“The only measure of success in this crazy media entertainment podcast space is survival” – Sam Sanders, award winning host of The Sam Sanders Show.
As traditional media continues to shed jobs at a dizzying rate, and fears of AI absorbing jobs becomes a reality, the question of striking out on your own for media professionals becomes less of an if question, and more of a when.
This can be a hard lesson to learn, but for longtime NPR veteran Sam Sanders who created his own production company to launch The Sam Sanders Show in 2025 partnering with radio station KCRW, it’s been an incredibly beneficial one. Having just celebrated the show’s 100th episode, Sanders is living proof that taking complete ownership of your brand pays off.
For everyone looking for a roadmap to success just remember that there’s no shortcut to hard work. With that said, here are four essential lessons from Sam Sanders on how to navigate institutional collapse, find your unique value, and take complete ownership of your career
1. You can’t rely on a corporation to look out for you
The roadmap in media used to be that you got a job at a radio or tv station and you “would trust the powers that be to guide your career for you.” That’s what Sam Sanders did at NPR for over 12 years, transitioning from political producer and reporter to eventually creating and hosting the pop culture show It’s Been a Minute with them for five years. During his early hosting years, Sanders would hear from listeners that they didn’t know he was Black or gay and when he transitioned to pop culture reporting and started expressing himself more, he started to receive listener feedback that he should stay the way he used to be. In other words he was discovering that his success in a corporate environment depended to some extent on how he was perceived.
He left NPR and followed that up with another pop culture show with Vox called Into It before it was cancelled after about a year and a half. Looking back on those experiences, Sam came to realize that “it’s actually better if you’re in charge of yourself.”
2. Identify and Focus on Your “Competitive Advantage”
Striking out on your own can be terrifying and because of that there can be a tendency to want to copy marketplace trends and become something that you’re not. Sam’s show does video now and you know who’s dominant in the video podcast space Sam asks? It’s comedians because of their ability to make a funny clip go viral. He started to ask himself why he wasn’t as big as these other comedian shows, but then he realized that he wasn’t a comedian and he doesn’t have to be.
Me existing in that sea of content doesn’t mean that I need to be more like those people. It means that I have to figure out exactly who I am and what my value add is as an interviewer and do that. The thing that will help you stand out for the longest amount of time and be as successful as you possibly can while doing the thing is finding something to do that you are better at than most people.The gimmick doesn’t matter. My personal story actually doesn’t matter that much. The set doesn’t matter. The look doesn’t matter. The only skill that I’ve realized that is actually marketable across all of these changes in media, and the only skill I have is the goodness of the questions I ask.
3. Learn to Embrace Change
Sam had spent nearly his entire career as a host doing an audio only show so when he realized he needed to pivot to video it wasn’t easy. “For the first four to six months I was fighting a panic attack every time the camera came on,” Sam explains. He was used to having deep conversations about dreams and desires and making art and so doing audio only interviews he was never sitting still. “I was stretching, I was playing with the dog and physically in motion because no one could see me.”
But everything changes in person and on camera. “You have to sit still. The camera doesn’t like fidgeting so I had to think about how my body exists in a room for a camera and I had to ditch the script.” Like a lot of interviewers he wrote out his own questions in advance and he would figure out during the course of the interview which ones he wanted to get to, but that all changes when there’s a person looking right at you. A friend of his told him, “You write the script with everything you wanna ask, and then when it’s time for the interview, you put the script away because if you’re meant to ask the question, you’ll remember it.”
And that change terrified him, and he’s so grateful he got where he is now but it took some time. “Now when you watch me,” he says, “we’re just cutting up, having a kiki. Margaret Cho brought her service dog in (for a recent episode), a seven or eight-year-old chihuahua named Lucia, and the whole interview basically I’m holding Lucia. The script is nowhere to be found.”
4. Change Your Definition of Success to Survival
Comparison is the thief of joy and for creators, just like anyone else, it’s easy to get caught up looking at who has the most downloads and who won what award. Sure, it feels good to be validated, but the ultimate measure of success is if you are able to continue to make the thing that you want to make.
Awards are like STDs. If you do it long enough and with enough people, you’re bound to get at least one. But I am always grateful for the acknowledgement. I think now what I tell people is that the only measure of success in this crazy media entertainment podcast space is survival..we’re in this moment where everything exists in the infinite scroll, so we compare our path to everybody else’s path.
And ultimately in order to get there you have to be yourself. This was encapsulated for Sam from listener feedback online following an episode about a man whom Sam calls “maybe the most senior high-ranking Black queer man in fashion,” famous Vogue editor Andre Leon Talley. The listener told him, “This seems a little too Black and too gay for me”.
This crystalized for Sam that he could never fully be himself while working for someone else. “So just be you,” Sam says. I think the last several years have been me walking towards the fullest expression of myself while understanding I’m part of the story, but I’m not the story. I’m still here to have good conversations of substance about the way entertainment and the arts shapes our world. But yeah, in general, to sum it up, the entire thrust of my career for the last several years has just been, if at all possible, gayer, Blacker.” If I’m being me, there’s no rush to get anywhere else….I’m being me, and Lord willing, I’ll be able to keep having those kind of conversations for a very long time.”
The lesson here for modern media professionals navigating an unpredictable landscape is that the truest road to success is found in defining your own terms and that includes finding out what works and what doesn’t. You can’t be anyone else, so you might as well be you.