This is the second in a series of posts about Mediabistro’s return to being an independent company. The first, “Mediabistro Is Back,” covered the separation, the mission, and where we’re headed. This one gets into the specifics of what we’re actually building.
Fair warning: our latest newsletter covers what happens when a tech billionaire decides to collect Hollywood like Infinity Stones. We’re taking notes. Except our version of world domination involves better email alerts and a freelancer database, which is admittedly less cinematic but hopefully more useful to your career.
Also on Mediabistro
We have four major product priorities for the next few months, and I want to walk through each of them. Some of this is already underway. Some of it is early-stage. All of it is pointed at one goal: making Mediabistro the most useful platform in the world for people who work in media, content, and creative fields, and for the companies that hire them.
Storytellers need a home now more than ever.
1. More Content, More Voices
The foundation of any good professional community is content that actually helps the people in it. We’ve been investing in ramping this up for the last couple of months, and the results are showing up.
We’ve expanded the articles we publish on Mediabistro, covering everything from salary transparency and hiring trends to practical career advice for writers, editors, producers, and creative professionals. We started covering media industry news (and man, it can be messy!)
Also, our newsletter, which now reaches more than 70,000 subscribers on Substack, has been redesigned to deliver a truly unique voice every week: industry news, job picks, and the kind of insider perspective that media professionals can actually use.
But we’re just getting started. The next phase is about increasing both quantity and quality, and expanding who contributes.
We’re building out systems to support more user-generated content on the platform. If you’re a working journalist, a content strategist with a strong point of view, or a creative director who’s learned something the hard way, we want to hear from you. Mediabistro should be a place where media professionals share knowledge with each other, not just a place where we publish to them.
We’re also bringing back Showcase, a feature that longtime Mediabistro users will remember. Showcase was a space for creative professionals to share their work and get it in front of employers and peers. It’s a natural extension of what we’re doing with freelance profiles, and it gives talented people a way to be discovered on the platform based on what they’ve actually produced. More details on the relaunch soon, but it’s a priority.
The more useful, relevant content we produce and curate for media professionals, the stronger the community gets. And the stronger the community, the more valuable Mediabistro becomes for everyone, job seekers and employers alike.
2. AI-Powered Job Search and Email Alerts for Media Professionals
This one is big. And honestly, pretty complex.
If you’ve used Mediabistro’s job search and email alerts before, you know the basics work. But “the basics work” isn’t the standard we’re aiming for. We want every job seeker on Mediabistro to feel like the platform understands what they’re looking for and surfaces the right opportunities without making them dig.
We’re already incorporating AI into the core of how jobs enter the platform. The rebuilt system launched with intelligent features for employers, including automated job description drafting and a streamlined employer dashboard, with expanded capabilities for job seekers to follow. On the ingestion side, this means smarter processing of job listings so we can classify roles more accurately, tag them with richer metadata, and normalize the wild inconsistency of how employers title and describe the same types of positions.
A “Content Manager” at a streaming company and a “Brand Editor” at a DTC startup might be functionally a similar job. Our system should know that and surface both to a candidate whose background fits.
On the job seeker side, this means better search relevance and dramatically improved email alerts. Right now, alerts are keyword-based. It works okay, but it’s a blunt instrument. We’re working toward alerts that understand the intent behind what someone is looking for, factoring in their experience level, their past search behavior, the types of roles they’ve engaged with, and the specific media verticals they care about.
The goal is that when you get a Mediabistro job alert in your inbox, every listing in it feels relevant. Not “sort of close.” Relevant. That’s the experience we’re building toward, and AI is what makes it possible at scale.
3. Application Tracking and Candidate Matching Tools for Media Employers
We rebuilt Mediabistro’s platform from scratch last month, and now we’re using that foundation to build the features that make hiring here more complete. The primary focus: application tracking and automated candidate matching.
For employers, this means better tools for managing the candidates who apply to their listings. Right now, the workflow for most employers is: post a job, receive applications, sort through them manually (or export them into another system), and communicate with candidates off-platform. We want to close that loop. We’re building tools that let employers track applicants, organize their pipeline, and manage the process inside Mediabistro, so the platform doesn’t end at the job post.
On the matching side, we’re developing automated suggestions that surface candidates to employers based on role requirements and candidate profiles. If you post a senior editor role and there are three freelancers on Mediabistro whose work history and portfolio match perfectly, you should know about them, even if they haven’t applied yet. That kind of proactive matching is where hiring platforms create real value, and it’s where Mediabistro has a distinct advantage because our user base is already specialized.
For job seekers, this means your profile and work history do more for you. The better your Mediabistro profile, the more likely you are to be surfaced to employers who are hiring for roles that match your background. That’s a much more efficient model than applying cold and hoping for the best.
4. Playbook: Workflow Planning and Hiring Tools for Creative Teams
We recently launched Playbook on Mediabistro, and it’s a product I’m excited about. Playbook is a discovery and workflow tool that helps creative teams find the right software, platforms, and services for their work, and then map out how those tools fit together with people into total workflows.
Playbook currently tracks 435 tools across 28 categories, from editorial production and visual design to video, audio, marketing analytics, and content creation. It starts with your creative process. Describe your work in plain language – “produce a short documentary for a non-profit client” or “build a monthly content calendar with SEO and social distribution” – and Playbook’s Stack Advisor responds with a step-by-step workflow, mapping the right mix of human talent and software to each stage. It’s built specifically for media and creative workflows, not a generic SaaS comparison.
Here’s where it gets interesting. We’re now working on integrating Mediabistro’s hiring tools directly into Playbook. The idea is that as a company maps out its creative workflow, it can identify gaps that require talent, not just software. If your workflow reveals that you need someone to own video production or editorial strategy, Playbook should help you go from “we need this capability” to “here’s the right person to hire” without leaving the platform.
We’re also publishing the Media Innovation Index, powered by Playbook’s product discovery data. It scores automation exposure by creative category and updates as new tools enter the market. Right now, Image Generation sits at 85% automation exposure, Graphic Design at 75%, and CMS & Publishing at 50%. It’s a running read on where the creative technology landscape is heading.
This is the long-term vision for Mediabistro as a product: not just a job board, and certainly not just a tools directory, but an integrated platform where creative teams can plan their workflows, find their tools, and hire the people they need, all in one place. Playbook will be a connective tissue that should help make it possible.
The Common Thread
If you look at all four of these priorities together, there’s a clear throughline: make Mediabistro more useful to more people, more often. So that’s our evil plan.
Content brings people to the platform and keeps them engaged. AI-powered job matching makes the core job board experience dramatically better. New tracking and matching features make the platform stickier for employers. And Playbook extends Mediabistro’s value beyond the job search into the day-to-day work of running creative teams.
None of this happens overnight. We’re a small team doing ambitious work, and we’re building in the open. Some of these features will ship in the next few months. Others will take longer. But the direction is clear, and we’re moving fast.
And if you have ideas, feedback, or want to contribute content to the platform, reach out to us on X or Bluesky. We’re building this for the community, and we’d love to hear from you!
– Miles Jennings, CEO of Mediabistro
Feel free to ping me directly on X as well.
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