About

I’m Steve. Product, AI & digital transformation executive based in Salt Lake City. I spent six and a half years rebuilding the digital platform at Tribune Media, then two and a half years at Fox Corporation building FOX Weather from a whiteboard sketch to #1 on the US App Store. Now I advise consumer technology, AI, and digital platform companies on the work that comes before launch (and to be honest, after it too!).

What I’m doing now

Mostly: advising. Pre-launch product reviews, applied AI workflows, GTM execution, launch readiness. The engagements over the last two years have spanned consumer electronics hardware, AI assistants (response-quality, supervised fine-tuning, RAG), and a category-leading multimodal AI product at one of the global tech companies. Some of it is technical product work; some of it is helping a senior team see the third-best option that’s actually the right answer.

I’m based in Salt Lake City and I’m comfortable working remote, hybrid, or traveling as needed. Open to advisory, fractional, and full-time conversations.

How I got here

I started in 1993 as a weather anchor in Gainesville, Florida. The station hired me partly for my forecasting and partly because they needed someone who would also operate the camera. I did that for two years, then two years in South Bend, Indiana, then nine years in Salt Lake City as a meteorologist and reporter at FOX 13 News. I won an Emmy for Breaking News Coverage in 2006, which seemed like a reasonable cue to try something different.

That same year I moved to Chicago for my first digital leadership role at Fox Television Stations. From there: VP of Digital Content & Technology at Local TV, LLC (sold to Tribune for $2.7B in 2013); VP of Digital & Head of Product and Engineering at Tribune Media (sold to Nexstar in 2019 for $7.2B); a year of post-acquisition integration work at Nexstar; a focused engagement as Chief Strategy Officer at the Local Media Association; and then Fox Corporation called and asked if I’d come build a brand from scratch.

The FOX Weather years were a lot. I’ve written about that one separately — the short version is we shipped a full mobile, web, livestream, and VOD portfolio in six months, drove the app to #1 ahead of TikTok and Instagram on launch day, and earned a Webby Award for Visual Storytelling along the way. I left in May 2023 to start the advisory practice.

What I care about

A few things, on repeat:

• Pick the team first. Argue for the budget the team needs, even if the budget gets you in trouble. Everything else is downstream of the people in the room.
• Cut things you love. A smaller product on time beats a bigger product late. Most of the worst meetings I’ve sat in were about features that should have been killed two months earlier.
• Distribution is part of the product. App Store Optimization, SEO, and content distribution — they live in the same conversation as the product itself, not in a separate “marketing” track that gets booked the week before launch.
• Translation matters. A career of explaining radar imagery to a TV camera turns out to be a remarkably useful skill in a product review.

Outside the work

I live in Salt Lake City because the mountains are right there and the snow is real. The weather is still my favorite hobby — I have probably read more morning forecast discussions than is healthy. I make dinner, ski often, and spend a lot of time on trails with my friends and family.

Where to find me

Email is best: steve@stevebaron.com. I read everything and try to respond in a day or two. I’m also on LinkedIn — if you want a quick read on the executive arc, that’s the place. If you want to see what the team and I built at FOX Weather, the launch essay is a long but honest one.

If you’re working on a launch, an AI product, or a category bet where the path is not obvious yet, I’d love to hear about it.

— Steve