Leading Through Disruption: Lessons from the Revenue Room™ Salon

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AI is both a disruption and an accelerant — a force that will redefine how journalism, storytelling, and trust intersect.

Heather Holst-Knudsen

Leading Through Disruption: Lessons from the Revenue Room™ Salon

At our inaugural Revenue Room™ Salon, we gathered three CEOs who are reshaping the media landscape: Barbara Peng, CEO of Business Insider; Sarah Personette, CEO of Puck; and Samantha Skey, CEO of SHE Media. What followed was not a panel about headlines or hype — it was an unguarded conversation about how leadership must evolve in an era defined by volatility, technology shifts, and trust at risk.

The New Demands of Leadership

I opened the discussion by acknowledging what most leaders feel but rarely say aloud: this wave of change feels different. The pressure is not only strategic but deeply operational — retraining teams, rethinking models, and maintaining momentum amid uncertainty.

Sarah Personette reframed the conversation around what she called VUCA leadership — volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity — a concept borrowed from the U.S. War College that has guided her through waves of digital disruption. For her, resilience is now table stakes; the differentiator is how leaders think.

Her advice: return to first principles. “Take every problem down to its core and rebuild it from scratch,” she said. In her view, technology isn’t the threat — complacency is. Leaders must model lifelong learning, not delegate it. “If you’re not the master of your own education,” she warned, “your team won’t be either.”

Holding Steady While the Ground Moves

Barbara Peng described the role of the CEO today as being “the steady and the rock” in an environment where nearly everything — business models, audience behavior, client needs — is in motion. Her message was both pragmatic and human: when change accelerates, clarity becomes a form of care.

She spoke about repeating the vision so teams have a horizon to steer toward, even as the ground shifts. “When Google rolls out AI overviews and everything feels upended,” she told the audience, “you remind your team: we’re still headed in that direction.”

Her other lesson was equally important: create space for risk. “If things don’t go sideways sometimes, I’m a little shocked,” she said — a reminder that experimentation is not just tolerated but necessary for survival.

Integrity as a Business Model

Samantha Skey brought the conversation back to purpose. For her, leadership begins with remembering why we do the work. “Media’s job — to provide meaningful, verified content — has never been harder,” she said.

She described the delicate balance between creative integrity and commercial pressure, especially in an era when algorithms reward outrage over accuracy. “Once you’ve had hands on revenue, it changes your voice in the room,” she said. “But if you lose sight of the integrity of your product — the why — the math of media can tempt you to cut quality. Don’t.”

Her shorthand for decision-making is “DIA: Data, Insight, Action.” Data on its own isn’t wisdom. The real value is in how teams interpret it — and what they choose to do next.

Reinvention as Routine

Across the conversation, one theme emerged clearly: reinvention is no longer episodic. It’s continuous.

Barbara shared how Business Insider made the bold decision to exit a profitable commerce line — highly dependent on search traffic — to double down on subscriptions, video, and live events. These moves were designed not just for short-term performance but for long-term sustainability.

Sarah echoed that sentiment. At Puck, she sees the advantage of being small and nimble — able to experiment with new revenue lines and technology-enabled workflows years faster than legacy organizations.

And Samantha spoke about investing in curation and community rather than scale for its own sake. Her latest initiative, Flowspace, focuses on women’s health over forty — an underserved area that merges editorial integrity with commercial innovation.

A Common Thread

All three leaders agreed that AI is both a disruption and an accelerant — a force that will redefine how journalism, storytelling, and trust intersect. But none viewed it fatalistically. The challenge, they agreed, is to push through the discomfort and lead teams through it with courage and clarity.

As Barbara put it, “To be bold doesn’t mean to be fearless. It means you have the butterflies — and you do it anyway.”

Closing Reflection

What struck me most during this discussion was not the talk of technology or monetization, but the shared humility. Each of these CEOs acknowledged that leadership today requires as much self-reinvention as business reinvention.

In the Revenue Room™ community, that’s exactly the conversation we’re here to advance: building organizations — and leaders — that balance growth with integrity, agility with steadiness, and innovation with purpose.

Because in the end, transformation is not just about surviving disruption. It’s about defining what endures.

Leading Through Disruption: Lessons from the Revenue Room™ Salon

AI is both a disruption and an accelerant — a force that will redefine how journalism, storytelling, and trust intersect.

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