By Erica Cobb
When my present, Each day Blast Stay, was canceled final 12 months, I didn’t spend a number of time mourning the top of an period. I embraced the start of a skilled revolution. After greater than two a long time in mainstream media, on each tv and radio, I knew one factor for certain: my voice wasn’t going to vanish simply because my nationally syndicated present did. The truth is, I spotted it was time to amplify my expertise on my phrases.
The timing couldn’t have been extra poetic. Only one week after DBL ended, I began the Goldman Sachs One Million Black Girls: Black in Enterprise program powered by NYU Stern. Surrounded by highly effective, visionary Black ladies consultants and entrepreneurs, I used to be reminded that what I’d misplaced wasn’t an ending, it was a door opening. The program outfitted me not simply with the mindset but in addition with the technique to show my title, my platform, and my rules right into a sustainable enterprise. And now I’m doing simply that.
Like many media personalities navigating a quickly shifting panorama, I made the leap from legacy media to impartial possession. I launched ComebackTV Presents, a multifaceted manufacturing firm constructed on my core values: authenticity, group, care, and sure, resilience, too. As a result of comebacks aren’t nearly bouncing again. They’re about rising up, reimagined and unapologetic.
We’re in a media second in contrast to any we’ve seen earlier than. Journalists, hosts, and creators are leaving, or being pushed out of, legacy networks and forging new paths as impartial voices. Substack newsletters, self-funded podcasts, YouTube reveals, and Patreon-supported journalism ventures are all exploding. This isn’t only a profession pivot for people like myself, it’s a mass motion that displays a starvation for digital storytelling that facilities actual individuals.
That’s why ComebackTV Presents exists. It’s not only a manufacturing firm; we’re rooted in the concept we don’t want gatekeepers to be nice. ComebackTV Presents’ slate of authentic podcasts, together with By accident Knowledgeable with Claudia Jordan and myself, and Daytime Speak After Darkish, hosted with my former DBL co-hosts, is proof of it.
However ComebackTV Presents is not nearly content material creators. We’re helpful strategic companions for manufacturers and organizations, too. What makes our workforce distinctive is that we’re powered by nationwide TV veterans with expertise in daytime and unscripted. All of us labored collectively in a newsroom for seven years, which is particular. We all know tips on how to inform a narrative that lands, scales, and sticks. We are able to wrap a newsroom construction round any trade or enterprise.
Beginning my very own enterprise wasn’t straightforward. It meant studying new abilities, assembling a workforce of fellow trade professionals, and investing in a dream with no ensures. However what I’ve gained is one thing liberating: freedom. The liberty to platform essential voices. The liberty to deliver alternatives to different proficient, usually missed media professionals, and the freedom to have interaction with new audiences throughout sectors. Beginning CTP was a pure transfer after Each day Blast Stay ended, as a result of I was already producing a lot of my very own content material for podcasts and stay reveals. My podcast, Comeback: with Erica Cobb, was even nominated for an NAACP Picture Award.
We’re not simply coming into a brand new chapter in media; we’re constructing a brand new ebook solely. Plenty of the innovation and creativity is coming from these of us who’ve gone impartial. The ventures and platforms we construct now will develop into the levels for the subsequent technology. And so they gained’t be constructed on formulation. They’ll be constructed on freedom.
In daytime TV, I had a seat on the desk. Now, I’m constructing the home, and there’s room for everybody who’s prepared to come back again stronger, louder, and freer than ever.
Erica Cobb is CEO & founding father of ComebackTV Presents. She is a 25-year veteran nationwide TV and radio host who leveraged her media platforms within the content material creator and manufacturing area. Cobb sat on the Board of META’s Black Creator Program, “We the Tradition,” and was a member of the LinkedIn Creator Program. She was honored with a NAACP Picture Award Nomination in 2023 and is a cohort of the Fall 2024 Goldman Sachs One Million Black Girls: Black in Enterprise program with curriculum associate NYU.