– To the top. At the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last week, two new documentaries aired that, while wildly different, had something in common. Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything and Call Her Alex, the two-part documentary about podcaster Alex Cooper now streaming on Hulu, both showed what it took to get to the top of the male-dominated media business—in two very different eras.

Tell Me Everything traces the story of Barbara Walters, the first woman to co-anchor an evening news program in the U.S. She made her debut in that role on ABC in 1976, breaking the hardest glass ceiling for women in journalism and television. The film by director Jackie Jesko follows the barriers Walters continued to break, from her famous celebrity sitdown interviews to her late-in-life reinvention on The View, alongside her personal struggles. While she married, divorced, and had a child, her personal life often suffered, the documentary observes. “Her job was the love of her life,” one talking head says on camera.

“She was an incredibly ambitious woman who loved the work, loved being on TV, she loved the thrill of the chase, she loved the competition,” says Jesko. “She got a lot of joy out of it—and it doesn’t always have to be a huge personal life that brings someone joy.” Jane Rosenthal, the cofounder and CEO of the company behind the Tribeca Film Festival, adds: “We grew up with her—and you didn’t realize what she was really doing as a woman, that she was the only woman in the room, the kind of fights that she had to have.”

Still, other era-defining women in media, including Oprah Winfrey and Katie Couric, reflect in the documentary about how seeing Walters’ path influenced their own choices. Couric says she knew she didn’t want to sacrifice her family life for her career, after seeing Walters.

Which brings us to the next Tribeca documentary. Alex Cooper, the host of Call Her Daddy and media mogul behind the Unwell network, has often been called the millennial or Gen Z Oprah. In Tell Me Everything, Winfrey remembers watching Walters to learn how to succeed as an on-air journalist. Without Barbara, there would be no Oprah. And without Oprah, there would be no Alex.

Cooper built Call Her Daddy within Barstool Sports, another overwhelmingly male-dominated media company. Her new documentary traces her upbringing, an experience of sexual harassment in college that she now says motivated her to never be silenced again, and the rise of her podcast.

Several decades after Walters’ career, Cooper doesn’t have to make the same trade-offs that Walters did. Her husband is her business partner. While Walters struggled with private insecurity about her appearance, another topic of Tell Me Everything, Cooper shares her most personal experiences and challenges with her audience. “She didn’t just build an audience, she built a movement,” Rosenthal said while introducing Call Her Alex. Rather than being beholden to someone else’s platform—like a television network—Cooper has been able to build her own.

Despite all these obvious differences, watching the films back-to-back, it’s clear Cooper and Walters have a lot in common. “I’m a competitive mother*******,” Cooper says. “I’m hard on myself.”

As much as the media industry has changed—the drive it takes to get to the top hasn’t.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

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– Fashion legacy. What does it take to create one of the most iconic and enduring brands in American fashion? For Elyce Arons, it took an unshakeable work ethic, a best friendship with one of fashion’s ultimate tastemakers, and a little bit of kismet.

Now the CEO of Frances Valentine, a colorful luxury handbag and fashion brand, Arons first came to prominence in the industry after cofounding Kate Spade with Pamela Bell, Andy Spade, and the company’s namesake and Arons’s aforementioned best friend, Katy. Arons reflects on meeting Katy in their dorm at the University of Kansas, the start of both of their careers in New York in the late 1980s, launching Kate Spade, and much more in her new memoir, We Might Just Make It After All, published this week. 

Courtesy of Elyce Arons and Frances Valentine

Of course, Arons’s book also addresses Spade’s tragic death in 2018, a loss that sent the fashion world reeling and still reverberates throughout Arons’s life (the duo also cofounded Frances Valentine together). But it is a credit to Arons’s writing, and the lives both women led, that her book is focused on the humor, risk-taking, and beauty at the heart of the story of the fledgling artists and entrepreneurs striking out on their own. Readers will learn about all of the work that went into creating the multibillion-dollar company; the ups and downs, the disagreements and the serendipity. And they’ll gain a fuller picture of the Katy behind Kate Spade: the introvert, the genius, and the best friend.

“I want her legacy to be remembered in this beautiful, positive way, because she was an amazing person,” Arons told me in a Zoom interview last month.

Beyond the personal relationships detailed, Arons’s book also made me nostalgic for the New York of the 1990s and early 2000s, when a group of friends with a little industry know-how, a wealth of creativity, and a ton of moxie could create one of the most well-known and regarded brands in fashion. New York was gritty, Arons writes, but it was teeming with magic and possibility for countless people—exactly what their brand epitomized. A Kate Spade bag was more affordable than other luxury brands, but still tasteful and chic. It became many young professionals’ first big purchase, “a rite of passage for generations of women,” a symbol of independence. Exactly what you’d expect from women like Arons and Spade.

One of Kate Spade the company’s early keys to success, Arons writes, is that the team tried to create a welcoming environment and only hire people they enjoyed being around. She finds that advice still holds true as the boss of another company, while telling recent grads—and more recently, her own daughters as they’ve entered the workforce—to get to work early and stay late. Both employees and employers should feel that they are contributing to the whole and be proud of the company they’re working for, she says.

“You’re spending most of your time at your job, yeah? It should be fun, and it should be pleasant, and you shouldn’t feel bad about your job, or making a mistake,” Arons told me. “Just do your best. People don’t care if you don’t know how to do something, but learn how to get it done.”

