@samseder Welcome to steemit! With your career on MSNBC and your experience on mainstream media, its amazing to see you noticed that the steem blockchain is a powerful medium to reach a very smart audience growing exponentially every day, week and months.
You will learn that the vision of the platform is far far more than just rewards, or just interacting with people and sharing content, like other social media platforms. The steem blockchain has the aim from its creators @dan to give freedom to people, empower people, and return the control to the people that is were it belongs to, without having banks and governments as intermediaries.
@teamsteem has made a great effort to get the vision ideas and concepts in one super post, that I recommend you to take a look. Its his post Welcome to Steem (https://steemit.com/joy/@teamsteem/welcome-to-steem).
You will have the chance to make a bit of more history here in the platform.
Again, a big welcome from all the Steemit Community.
Regards, @gold84