Lisa Arledge Powell put a crib in her first office. It was an optimistic piece of business planning. Her son was a baby, the company was new, and she thought the two enterprises might coexist within convenient walking distance. The arrangement eventually taught her to work during naps. Video scripts acquired a certain urgency.
That is her own account of MediaSource’s beginnings, offered with the benefit of two decades’ distance. It gives the founder a more useful introduction than a row of trophies. Before there was an established agency, there was a woman trying to finish a script before somebody woke up.
She had wanted to be a television journalist since childhood. After college, she moved across the country for a reporting job and spent about eight years in television. A later move into national television brought celebrity interviews and a new level of professional intimidation. Her boss, Debbie Phillips, helped her see that she belonged there. In 2020, Powell said Phillips was still advising her, now as her business coach. Some working relationships survive a change of job description. This one survived the creation of an entire company.
A producer sees the missing piece
The business idea came into focus on a freelance assignment for Lane Bryant. Powell produced a video intended for television news. Another firm was responsible for securing coverage. When she looked at the results, she believed she could do better. Production and distribution belonged together. She began learning how video storytelling could work in public relations.
MediaSource opened in Columbus in September 1998. Powell brought the experience of a reporter, producer and anchor to a business that would combine making stories with getting them seen. The distinction mattered: a finished video sitting unseen is an expensive private screening.
She has described Sue Jablonski as an early believer. Powell had already worked with her as a freelance producer; Jablonski gave the new company its first client. That early vote of confidence is a reminder of how personal an institutional decision can be. Somebody has to trust the person before the company has much of a history. Powell would spend the following decades giving that decision a longer history.
- 1998Starts MediaSource in Columbus
- ~2013Sharpens the focus on brand journalism
- 2023Earns APR and the Tom Poling award
- 2026Ragan Agency Leaders honoree
The discipline of choosing a lane
By September 2014, Powell could describe a second beginning. MediaSource had committed to brand journalism roughly a year earlier. Before that focus, she said, the company lacked a defining trademark. Specialization gave people a clearer answer to a basic question: what should we hire you to do?
Her advice was practical. Run the company’s content operation like a newsroom. Give people reporting beats. Collaborate with traditional news outlets. Involve leadership in the editorial work. A company may have plenty to say, but a newsroom has to decide what deserves an audience.
There is a useful modesty in that approach. The first task is listening for material, rather than assuming every announcement merits applause. It also makes the reporter’s background relevant long after the reporter has become an executive. The habits travel: ask, notice, select, explain. Powell’s Ohio-to-Texas move in pursuit of television work had led to a business whose advantage depended on retaining those habits.
In a 2014 discussion of her methods, she asked why communicators should stop at a release when they could produce a story. Her recommendations included finding a real person through whom to tell it, speaking plainly, considering the audience’s interests and using visuals. Those are editorial choices with consequences. A useful human detail can give an abstract subject a point of entry. A technical phrase can close the door again.
The same advice included allowing the brand to occupy less of the frame. This requires restraint from the people paying for the work. Most organizations enjoy being the subject of a sentence. Powell’s approach asks them to consider whether the reader has a reason to finish it.
“Why write a press release when you can create the actual story?”
Lisa Arledge Powell · 2014
Make room for the reader
In 2015, Powell wrote about branding with less jargon. Her argument asked organizations to step back so that customers could come forward. Logos, slogans and company language could overwhelm the very information meant to attract an audience.
That argument helps explain the consistency of her career across different platforms. The surface changes from a broadcast segment to a website or a social post. The editorial difficulty remains familiar: deciding what to leave out. Clear communication often asks a company to surrender something it likes saying about itself.
Her writing that year also distinguished finding stories from telling them. She advocated embedding communicators in departments, working like beat reporters to discover relevant material. The camera comes after the reporting. That sequence is easy to reverse when a team is under pressure to publish. A polished production can arrive before anyone has established why it should exist. Powell’s prescription starts earlier, where the questions are less glamorous and more useful.
