Can Journalism Survive? The Media Elite on Its Future

“He’s the richest man in the world, who controls this massive platform that has a huge impact on what information and what media sources people are exposed to. And he has however hundreds of millions of followers himself, and he is actively and openly campaigning for Trump to be elected president. The degree of his power, it’s just mind-boggling and not in a good way.” — Betsy Reed

“He has a massive platform, and he exploits the shit out of it.” — Jim VandeHei

“The source of his power is his willingness to use it at the expense of his business to move politics in the short term.” — Ben Smith

“In 2016, if Rupert Murdoch had advocated for a VP candidate to Donald Trump, that person probably would’ve become the VP. He did that this time with Doug Burgum, and Trump didn’t pick Burgum. Ultimately, he was listening much more to the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels of the world.” — Kaitlan Collins

There have always been wealthy people who want the status, influence, and attention you get from press ownership. “You’re asking if vanity and ego are still a thing in the world, and they will always be,” says one executive. The difference today is that media properties are no longer very good businesses, which means they often attract the interest of a different kind of rich person — either charitable or, possibly, delusional. Both types have a mixed record of late.

“I don’t think they’re serious players in the business sense,” says Hamish McKenzie of the current class of media benefactors. “I think they’re just owning — they’re picking up formerly prestigious brands as trophies for their shelves.” Billionaire ownership “keeps some people employed, and it keeps these loved institutions alive in some ways,” he says. But the publications supported like this “are mostly just on life support. They’re not actually major cultural players anymore.”

A billionaire owner “certainly makes it easier to have time to figure out your options,” says Politico’s John Harris. Because of that, a wealthy white knight is something many people working for financially shaky high-status operations are hoping for. “Someone will always take their money,” says Janice Min, likening it to the Medicis’ patronage.

But eventually, the good feeling wears off and the Medicis begin to resent their endless check writing to self-regarding journalists unwilling to adapt. “I haven’t really seen many billionaire benefactors who are kind of indifferent to the business performance of the property,” says Harris. “That’s just not the way it works,” adds an executive. “Marc Benioff wants Time to make money. People don’t get that because they think people much richer than them stop caring about money. Actually, that’s not the case. It’s people who are much richer than them who care obsessively about money.” Though they are often more patient than, say, venture-capital firms, eventually their charitable impulse runs low. “You don’t become a billionaire by letting your properties lose money indefinitely,” notes another executive.

Besides, having such support can, in that sense, be stifling to the business model. “The Washington Post and the L.A. Times are obviously the real case in point here,” says an editor-in-chief, “where billionaire ownership meant they never really took seriously building a business. And at some point, the billionaires get bored with that.”

“Just once, I would like to see a billionaire-backed business model in media, as opposed to just a billionaire subsidizing a broken business model,” says Jeremy Boreing.

“It’s high on my list of organizations that have stumbled,” says Stephen Engelberg. Many people felt it was in a strong position compared with other regional papers — if nothing else because the region is so wealthy and influential. “I don’t think they figured out how to be indispensable in California,” notes a top editor. “I think that they tried to be a smaller New York Times, but there already is the New York Times,” says another top editor.

“Ownership is important. Never underestimate that, as they say. It’s a cliché, but it starts at the top,” says a veteran newspaperman. In 2018, Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotech billionaire, bought it. “I think what happened there was a well-meaning but way-in-over-his-head owner who was basically extorted to rescue a beautiful but nearly doomed hostage for $500 million or whatever,” says an editor-in-chief. Then he put more money into it but didn’t fix the problems. “It’s gone wrong over too many years. The unionization has made everything more expensive. Print is dying, yet the staff is so not digitally focused enough,” they say. “The staff really didn’t have the skill sets necessary to achieve a turnaround. And the New York Times, by the way, in 2008, didn’t have those skill sets either, but it managed people out who refused to change it, bought out a whole bunch of older people, hired a whole bunch of new people, and then did not lay them off as the L.A. Times did.”

In 2021, Soon-Shiong hired Kevin Merida as editor, but he left early this year; it has been reported that the two clashed. Others in the newsroom have complained about the owner’s very progressive daughter taking too close an interest in the paper’s coverage. (The paper has since cut 20 percent of its newsroom.)

Another thing it never did: As the Hollywood trades went digital (with Jay Penske buying up Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline) and The Ankler and Puck competed for the insider, the L.A. Times didn’t become a player in that — its home market. “Everything about them is so ideological, flat,” says a media executive. “I remember ‘Are Freeways Racist?’ as a perfect example of an L.A. Times story.”

So what is to be done? “My hope is that the L.A. Times fights its way out and follows more of the path of the Boston Globe,” a regional paper that has a solid digital subscription business, says another media executive. “But there’s kind of a cycle where you lose your best writers, you lose your best people, then you start to do things to try to make your model work, and then you’re in a real problem.”

It wasn’t so long ago that the Washington Post was on a roll with Jeff Bezos’s checkbook backing up Marty Baron’s editorial leadership. Bezos bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million after the paper’s lack of digital strategy — both Vox and Politico were founded by Post refugees — put its future in peril. He invested deeply to expand the newsroom. At the height of the so-called Trump Bump, under its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan, digital subscriptions surged. But some argue the chaotic newsmaking presidency of Donald Trump masked a host of shortsighted business decisions. “The Post and the Times had a huge run-up during the Trump administration, and the Times used that time to diversify into games and health and lifestyle items, cooking, and the Post just acted as though this moment would last forever,” says a magazine editor. But after that, unlike the Times, the Post didn’t have a plan for what to invest in next that wasn’t politics, and after Baron left and was replaced by Sally Buzbee — then-publisher Fred Ryan’s pick — even that coverage seemed to lose its edge.

