Jacob Soboroff says he was doing creator media before creator media became cool.
In some views, the 43-year-old MS NOW correspondent has finally made it. After years of doing what can sometimes be intense in-the-field coverage of the treatment of people crossing the southern U.S. border or the wildfires that ravaged the Los Angeles region, the journalist will anchor his own three-hour program, “Connect,” starting this weekend between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.
Yet Soboroff has been narrating his journey, story by story, via a host of platforms for years, some of them decidedly non-traditional. And MS NOW is likely counting on that experience to help court viewers to his new program. In years past, Soboroff worked on a show called “YouTube Nation,” and logged time as a contributor to MTV News and HuffPost Live. He got his start doing videos he hoped would go viral, in an era when a lot of people thought that phrase meant someone was feeling under the weather.
“I think that that spirit is ingrained within me. I was born from that culture,” Soboroff says of the dozens of video podcasts and newsletters that are being launched these days. In a different time, Soboroff took note of how a young Anderson Cooper got experience at a start-up called Channel One, then made his way to ABC and CNN. “That was sort of a model for me,” says Soboroff during a recent interview. “It just showed me that by doing things on your own somebody might see it — and that’s exactly what happened to me.”
