Meet the CEOs Shaping Media

Because the media panorama continues to evolve, an modern crop of leisure trade professionals are utilizing their platforms to vary our relationship to how we eat leisure.

Stephen Shaw and Jonathan Linden, co-CEOs of Spherical Room Reside (RRL), and Isha Sesay, CEO of Areya Media, are main the way in which, connecting audiences to experiences that entertain, illuminate and educate in new methods with out sacrificing impactful storytelling.

Taking TV and tradition the place it’s by no means been 

What do a former lawyer, a Rolling Stones roadie and “Child Shark” have in frequent? So much, which you’ll know when you’ve ever attended an enviornment present or exhibition placed on by Stephen Shaw and Jonathan Linden, co-CEOs of Spherical Room Reside. 

After working collectively at reside leisure producer S2BN Leisure, the 2 mixed their years of experience to create a world all their very own. The tour and exhibition expertise for manufacturers just like the Rolling Stones, Oprah Winfrey and Marvel and Linden’s world licensing expertise and producer credentials for 2 of Barbra Streisand’s excursions and Rock of Ages on Broadway can be the proper recipe for fulfillment.  

Because of their big-picture considering, they’ve remodeled the reveals and songs kiddos see and listen to on TVs and tablets into participating reside spectacles. As stunning as it could appear, they turned the 18-word viral sensational track “Child Shark” right into a 75-minute present seen by greater than 300,000 households. Then, they proved that an on-stage reimagining of a TV present can rival the conventional manner we eat leisure by taking everybody’s bespectacled buddy in orange suspenders, Blippi, from behind a display to a full-on musical. 

The duo’s occasions aren’t only for children, nonetheless. Household-friendly choices like The Components 1 Exhibition enchantment to all ages, whereas these in the hunt for highly effective social justice and world advocacy installations can discover it in Mandela: The Official Exhibition, created in partnership with The Royal Home of Mandela. The exhibition, which excursions internationally, examines the legacy of the human rights icon with private results and objects not beforehand seen outdoors of South Africa. A previous exhibit, Tupac Shakur: Wake Me After I’m Free, used expertise and artifacts from Shakur’s private archives as a strategy to dive deeper into the activism, music and artwork he created.

Shaw says RRL’s strategy to reside occasions is rooted in storytelling, cultural expression and emotional connection. He factors to the Mandela and Shakur exhibitions as highly effective examples of how reside experiences can interact audiences in vital social points.  

“These exhibitions are designed not solely to rejoice cultural icons but additionally to light up the struggles, triumphs and legacies that formed them,” he shares. “By bringing these tales to life by immersive environments, archival content material and emotionally resonant narratives, we intention to foster reflection, dialogue and understanding…. It’s about creating areas the place individuals of all ages and backgrounds can come collectively to study, really feel and join with one thing bigger than themselves.” 

Given the sheer quantity of households who attend their occasions and exhibitions the world over, one would possibly surprise if the duo foresees a shift from screens as a fundamental supply of leisure to watching dwelling, respiration actors, singers, and dancers recreating one thing that’s one-dimensional. 

“Completely,” Shaw says, noting that they’ve seen a transparent cultural shift.  

“In an more and more digital world, there’s one thing uniquely highly effective about being in a bodily house, surrounded by different individuals, watching tales unfold in actual time,” he says, including that “individuals need to really feel one thing. They need to join—not simply with content material, however with one another, with historical past, with emotion and with the world round them. That’s what we try to ship.”

Bringing the African diaspora into the sunshine 

Connecting individuals with content material, one another and the world is one thing RRL has mastered with their reside occasions and exhibitions, however Isha Sesay is equally dedicated to doing related work by a distinct medium. 

In 2021, the previous CNN worldwide information anchor turned CEO of OkayMedia, now Areya Media (AM), a multimedia firm that amplifies voices throughout the worldwide Black and African neighborhood and is the mum or dad firm of Okayplayer and OkayAfrica, platforms recognized for his or her culturally pushed narratives.
 

Sesay’s ardour for creating impactful storytelling that advances underrepresented voices is a ability that earned the UK-born, Sierra Leone-raised journalist a prestigious Peabody Award a decade in the past for groundbreaking work—together with breaking the story of the 2014 Boko Haram kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok, Nigeria.

Since changing into CEO, Sesay has stewarded the evolution of Okayplayer with the Webby Award-winning podcast, The Almanac of Rap. Hosted by rapper and hip-hop knowledgeable Donwill, episodes are half dialog, half historical past lesson and half leisure—that includes influential artists, producers and people steeped within the wealthy historical past of hip-hop. Sesay considers it a sister providing to Okayplayer’s Afrobeats Intelligence podcast with Joey Akan, an award-winning journalist Sesay says has deep relationships within the music trade and with the largest stars in Afrobeats.

Sesay says AM’s mission is to “be sure that each nook of the world sees African expertise, sees our efforts, appreciates our voices and our tales.”

Although Sesay was born within the UK and now lives within the U.S., she lived in Sierra Leone between the ages of seven to 16 earlier than transferring again to London. It’s an expertise she says had a profound impact on her view of the world.

“For a big a part of my youth, teenage years and possibly even up till my early 30s, I don’t assume I totally appreciated… the blessing of getting moved round and existed in such totally different cultures and what these experiences have meant for me and the person who I’m as we speak,” she says. 

“I’m so grateful that every one three of these cultures are a part of my background, however particularly in order that I spent my youth in Sierra Leone in West Africa, which, for my total life… has been kind of within the backside tenth of the world’s poorest nations.” 

She factors out that Sierra Leone is “nonetheless battling forces of misogyny and nice gender inequities,” noting how this has formed her view on gender dynamics and the way she strikes by the world. “I refuse to be held again by those self same forces,” she says.

When Sesay joined OkayMedia, she intentionally modified the identify to Areya, which implies “sunshine” in Yoruba, one of many largest single languages in sub-Saharan Africa.

She says the corporate skilled some turmoil earlier than she joined, shrouding it in a little bit of darkness. To her, it was simply begging for a contemporary begin, and a reputation change was a strong manner of doing that.  

“After I got here to seek out out that [Areya] meant ‘sunshine,’ it felt so proper, given the place the corporate had been and the place I used to be attempting to take it,” she says. “Past that… I felt it spoke to a much bigger level of what we’re attempting to do round Black tradition and Black tales and voices and transfer us from the margins, from the shadows and the corners, to heart stage and to the sunshine.”

For Sesay, sunshine is synonymous with pleasure, one thing she feels is desperately wanted proper now. “We’d like a lot extra Black pleasure proper now as a result of issues are robust, issues are scary, issues really feel darkish. And so to have that as your mission, to fight that and to deliver gentle, that’s the work I need to be doing.”

Photograph courtesy of Isha Sesay