The 5 Media Trends I’m Thankful For

This story was initially printed in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly publication that explores the important thing themes shaping the media business. You may join it right here.The media business has no scarcity of existential crises on its plate. From the disruption posed by synthetic intelligence to the precipitously low ranges of client belief, publishers usually discover themselves on the defensive, reacting to adversarial situations that threaten their very means to outlive.I cowl these parts ceaselessly and with the suitable measure of sobriety, however Thursday within the U.S. is Thanksgiving, and it pays to do not forget that the media business isn’t fully bereft of its tailwinds. Plus, as Cormac McCarthy as soon as wrote, you by no means know what worse luck your unhealthy luck has saved you from.So, in that spirit, listed here are 5 developments within the media business that I’m grateful for, which provide at the very least some morsel of optimism for the long run.1. The daybreak of the pay-per-crawlAs I’ve amply lined, one of many chief threats to the media business is the unpaid use of its content material to energy AI reply engines. Outdoors of a handful of bespoke offers, the overwhelming majority of content material creators have watched powerlessly as AI companies hoover up their knowledge, repackage it, and use it to reply customers’ questions.In latest months although, a number of new initiatives have emerged that provide a framework for a market that might enable this mannequin to persist whereas nonetheless managing to compensate the publishers that allow it. Simply final week, I wrote about an experiment involving Criteo and the media community Raptive that used a pay-per-crawl infrastructure to generate $174 in a case examine involving an impartial meals writer. These are sometimes called “the Spotify mannequin,” because it successfully does for textual content content material what streaming did for music. FOR Scoops, Sharp Evaluation, and Insider Context By submitting your e-mail, you conform to our Phrases of Use and Privateness Coverage . You might opt-out anytime by clicking ‘unsubscribe’ from the publication or out of your account. E mail Subscribe Loading… Companies like Cloudflare, Fastly, Tollbit, ProRata, Criteo, and others assist this type of mannequin, which might successfully cost AI companies for the fitting to crawl an internet site. However these efforts are nascent and face important roadblocks. For example, what incentive would the AI companies should take part? Outdoors of a authorized mandate, I’ve heard few actually convincing solutions to that query. Nonetheless, at the very least there’s some groundwork. It additionally bears mentioning that this isn’t only for the good thing about publishers. The system because it at the moment exists is evidently unsustainable: AI companies depend on content material creators whereas eliminating their means to fund their content material. The earlier we arrive at an equitable resolution, the higher off the web is. 2. The vodcast extravaganzaBlame it on the 2024 election, maybe, however 2025 was the yr vodcasting—the vogue new time period for a video podcast—went supernova.Practically in a single day, audio-only podcasts have practically disappeared. Instantly, a podcast look turned one thing you needed to look good for. This has been helpful in a wide range of methods. First, for the podcast business, it has allowed the medium to faucet into video promoting budgets, that are a lot bigger. It has additionally helped podcasting remedy its lingering discovery drawback, as customers can now come throughout podcast clips on social media (which are inclined to favor video posts) that they may’ve in any other case by no means bothered to discover.However I feel most impactful is that vodcasts have given publishers and creators a low-lift technique of coming into extra meaningfully into the world of video content material. A podcast is usually merely an interview, which journalists conduct on the common. Movie the alternate, put it on YouTube, and voila: You’ve gotten turned a reporter right into a vodcaster. It is a comparatively incremental shift, nevertheless it has necessary implications for this subsequent development.3. The creator-ification continues apaceNearly a decade too late, publishers have lastly began taking cues from creators—at the very least with regards to the methods they bundle and distribute their content material.Most notably, this has been made manifest within the rising quantity of video output now coming from publishers. Information retailers together with The New York Instances and Washington Submit have even included entire tabs into their cell apps designed to duplicate the expertise of scrolling by means of TikTok.Nevertheless it extends past any single channel. You see it in Vox launching on Patreon and The Monetary Instances becoming a member of Substack. You see it within the new breed of creator-publisher partnerships, equivalent to Platformer’s Casey Newton becoming a member of The New York Instances by means of Arduous Fork or Alex Heath working with Vox through Sources. Even internally, publishers like Axios, Wired, and Bloomberg are franchising their star reporters, constructing out manufacturers round their expertise as a result of audiences gravitate to people.The downstream results of this shift are extra necessary than anyone journalist doing a front-facing video. They replicate the emergence of a brand new means of balancing the advantages of an establishment with the appeals of a creator. Publishers have traditionally resisted this atomization, however there may be rising proof {that a} center floor is feasible and rewarding. 4. Creator-led media scales upOn a associated word, a media government as soon as informed me that the digital transformation of reports was all about right-sizing: the large gamers wanted to get smaller, and the small gamers wanted to get greater.Till lately, we’ve seen loads of the previous however little or no of the latter. This yr, that started to alter. The Substack revolution of the early pandemic gave rise to a wave of solo creators, however solely lately have these impartial outfits begun to scale up, giving rise to sustainable operations that domesticate a smaller however extra engaged viewers, usually by means of subscriptions.The Free Press is clearly the poster youngster of this evolution, having secured a $150 million exit. However numerous different creator-centric publishers have these days approached escape velocity themselves.Emily Sundberg’s FeedMe, naturally, is probably most emblematic of this shift, however Puck represents a much more refined iteration of the development. Alongside it are stalwarts like Defector, which continues to chug alongside unbothered, in addition to Zeteo, Standing, 404Media, Newcomer, Platformer, TBPN, A Media Operator, Drop Website Information, and The Bulwark. You could possibly even throw Semafor within the combine.These publishers is likely to be small, however their continuity feels much more assured than that of the media giants of yesteryear. Even because it was occurring, the multibillion-dollar valuations of websites like BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox, and Enterprise Insider felt just like the product of a fever dream. Possibly media has realized from its errors, at the very least to a point, and the most recent torch-bearers are much more sturdy than their predecessors.5. Publishers, meet marketingDespite their reliance on promoting, publishers have been oddly loath to market themselves. This yr, that started to alter.As I reported, six publishers ran brand-marketing campaigns this yr, a number of of which did so for the primary time in firm historical past. Retailers together with Hearst, Wired, Reuters, MarketWatch, NBC Information, and The Guardian all paid for splashy spots throughout digital and bodily media in latest months, all in service of shaping their model id. Different premium publishers, together with The New York Instances, Wall Road Journal, and Bloomberg, additionally often flog their pedigree. Equally, this yr has been full of media rebrands: Max regained its HBO garlands, MSNBC modified to MSNow (as NBCUniversal’s cable networks break up off into Versant) , Dotdash Meredith reworked into Folks Inc., and Gannett turned USA Immediately Co. These will not be brand-marketing campaigns per se, however they’re definitely born of a higher concentrate on how customers understand their firms.This shift is essentially the results of the shifting info panorama, the place passive discovery has disappeared and publishers should proactively pursue customers. As with the creator-ification development I discussed earlier, the significance right here isn’t particularly one model marketing campaign, however the mindset shift that the development displays.Publishers pondering of themselves not a lot as information or leisure companies, however as manufacturers whose product is a selected form of info, will discover themselves much better positioned to compete in an ecosystem the place content material and knowledge are ubiquitous. It is likely to be a clumsy evolution, however it’s one lengthy overdue.