Senior Reporter, Author, and Change Maker. For nearly 18 years Julia Boorstin has graced the airwaves of CNBC covering media and technology. But she’s innovated so much more including the outlet’s annual ‘Disruptor’ list and their new ‘Changemakers’ list.
“I just love being able to be entrepreneurial within this big organization.” Boorstin said over a Zoom call, adding, “The fact that I’ve been here for so long is really a testament to the fact that I’ve been able to create things and build things, and partner with my colleagues and feel like we’re building valuable things together.”
Straight out of college, Boorstin got her first gig as a reporter at Fortune Magazine. “I had a really great luck to work with great editors there who really trained me, on everything. Not just how to write a profile thousands of words long on a CEO, but also really how to read documents and balance sheets and dig into the numbers.”
She added, “I sort of think that I got a thorough business school boot camp of sorts, working with legendary editors, including Carol Loomis who is an amazing editor and role model.”
While at Fortune, Boorstin appeared as a contributor on CNN. She said of the time, “I was only 22 years old, and I thought it was kind of crazy to be on live television. But I didn’t get nervous. Because of my ability to be quick and fast on my feet, they asked me back to become a contributor. So I became a contributor to CNN and CNN Headline News.”
Joining CNBC in 2006, the Princeton graduate was a general assignment reporter before being given a choice of working a media beat or a retail beat. “I’d done various stories in both of those areas at the time and the media industry was really starting to transform.” Boorstin added, “We were seeing the rise of YouTube and Netflix as a force. We were also seeing the emergence of these powerful social platforms, like Facebook. So I said, ‘Media seems really interesting. There’s a lot of change and transformation. I really want to cover this beat.’”
In 2007, Boorstin moved to L.A. to focus on media.
With technology changing the media, Boorstin has also developed a passion for reporting on Artificial Intelligence. “In the past year and a half or so, since the launch of ChatGPT, I’ve been really focused on trying to report on how AI is going to impact and disrupt all of these different sectors.”
“I think the industry, the entertainment industry is going to be very careful, mostly because [AI] does threaten a lot of jobs and was the source of a lot of concern around the actors and writers strikes last year,” she later added. “So there are legal concerns, but there are also just structural concerns.”
One of those “structural concerns” is protecting intellectual property (IP). “How do we experiment with AI in a way that’s not going to expose our IP to these models? We don’t want our content being used by these models and then used by other people down the road. So there’s sort of the legal concerns of protecting IP and not violating their deals with the actors and writers,” Boorstin said.
Over the years, the veteran reporter has witnessed many evolutions in the media space. In turn, it transformed her reporting.
“After covering the Facebook IPO, I realized we needed a better structure at CNBC to talk about fast-moving, disruptive startups before they went public.”
She went on to say, “Around the time of the Facebook IPO, I proposed to my bosses that we should create a Disruptor 50 list. We should create a list of the 50 fastest-growing private companies and put it in the language that is relevant to our viewers and say, ‘Either these companies are going to be the next public giants, or they are already disrupting the current public giants.’”
This May will be the 12th annual Disruptor 50 list.
A new list debuting on CNBC this year is another Boorstin pitch: ‘Changemakers.’
“The idea of Changemakers is to talk about women who are transforming business. It’s an annual list. We just launched our first one. It’s 50 women. It is unranked because we are not interested in ranking women,” she shared.
“We just want to highlight their success stories. And these women vary across industries, but they also vary from women who you’ve heard of, like Taylor Swift and Naomi Osaka, to women who are maybe accomplishing things that you’re less familiar with.”
While Boorstin did not make her own list, she has made a huge impact on CNBC and the way media is covered. Her advice to those looking to follow in her footsteps is, “You don’t know what you’re going to like doing or what you’re good at unless you try it. The industry that I’m covering now didn’t even really exist 20 years ago. So I think it’s just important to be open to trying different things. I didn’t know that I would fall in love with business news, until I was a year or two in at Fortune Magazine.”
Boorstin went on to say, “I think looking back at all the women I interviewed for my book and the women ChangeMakers, but also the men I interview is that no one succeeds without a growth mindset. I really increasingly see a growth mindset is just the combination of confidence that you can keep on learning and changing. Whether it’s a personal scale of leadership or the actual like the content itself, that we all need to have that confidence that we can keep learning and changing and growing.”
She added, “Also the humility that we don’t already know everything, we’re not going to naturally be good and all the things. We need to not feel discouraged when, when stuff gets hard, but also just know what sort of part of the process.”
Krystina Alarcon Carroll is a news media columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. She has experience in almost every facet of the industry including: digital and print news; live, streamed, and syndicated TV; documentary and film productions. Her prior employers have included NY1 and Fox News Digital and the Law & Crime Network. You can find Krystina on X (formerly twitter) @KrystinaAlaCarr.
