Media businesses tend to rise and fall along with macroeconomic trends, so people in our industry pay close attention to forecasts. Lately, however, those predictions haven’t had a great track record. During the early days of Covid, some pundits predicted an economic cataclysm on par with the Great Depression—a view that, fortunately, proved wildly inaccurate. When inflation soared in the aftermath of the pandemic, some models suggested that we would enter a long period of 1970s-style “stagflation”—another forecast we’ve been happy to see proved wrong.
A version of this article appeared in the July–August 2024 issue of Harvard Business Review.