The Scoop
The prolific Bloomberg tech journalist Ashlee Vance has left to start a new media company around his curious, generally optimistic inquiries into technology and science.
The startup, called Core Memory, has the unusual ambition of producing high-end documentaries along with the typical “digital” products: a YouTube show, a podcast, and a Substack newsletter. That range matches Vance’s own career, which spans feature writing, hosting Bloomberg’s globetrotting show Hello World, writing a bestselling 2015 biography of Elon Musk, and independently producing documentaries, most recently Don’t Die on Netflix. Vance, 47, also has a book in the works on OpenAI, for which he said he’s already sold the movie rights.
“I’m convinced there’s a way to live in both worlds and do it successfully,” Vance said of documentary film and digital journalism.
Core Memory will be futuristic, focusing on emerging technologies and science. Its first documentary, which Vance is directing and has begun production on, is on brain-computer interfaces, Vance said. He’ll also produce two annual seasons of a talk show on YouTube, the first on brain science, and a second YouTube show about manufacturing in all its “gory, beautiful detail,” he said.
Vance’s 14 years at Bloomberg (plus a stint at The New York Times) turned him into a favored reporter for tech visionaries with big dreams. Hello World took viewers from Texas to Nigeria to Kyrgyzstan to chase stories covering topics from lab-grown meat to robots to AI. (Core Memory’s YouTube show, he said, would not have a similar travel budget.) He’s also largely stayed out of the decade’s ideological battle between Silicon Valley’s elite and the journalists who cover them.
“A lot of what I read in the mainstream media on tech feels like activism to me, and people who are very slanted in their point of view,” he said.
Ben’s view
Vance’s move is another mark of the accelerating convergence between legacy and new media, and low- and high-production video in particular — one accelerated by a new wave of digital tools that have lowered the cost of producing high-quality video.
It’s also part of the running tug-of-war between media companies and their journalists over intellectual property — that is, who controls the movies or TV shows that can come from news articles. Publishers have spent a decade tightening their control of the content that is, as they see it, generated by their employees on their time. And so the writers who can see a path to making films and television shows on their own, with the creative control and money that come along with that, have more reason than ever to jump ship.
Many of Vance’s peers will be eying Core Memory with interest. His model won’t be easy to replicate, though, in part because of his own bona fides on the beat he’s spent his career developing. And stories about futuristic technology and the people developing it have always been attractive to the screen — perhaps now more than ever, as gun-shy producers avoid anything with a hint of politics.