Imagine a Venn diagram with three circles; content, design, and technology. Vern is positioned exactly where they intersect. He is a highly creative and entrepreneurial media executive, educator, and researcher possessing dynamic business skills forged in network television newsrooms and control rooms and continuously fine-tuned in digital. Vern is passionate about digital content creation, new ways of storytelling, and the super-talented people who drive media innovation forward. Vern’s academic research interests focus on niche streaming video services, the future of broadcast journalism, positive media psychology, and Gen Z media audiences. As the concept of a mass audience continues to collapse, demographic, sociocultural, and technological shifts are ensuring that the future is niche. The challenge for media organizations is to develop an editorial “voice” that is embraced as being truly authentic and use hyper-curation and brand experiences to “own” a specific genre or taste cluster with authority. The magic happens when casual viewers are converted and consolidated into an interactive, engaged, and loyal, “audience-community”. Vern is highly skilled in all aspects of media production, application development, content strategy, branding, real-time data integration/visualization and content delivery. He has led innovative broadcast and communications projects including national election broadcasts, virtual production-based projects, AR/VR, international summits, television channel and program launches, broadcast rebrands, and large place-based media installations. As a consultant, Vern blends extensive industry experience with his current academic research to create practical strategies that optimize and amplify niche streaming audiences to create untapped business opportunities for media organizations. Learn more at gracestreetmedia.com.