Who protects the fastest growing workforce?
Shira Lazar on why creators need more than a ring light and a brand deal.
“Very rarely do people ask us how are we doing?”
Shira Lazar, founder of What's Trending and Creators for Mental Health
This week on The Media Odyssey Podcast , we sit down with Shira Lazar, founder of What’s Trending and the person who has been covering internet culture since before anyone called it a culture. She started vlogging red carpets on a Nokia N95. Interviewed Norm McDonald on a phone during the 2007 writer strikes while studio executives asked her, “who’s hiring you to do this?” Now she runs a media brand distributed in movie theaters, gas stations, and soon, New York taxi cabs.
But this episode is not about her origin story. It is about what she uncovered when she started asking a simple question nobody else was asking: how are creators actually doing?
The answer led to Creators for Mental Health, a 50-page research study with 542 North American creators, and a new initiative with Congressman Ro Khanna called “The Creator Bill of Rights”. We get into the stats that should make platforms uncomfortable, the gap between influencer marketing budgets and what most creators actually earn and why checking your analytics more than once a day correlates with negative wellbeing.
Shira puts it plainly: “There’s 83,000 steel workers in the US but there’s 1.5 to 10 million creators, and you’re just letting us dilly dally and say it’s the wild west.”
We also talk about the Creator Map Evan Shapiro and Shira built together last year, what traditional agencies keep getting wrong when they launch creator divisions and why the land grab for influencer marketing dollars is producing some spectacular messes.
If you work with creators, hire creators or are one yourself, this conversation will reframe how you think about the economics and the human cost of the attention economy.
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Join us live tomorrow (at 4pm CET / 10am EST / 7am PST) on LinkedIn and YouTube for our 2nd earnings season breakdown. On the menu: Apple, Meta and Microsoft.
That’s it for today but before you go: