Hosted by Joseph Itaya & Anika Jackson
92 episodes listed below
Practical conversations for changing digital media work.
MEDIASCAPE pairs long-form guest conversations with practical questions about how media, marketing, design, and communication are changing. Its episodes favor guests who can connect new tools to real workflows, career choices, and business constraints.
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MEDIASCAPE is a guest-led business and media series focused on the people adapting to a fast-changing digital landscape. Its center of gravity is practical change. The show spends time with guests who are close enough to the work to explain where the friction really lives. Episodes are conversational and measured, often opening with an origin story before moving into strategy, tools, and market behavior. AI is a recurring subject, but the show treats it as part of daily media work rather than a distant abstraction. In one travel-focused conversation, Diani and Eni describe Travel Spoken as a social AI platform that could turn natural-language preferences into smarter itineraries. The discussion stays grounded in user behavior, influencer outreach, target cities, waitlist interest, and the problem of wasted trip time. In the SEO episode, Stephen Schneider talks through how search has moved away from listicle-style thinking toward lead generation, client fit, experiments, pricing, and more specific strategy. The show is comfortable with those operational details. It also asks media professionals to think carefully about process. Pete Paschal’s AI conversation looks at disclosure levels, editor oversight, publication mistakes, and the practical temptation to let AI take on more work once it proves useful. Nick Cawthon’s design episode brings the same careful lens to interfaces, automation, agents, and the need for human direction when tools expand what organizations can do. Podcast monetization is treated bluntly, with Jeffrey Spector describing a model that works poorly for most shows unless they are already large. Rob Durant’s sales and branding conversation connects professional identity, training gaps, and the reputational baggage around sales work. Across these episodes, MEDIASCAPE favors context over punchlines. The questions are expansive, and the answers are allowed to develop. It is best for listeners who want thoughtful, current conversations about media careers, digital strategy, and the business realities behind new tools.
Made for: MEDIASCAPE is for media, marketing, communications, design, sales, and entrepreneurship professionals who want context around changing digital tools. It also suits students and early-career operators looking for grounded examples from working practitioners.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by connecting big digital shifts to specific work problems: client selection, AI disclosure, itinerary building, design judgment, sales training, and podcast revenue. Its measured interview style gives guests enough space to explain process, not just promote outcomes.
Join hosts Joseph Itaya and Anika Jackson as they dive into conversations with leaders and changemakers shaping the future of digital media. Each episode explores the frontier of multimedia, artificial intelligence, marketing, branding, and communication, spotlighting how emerging digital trends and technologies are transforming industries across the globe.MEDIASCAPE is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. This online master’s program is designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical…
Based on 4 episodes we listened to · September 2026
MEDIASCAPE turns conversations about emerging technology into practical questions about building products, serving clients, and managing digital work.
MEDIASCAPE follows digital products from the idea stage into the decisions that make them workable. In interviews led by Anika Jackson, guests reason through AI-assisted publishing, product design, SEO services, and a travel platform built around natural-language planning.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A travel-planning AI pitch with practical workflow detail and a concrete launch plan.
The episode lands because it starts from a familiar travel-planning problem: turning loose inspiration into a workable itinerary can mean juggling timing, weather, hotel distance, and transportation by hand.
SEO faces a rougher, more judgment-heavy market as AI blurs the easy stuff.
SEO is the topic, and the discussion keeps coming back to how much tougher the work has become as Google and generative AI reshape the field. Stephen Schneider of Trio SEO contrasts the early days, when Google was still figuring out what quality content meant, with a later stage…
A grounded look at how media teams can use AI without losing human review.
This episode takes a practical look at how AI is reshaping media work, with attention to journalism, PR, and comms teams that want to move ahead without letting judgment slip out of view.
A grounded look at how design judgment and human goals can stay intact as AI speeds up the work.
This episode treats design as a practical way to reach the right people at the right time, not as surface polish. The discussion with Nick Cawthon moves from his early pull toward visual arts and arts education into AI, education, and the harder question of how new tools can be…
Rob Walling on bootstrapped SaaS growth, plateaus, and exits — with founders who lived them.
Abbey Ashley's playbook for turning your job skills into a virtual assistant business.
SaaS operators on scaling, pricing and AI, metrics included.
Alex Blumberg interviews guests like Megan Phelps-Roper and Shane McAnally about failure and reinvention.
Travel planning still eats up time, especially when transportation is the messy part.
Stephen Schneider joins Mediascape to talk about how SEO has changed.
Pete Paschal joins Mediascape to talk about AI in media.
Mediascape opens with a conversation about why design still matters when AI changes how people find and use information.
Andy Citizen of Share More Stories describes moving from psychology, programming, cloud deployments, and data management into AI work beginning around 2016 or 2017.
This episode features a conversation with Jeffrey Specter about the challenges and broken business models in podcast monetization, drawing from his radio background and insights into the industry.
Hosts interview Rob Durant about his organization, the Institute for Sales Professionals, which aims to elevate the sales profession through training and professional development.