Alicia Adamczyk
alicia.adamczyk@fortune.com

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– Sponsor her. Women in the workplace need both mentorship and sponsorship. The latter is someone who advocates for you when you’re not in the room, explains Rosalind Chow, an advocate for sponsorship and the author of the new book The Doors You Can Open. 

But sponsorship often isn’t a small ask of senior leaders—and it can be an even bigger ask of women. Rising women are more likely to need “protection” from their sponsors. 

“Women proteges tend to get criticized more often—so women sponsors need to engage in protection more often than male sponsors do,” says Chow, who teaches organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University. “But protection is a very costly sponsorship behavior. … It means they’re using up their social capital. Every time they do this, it knocks their credibility just a little bit more.” Over time, that can hurt up-and-coming women in the workplace—their sponsors’ efforts “might start being less effective,” Chow says. 

She shares an example in her book; a director of a women’s leadership program recommended a part-time instructor for a full-time position. The instructor was passed over, with the college administration citing her lack of a PhD as a determining factor—even though the school had recently promoted a male instructor without a PhD. On top of this, the director was met with accusations that she had gone against hiring processes and against the wishes of other faculty members. “For her efforts, she was rewarded with damaged relationships and broken trust,” writes Chow.

Courtesy of PublicAffairs

This is just one of the differences that comes up for women seeking allies to support their career advancement. The discrepancy starts with who women seek out as sponsors—often other women. With men still dominating most corporate leadership, that can mean the “power level of the sponsor” can be different for rising women compared to men. 

Efforts to counteract those gaps—like networking—can come with their own penalties. “Networking is manipulative when it’s done by women, and when it’s done by men it’s just kind of like, ‘Yeah, this is what people do,’” says Chow. Women who actively network often receive lower leadership ratings than men, and their connections with high-status people are viewed— negatively—as strategic. 

It’s ironic how sponsorship can hurt senior women—given that women often view it as a more “palatable” form of networking. “The focus is not on you. It’s about helping others … as opposed to trying to maximize everything for yourself,” she says. 

Chow previously developed a mentorship program for Black professionals at the Advanced Leadership Institute, where she aimed to push leaders from mentorship to sponsorship—to go from trying to change the behavior of a mentee, to getting others to see how great that person already was. 

That’s why she says one of the most critical ways men can support women in the workplace is to sponsor them. Men can tap the power they have accrued and take risks that senior women often can’t, without the risk of hurting their own careers. Senior male leaders should ask themselves, “How many women do I know? How many women do I trust, spend time with, respect?” she advises. “All those women that you know and respect, you should be sponsoring.”

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– Soda success. Ten years ago, Allison Ellsworth started mixing fruit, apple cider vinegar and soda water in her kitchen with the goal of making a “healthy” soda that was low in sugar and high in fiber. Last month, PepsiCo closed the acquisition of Ellsworth’s beverage company, now known as Poppi, for $1.95 billion (this figure includes an estimated $300 million of cash tax benefits).  

“From day one, we knew that this [selling the company] was always something we wanted to do,” says Ellsworth, who cofounded Poppi with her husband, Stephen, and will remain with the brand as a creative advisor. It was PepsiCo who made the first approach, and the big draw from Poppi’s perspective—in addition to the dollar signs, of course—was the impact an acquisition would have on its distribution system, she adds. In 2024, Poppi, which brands itself as “prebiotic soda,” had annual revenue of more than $500 million, according to the company, and was sold in over 120 different retailers, including Whole Foods, Target and CVS. It is currently only available in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. “There were places we couldn’t get in before, like sports arenas and certain fast casual restaurants,” Austin-based Ellsworth explains. “Now we have a Ferrari underneath us for distribution.” (The “functional” beverages market, meaning drinks that claim to offer health benefits beyond hydration, was worth around $175.5 billion in 2022 and is expected to soar to $339.6 billion by 2030.) 

Courtesy of Poppi

It’s a remarkable trajectory for a company that only officially launched in 2020, and one facilitated in part by Ellsworth’s determination that Poppi be “a community” at the intersection of wellness and influencer culture, rather than a straightforward drinks brand. “We are not just a soda,” she says. Cans of Poppi come in 16 flavors and are known for their bold, neon branding and celebrity fans (Olivia Munn, Post Malone, Alix Earle and Nicole Scherzinger are all investors). Ellsworth, who in 2018 appeared on Shark Tank while nine months pregnant, resulting in a $400,000 investment from Rohan Oza, is the face of the brand. She frequently communicates with its approximately 1.2 million followers across Instagram and TikTok, announcing new initiatives and addressing controversy when it arises. Notably, Poppi has recently settled a class action lawsuit for $8.9 million, following allegations from a consumer that the company’s marketing promises around gut health are misleading. One can contains 3 grams of fiber and 5 grams of sugar, according to the company. The lawsuit contends that the drinks would need more prebiotic fiber and less sugar to positively impact digestion. “It’s something that big brands go through,” says Ellsworth of the lawsuit. “It feels good that it’s behind us.” The company’s official statement on the settlement adds that Poppi “acknowledges no fault, liability or wrongdoing.” 

Ellsworth compares handing over the reins of her company to watching a child go off to college.  “You’re happy but you have anxiety,” she says. “You want to see it flourish, but you want to hold on. But I have a calmness. We did good. Poppi is in good hands.” 

Ellie Austin
ellie.austin@fortune.com

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