By 2019, she was urging communicators to carry strategy through goal setting, production and measurement. She also encouraged teams to consider longer video formats when the material justified them. Format was a decision to make in service of a story, rather than a quota to fill. Even a summer content plan, in her telling, needed a purpose beyond occupying the calendar.
The reporter is still waiting
A revealing example of Powell’s working philosophy appeared in 2024, in an article she wrote with Matthew Libassi. Its subject was the digital newsroom, and its villain was familiar: the download that requires a link, a registration, another link and a visit to the spam folder. Somewhere at the end of the process is a reporter who still needs a photograph.
Their advice put the recipient’s working day first. Make photographs, video and soundbites easy to obtain. Identify people and places clearly. Prepare material for the channels where it will appear. Think through the sequence of shots as a producer would. The apparent smallness of these details is exactly the point. A story can lose its opportunity at the moment somebody cannot open the file.
For a former television reporter, this is recognizable professional courtesy made into a communications method. Making the other person’s job easier creates room for the work itself. The glamorous pitch has to survive the unglamorous download.
A process with a toast at the end
MediaSource’s current storytelling method has four stages. It begins with goals and an audience, moves into creation, plans distribution and ends by measuring results. The agency gives the stages more festive names, finishing with “Toast Your Success.” Somebody has sensibly put the celebration after the measurement.
The sequence gives a creative business an operational spine. Who should see this? What are we making? How will it reach them? What happened afterward? Those questions connect the writer’s desk, the production team and the person responsible for the budget. They also supply an answer when a beautiful piece of work has reached the wrong people.
Powell’s own role extends into teaching. Her professional speaking work includes PRSA, Ragan and Content Marketing Institute events. She has led instruction on discovering, creating, amplifying and measuring stories. The curriculum follows the same practical progression as the agency’s work. Making something is one part of an assignment that begins with discovery and continues after publication.
- 01Dream bigGoals & audience
- 02Create your masterpieceShape & produce
- 03Command the spotlightDistribute & adapt
- 04Toast your successMeasure & learn
Recognition, with the team in the frame
In 2023, MediaSource received Women’s Business Enterprise certification from the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council. The designation formally recognized a company Powell had already been leading for almost 25 years. It also placed her in a wider network of women who own businesses.
That year brought an individual distinction as well. PRSA Central Ohio named her its Tom Poling Practitioner of the Year, an award recognizing service, leadership and contributions to the chapter. The professional body lists it as its highest honor for a practitioner. Powell also earned her Accreditation in Public Relations in 2023. After years of teaching other communicators, she added another credential to her own name.
In March 2026, she was recognized in Ragan’s Top Women in Communications Awards. The luncheon took place at City Winery in New York. Her response directed attention toward family, friends, clients and colleagues. “A leader is only as strong as their team,” she said. The line fits the picture of an agency founder whose product depends on other people’s judgment, reporting and craft. There is no solo version of a production team.
The next assignment
The agency’s May 2026 update offers a more concrete view of the business behind the honors. Nearly half its clients had been with MediaSource for more than a decade. It was producing close to 100 campaign videos annually. PRovoke Media included it in its 2026 list of 100 Best Agencies in the United States. Those are company measures, but they describe the organization Powell has spent her career building.
The same update points toward a newer assignment: helping earned media become discoverable in AI search. Distribution has acquired another destination. Her original problem, how to get a well-made story in front of people, keeps finding new technical complications.
of MediaSource clients had stayed for more than a decade, according to the agency’s May 2026 update.
Powell has also returned to the question of what kind of workplace should do that work. In December 2023, she wrote about closing the business between Christmas and New Year’s. In a 2026 post about the agency’s spring summit, she described a theme inspired by Ted Lasso: leadership, teamwork and believing in people. The reference suits someone willing to discuss both ambition and the practical conditions under which people can sustain it.
Her public account of becoming a CEO still begins with wanting to be a journalist. The continuity is persuasive. She changed the organization of her working life while keeping the work she wanted at its center. A company grew around that choice. The crib has become an anecdote; the assignment continues.