills up a drawer.
Soledad O’Brien, journalist and CEO of Starfish Media Group, talked about seeing the long game. “You have to see things as opportunities all the time.” O’Brien has reinvented her career multiple times, moving from network television to independent production to running her own media company. That kind of adaptability doesn’t happen by accident. It comes from treating every experience, even the disappointing ones, as raw material for whatever comes next.
Marcy Bloom, Senior Vice President and Group Publisher of Modern Luxury, shared the leadership lesson that stuck with her: “Hire people that are smarter than you and do things that you don’t, and then let them do their thing.” That’s advice for people who’ve already climbed a few rungs, but it’s worth hearing early. The instinct to control everything is strong, especially in creative industries where your taste and judgment feel personal. The leaders who scale are the ones who learn to trust other people’s judgment alongside their own.
On Staying Honest in Your Creative Work
Media careers are built on creative output, and the people who’ve sustained theirs over decades all came back to the same principle: do the work that’s honest to you. In an industry full of trends, algorithms, and pressure to produce what’s already performing, that’s harder than it sounds.
Cecily von Ziegesar, creator of Gossip Girl, gave advice that applies to anyone producing creative work under pressure: “The best thing to do is write a book thinking no one’s going to read it.” The freedom of writing without an audience in mind, she suggested, is what produces work that actually connects with one. That’s a paradox worth understanding. The more you try to engineer something for mass appeal, the more generic it tends to become. The projects that break through are usually the ones where the creator followed their own instinct and got lucky that other people felt the same way.
Michael Hirst, creator of The Tudors and Vikings, was blunter: “Nothing could be dumber than writing a film or TV script based on prescriptions, on other peoples’ ideas of what character should be.” Hirst wrote historical dramas that took real liberties with their source material, and they worked because he committed to his own vision of those stories. Trying to write by committee, or by what focus groups say they want, produces work that satisfies no one.
Brendan Deneen, executive editor at Macmillan Entertainment, echoed the same idea: “You have to be true to what you believe as an artist.” That’s advice that sounds obvious until you’re in a room where someone with more authority is telling you to change the thing that makes your work yours. Holding your ground in those moments is what defines a creative career over the long term.
And Hughes, reflecting on decades in broadcasting, resisted the label that success often brings. “I’m not a mogul. I hate that title because I’m still very much a work in progress.” After founding two media companies, she still saw herself as someone who was figuring it out. That kind of humility is rare at the top of any industry, and it’s probably part of why she got there.
On Handling Setbacks
Everyone we interviewed had stories about getting knocked down. The ones who built careers had a way of getting back up quickly. What’s interesting is that none of them pretended the setbacks didn’t hurt. They just had systems for moving past them.
Soledad O’Brien’s rule was the most memorable: “You get to complain for 24 hours and then let’s go.” There’s a generosity in that framing. She’s not saying don’t feel it. She’s saying feel it, and then move. Twenty-four hours is enough time to be angry or sad or frustrated, and it’s not enough time to let those feelings calcify into something that holds you back.
Minor, who pivoted from law to land at the top of a Conde Nast masthead, showed that the unconventional path is sometimes the right one. “I left law because I was not passionate about it. I realized the part of law that I liked was working with these small creative media companies.” Her setback, choosing the wrong career, turned out to be the thing that clarified what she actually wanted. That’s a pattern you see again and again in these interviews. The detours end up being the most important part of the route.
And Hocking, after nine years of rejection, offered the reminder that effort and output aren’t always visible to the outside world. “I think that a lot of people are missing that, because I think they see self-publishing as, ‘Well, you could just click and upload it, and then that’s it.’ There’s a lot of time, energy and your heart that you put into it.” The same applies to every media career. People see the byline, the on-air appearance, the published book. They don’t see the years of invisible work that made those things possible.
The common thread across all of these quotes isn’t talent or luck or timing. It’s showing up, doing the work even when no one is watching, and refusing to let a closed door be the end of the conversation. Media careers don’t follow a script. But the people who build them tend to follow the same principles. And the good news is that those principles are available to anyone willing to act on them.
These interviews are part of Mediabistro’s archive of conversations with media professionals across publishing, television, advertising, and digital media. Read more interviews here, or browse open media jobs on our job board.
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Advice From the Pros
