The Changing Media Landscape
Tina Brown & Tom Freston
moderated by Ken Auletta
Monday, July 13, 7-8:30pm ET at Guild Hall
Presented by Guild Hall & The Common Good
Series programmed by Ellen Chesler and Patricia Duff
The media landscape has been reshaped drastically over the past three decades. Newspapers and magazines shuttered; three broadcast networks gave way to cable television and then fragmented further into a world of digital platforms, streaming, and artificial intelligence.
Join media legends Tina Brown, the influential editor behind Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and founder of The Daily Beast, and Tom Freston, co-founder of MTV, former CEO of Viacom, and author of the 2025 book Unplugged — two media icons who helped drive that transformation, for a sharp conversation on how we got here, what broke along the way, and where journalism, entertainment, and public trust go next.
Moderated by Ken Auletta, longtime New Yorker writer and one of the country’s most trusted media observers.
About Our Speakers
Ken Auletta launched the Annals of Communications column for The New Yorker magazine in 1992. He is the author of thirteen books, including five national bestsellers—Three blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way; Greed and Glory On Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman; The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Super Highway; World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies; and Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It. His twelfth book, Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (And Everything Else), was published in June 2018. His thirteenth book, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, was published in July 2022.
Ken is currently reporting a documentary on Murdoch with acclaimed director Matt Tyrnauer, and is also writing about The Murdoch Puzzle anti-poverty advocacy organization focusing on Africa.
Tina Brown is an award-winning journalist, editor and author. Between 1979 and 2001, she was editor-in-chief of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Talk. For her services to journalism, she was awarded the honor of Commander of the Order of the British Empire by H.M. Queen Elizabeth in 2000. She was inducted into the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in 2007.
In 2008, Brown launched and edited the digital news site The Daily Beast which won the news website of the year award in 2012 and 2013. She founded Women in the World in 2009 as a live journalism platform for female leaders, CEO’s, celebrities, and global activists and hosted ten sold-out summits at New York’s Lincoln Center from 2010 to 2020.
Tom Freston is a cofounder of MTV and the former CEO of Viacom, where he oversaw Paramount Pictures. After launching a successful clothing export company out of Afghanistan and India, Freston transitioned into the media landscape, helping found MTV and bringing it to international fame in more than 150 countries. Before his Viacom roles, he ran MTV Networks for seventeen years, overseeing Nickelodeon, VH1, Comedy Central, and other legendary networks.
He is a board member of Imagine Entertainment and a board member emeritus of both the American Museum of Natural History and the think tank New America. He currently serves as Board Chair of The ONE Campaign, an anti-poverty advocacy organization focusing on Africa.