Whether your news feed is primarily filled with Hollywood entertainment stories or political updates out of D.C., modern social media would suggest the overlap between the two verticals is more prominent than ever before.
That’s the core concept behind Another New Day Media, the talent-first venture studio founded by Christian Tom, Aisha Shah and Landon Morgado. Together, the trio is using their expertise from the worlds of technology and public policy to support content creators who share their values following years of work in the White House under the Biden administration.
After launching the company in 2025, AND Media already boasts a recognizable client list that includes Hunter Prosper (“Stories From a Stranger”), A.J. Daulerio (“The Small Bow Podcast”), Meredith Lynch, Rebecca Sananès (“The Moment Live”), Matt Buechele and “Subway Takes” star Kareem Rahma (who has since been signed to UTA in the brief period between this initial interview and publication).
Read TheWrap’s full conversation with Tom, Shah and Morgado, slightly edited for brevity and clarity, below:
TheWrap: How did you find yourself in the world of media?
Christian Tom: I got my start in media on the platform side. I worked at YouTube when it was a somewhat new part of Google, and I then spent four years at Twitter, many eons and many Elons ago. I ended up working on the publishing side when I ran the revenue team for Now This and The Dodo, two media brands inside of a holding company called Group Nine Media — they’re now owned largely by Vox Media, but given that this is the media business in 2026, Vox Media has subsequently been split and sold. Anyway, that’s my world up until 2020; publishing and platforms and always working on the revenue and advertising side. Only in 2020 until last year did I have the chance to work in public service, where Aisha and Landon and I met.
AND Media is the perfect culmination of the work I did in private sector, the work that I shared in public service and the idea that creators and digital communities can drive engagement in ways that traditional media cannot. The goal has always been meeting audiences, younger audiences especially, where they consume information and how they consume information.
Landon Morgado: I also came from the platform side. I worked in entertainment for a while, I started as an assistant at CAA back in the day, as all entertainment folk do at some point. Then I worked on the partnerships team at Instagram for seven years, working with creators and celebrities, teaching them how to use the Square photo app at the time. I sort of realized how important creators and influencers were becoming to the ecosystem of media, and seeing how they were becoming trusted communicators and messengers for not only themselves and their own brands, but some of the largest Fortune 500 brands around the world.
Then I met these guys during Covid at the White House, where we built a partnerships team focused on this type of work and podcasts and creators with strong communities who wanted to get involved in public service and engage creators within The White House. I then went on to build an advocacy team at TikTok, focused on helping top creators also use their platform for good; to be meaningful content on the platform. As Christian said, AND Media sort of rounds out all of our experiences meshing the political world with culture and media.
Aisha Shah: My background melds social impact and media. I worked for an executive at a PR firm that was building a project for the Aspen Institute that helped teach non-profits and social impact organizations how to leverage pop culture for social change. I got to work with a lot of organizations that were mission-oriented and wanted to see the things that they really cared about showing up in media. Then from there I worked in the arts and culture space across the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian, which was adjacent to a lot of the media that was coming through and coming out.
After I met Christian and Landon on the campaign, I actually sort of dipped back into that skill set of being able to bridge the world of social impact and media by going to build a creator program at GoFundMe. GoFundMe raises millions and millions of dollars for a number of different causes and their comms team was very good at what they do, but very focused on getting stories out onto local media networks, which had worked for them really well and continues to do so, but they hadn’t necessarily leveraged the power that creators have in advocacy and in media. I was able to come in and help them build a team around ensuring that they were thinking about connecting with creators in the creator industry in the same way that they were thinking about connecting with traditional media and comms. So that is where we find ourselves here, at the intersection of all of those things in our lives.
TheWrap: How do you choose who you want to work with in the creator space?
CT: I think we have our pick of the litter, given how many incredible creators there are in the world. But we’re investing in folks with whom our values align and who want to make a meaningful difference in the world and have a strong POV. A lot of the creators, whether it be from past relationships or from working at Instagram or working at the White House with them, a lot of these folks we have worked with for a while now. It’s incredible to be able to invest in them in a meaningful way and help them build the next block in their career by investing in long-form content — a mixture of comedy and politics and culture. We are very aware that politics is downstream from culture, and we are trying to emphasize that with the creators we work with.
TheWrap: How did you land on the name AND Media?
CT: AND Media stands for Another Normal Day. The reason we chose it is because it’s a tongue-in-cheek nod to the reality that today’s media ecosystem is anything but normal and the entire industry is in flux. The name reflects the fact that there is this constant evolution happening in media and culture and that the way to be successful is to adapt alongside these audiences, how people are consuming content today, engaging with creators. It’s not another normal day in Hollywood, it is not another normal day in the media industry.
TheWrap: How are you embracing the changing entertainment landscape?
AS: People are sort of straddling the world of traditional media and the world of creators, coming into their different voices. Something that we used to see a lot is people would try to lump creators in with a general press pen, but we have seen that they are really different styles and types of storytelling; we should be able to build those spaces for those people. The reason we want to invest in creators is so that they don’t necessarily have to fit into another box where they might not necessarily see their vision coming to life — What is your perspective? What is your POV? How would you like to tell this story?
If you’re a news or politics creator, it could be similar to the way that a journalist would endeavor into it or similar to a documentary filmmaker or you could be coming into it as talent. That’s why we are really eager to speak to all different types of creators and meet them where they are, so that we’re able to build and grow the space instead of kind of make people fit into into boxes that might not be the best fit for them.
CT: We call ourselves a venture studio, and I think that kind of reflects that we’re trying to build something that hasn’t existed before. Almost like a venture capital mindset [with] the studio model. We are trying to borrow from both of those, and I think what drives it is the belief in long-form storytelling. We believe that it’s durable IP, we believe it’s consistent audience growth, it’s scalable monetization, and also we’ve seen how fragile short-form algorithm-driven success can be as well.
We are making bets on people, on creators, on personality-driven media brands, and I think there are a lot of people working in the creator space, broadly, who are really sharp, with a specific POV. We’re lucky to say, so far, it’s working.
TheWrap: What does the future hold for AND Media and the three of you?
CT: We have a great roster of shows now. We are going to be expanding that roster with the same philosophy of values-aligned creators reaching younger audiences, larger cultural conversations. That’s kind of the blueprint for our goal of keeping that commitment to backing creator-led IP and long-form storytelling that will exist across a number of genres: A really robust pipeline with sustainable scale that includes revenue opportunities and platform growth, driven by us putting trust in creators and their ideas.
