Mehdi Hasan realized that he survived the jump from linear to digital after an encounter in a men’s room. “Another man came out and started talking to me,” Hasan recalled. “He pointed at me and said, ‘You’re …’ — and I thought he was going to say, ‘You’re Mehdi Hasan from MSNBC, you’re the guy from Piers Morgan, you’re the guy from Jubilee or the Oxford Union’ — he said, ‘You’re that guy from Zeteo, right?’ And I said, ‘Yes, that is me. The Zeteo guy.’
“When the brand is being used to identify you in public restrooms, that is when you know you have made it,” Hasan quipped, speaking to a crowd of well-wishers that included comedian Hasan Minhaj, chef José Andrés and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in a midtown Manhattan Lebanese restaurant in April.
Hasan is one of a small number of TV news veterans who have built a viable…
