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Can Laurene Powell Jobs Save Storytelling?

Her firm is buying up one media property after another. This week it added Pop-Up Magazine Productions to its roster.

Laurene Powell JobsCredit...Mike Cohen for The New York Times

Contributing Opinion Writer

Just what is Laurene Powell Jobs up to?

Over the last few years, Ms. Powell Jobs, an activist, investor and entrepreneur, has been investing in media companies through her social impact firm, Emerson Collective. Buying up a range of unusual properties, she seems to be making an effort to turbocharge storytelling in this fractured digital age.

It’s an interesting experiment to watch, because the investments include a panoply of the cool, hip and fresh in a mostly glum content industry. On Tuesday, Emerson announced that it had bought Pop-Up Magazine Productions, which runs innovative and decidedly quirky “live magazine” events across the country and publishes The California Sunday Magazine. The magazine appears in print and online, and has made an award-winning splash in its short tenure. Ms. Powell Jobs’s firm last year quietly invested at least $10 million in Pop-Up, based in San Francisco, and is now taking full control of all of it.

Emerson — which gets its name from, yes, Ralph Waldo and has focused on education, immigration and the environment since it was formally created in 2011 — would not disclose the price it paid for Pop-Up. But it’s small compared to the many other investments its for-profit and nonprofit arms have made over the last two years.

That includes an undisclosed sum to pick up a majority chunk of The Atlantic magazine, along with funding to add 100 employees, including the New Yorker writer George Packer and a former Facebook executive, Alex Hardiman; starting a documentary production company, Concordia Studio, with the Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim; buying a large stake in the production, content and talent management powerhouse Anonymous Content, the maker of “Spotlight”; purchasing another in Macro, which finances media focusing on stories of people of color, like “Fences”; and making investments in the online magazine Ozy, the news site Axios and the podcast-making phenom Gimlet Media.

Emerson has also sprinkled money all over nonprofit journalism, including at ProPublica, Mother Jones, The Marshall Project, the Committee to Protect Journalists, StoryCorps, Lawfare, Texas Observer and Chalkbeat.

Most interesting, it has also been supporting dramatic art projects like “Carne y Arena (Virtually present, Physically Invisible),” a stunning virtual reality piece by the Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu that depicted the lives of refugees and also the border patrol agents who try to hold them back. I went to an installation in Washington to see it, and found myself plunged into both a chilly immigrant holding cell and a rocky border desert without shoes. A lightweight VR headset and backpack allowed me to move throughout the space, which included real-world touches like wind and heat. It was jarring and disturbing and made a deeper impression about the vicissitudes of immigration than any news story could ever provide.

Another project supported by Emerson used giant photographs of immigrants taken by the artist JR that were displayed in prominent spots across the country, including a giant baby peering over a wall at the border.

It’s a lot, and it seems to be accelerating. Ms. Powell Jobs has $20 billion from the stakes in Apple and Disney that she inherited from her husband, Steve Jobs. She also seems to have inherited his understanding that narrative moves people more than anything else.

I asked Peter Lattman, a former New York Times reporter and editor who is now the managing director of media at Emerson, what the firm’s goals are. “Broadly, we invest in and support super high-quality journalism,” he said. “We are looking at innovative approaches to media and storytelling.”

Pop-Up is that. Its shows are truly memorable — they have to be, because they are not taped and never survive except in the memories of the audience present. With a multimedia brew of photos, music, dance and even shadow puppets, the Pop-Up shows have attracted sellout crowds who like its quirky vibe. But it’s not all twee; the shows tackle a wide range of issues that often zero in on the impact of tech on society.

In one show I saw recently in Washington, a presenter named Jason Parham did a take on “thirst traps” on Instagram — photos meant to show off yourself looking good — that had the crowd in hysterics. In another, the speaker demonstrated how to use a DNA strand from an extinct Hawaiian hibiscus flower to revive its scent, and the crowd got to smell it via a small piece of paper in the programs, a synthetic process that can now be replicated over and over without the need of a plant. Smell-O-Vision for the 21st century, if you will.

The California Sunday Magazine is more serious, often breaking news, and using high-quality photos and graphics. The work has vaulted it to the finals of the National Magazine Awards this year, with its closest competitor being decades older.

Its editor in chief, Doug McGray, said that the company plans to use the new funds — it has raised $4 million in addition to the Emerson investment — to expand its Pop-Up business.

“I have always been inspired by the idea of making the most ambitious, inventive journalism we can,” Mr. McGray said. “And what we get here is to team up with an institution that already understands our value. It’s such a natural alignment.”

What will be interesting to watch going forward is how the various arms of the Emerson media machine will work together. Both Mr. McGray and Mr. Lattman said that would be a welcome development. Already, Gimlet’s podcast “Homecoming” went on to become the Amazon Prime show starring Julia Roberts, produced by Anonymous Content.

Whether that makes a successful media strategy or not is hard to tell for now. Ms. Powell Jobs is not saying much, but there’s a clue in the statement she sent me about Pop-Up purchase.

“Both magazines have managed to create unique journalistic platforms that help foster empathy and a better understanding of the world,” she said.

I like the idea of that.

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Kara Swisher, editor at large for the technology news website Recode and producer of the Recode Decode podcast and Code Conference, is a contributing opinion writer. @karaswisher Facebook

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