“They hadn’t built a sustainable editorial model that could support itself, post-resistance Trump era. And they hired some of the wrong people,” says another media executive. Meanwhile, the Post missed out on the arrival of a new era of political and policy coverage, allowing competitors to crib its audience.

“The Washington Post is screwed. They screwed themselves, maybe eternally,” says a digital-media executive. “Gross mismanagement, lack of a strategy, crappy culture, complex unions, allowing too many people from Politico to Axios to the New York Times to own categories they once had a chance to own.” As Bari Weiss says, “They should dominate D.C. They should get every scoop related to the federal government. And they just don’t.”

Even Bezos’s efforts to fix it of late have led to more tumult. This summer, it came out that his new publisher, Will Lewis, who arrived at the top of the year, had tried to shunt Buzbee into a new gig running a “third newsroom” focused on service and social-media journalism. But Buzbee quit, and Lewis’s hand-picked crony replacement for her, a Brit named Robert Winnett, was forced to step back after accusations of being too Fleet Street. Another onetime Lewis associate, Matt Murray, earlier replaced in the top Wall Street Journal job by Emma Tucker, was brought in to be interim editor. Now, many people think he’ll just end up staying on.

“I think what’s going on at the Post is a little concerning. This talk about a third newsroom, I don’t really understand it,” tsk-tsks a rival top editor. Others are less harsh. “I think the third-newsroom idea is great. Terrible branding, but it’s smart,” says a media executive. “The current commercial side of the Post is run by people who understand the subscription model. I think it’s much more clear now that they are focused,” says an editor. And as Ben Smith notes, “the Washington Post is still the Washington Post. Washington is still a place. Political news is still a thing. I think they’ll ultimately find their way to buying Punchbowl and trying to eat Politico’s lunch.”

“We have to be careful about not using the ‘in peril’ narrative too much, where people will think it’s already all dead and there’s nothing left to save,” says CJR’s Sewell Chan, who spent three years running the nonprofit Texas Tribune. Chan points to two bright spots in efforts to support local news: the National Trust for Local News, which acquires vulnerable community papers and invests in their development, and the American Journalism Project, which tries to rebuild local news by seeding local digital start-ups.

Audience interest in local stories is high, Apple News has found. “That’s part of what we’re trying to do — connect local news outlets with their audiences again,” says Lauren Kern of Apple News. “After the Apalachee school shooting earlier this fall, we relied on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for coverage,” she notes. “The North Dakota state abortion ban was ruled unconstitutional, and we have the North Dakota Monitor to literally put at the top of a national news app.”

Among other experiments are small, sometimes worker-owned or nonprofit newsrooms around the country. San Francisco has 27 news organizations — about the same as it had a decade ago, thanks to a mix of nonprofits, radio stations, and, yes, the largesse of various rich people, of which the city has no shortage. In New York, there’s the swashbuckling Hell Gate and the more self-serious nonprofit The City. But there’s also the Murdoch-owned New York Post, which has survived by becoming, as its editor Keith Poole puts it, “a national digital brand.” That means it peddles national news, tabloid sensationalism, gossip, and Fox News–adjacent talking points that make it sometimes seem to despise the very city it’s based in. “We have to treat our news very differently locally and nationally. Not all readers will necessarily be interested in education policy in New York City,” Poole says. “We’re profitable — little-known fact. We’ve been profitable for the last three years in a row.”

The biggest threat to local news is hedge funds like Alden Global Capital that have gobbled up and then gutted regional papers across the country. “These are either zombie newspapers or soon-to-be-zombie newspapers. I don’t know if they’re going to make it,” says Stephen Engelberg.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, though, is owned by Cox Enterprises, a family-owned company that gave the paper a multiyear building plan. “There’s a difference between managing decline and investing in transformation,” says editor Leroy Chapman Jr. But, by and large, “the business model for local news is broken. It really is,” he adds. “There has to be, among the public and among elected officials, a recognition of how vital local news is to thriving communities” and “public investment” in protecting it. “We need some help to have a business model that lets us recoup fairly what we should, based upon what we produce, and that will provide the sort of thing our democracy needs, which is objective fact.”

From left: Jeremy Boreing, co-founder and co-CEO, The Daily Wire. Matt Murray, executive editor, the Washington Post.

From left: Jeremy Boreing, co-founder and co-CEO, The Daily Wire. Matt Murray, executive editor, the Washington Post.

From left: Alison Roman, writer and chef. Jon Kelly, co-founder and editor-in-chief, Puck.

From left: Alison Roman, writer and chef. Jon Kelly, co-founder and editor-in-chief, Puck.

Neal Mohan, CEO, YouTube.

From left: Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief, Semafor. Simone Swink, senior executive producer, ABC’s Good Morning America.

From left: Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief, Semafor. Simone Swink, senior executive producer, ABC’s Good Morning America.

From left: Wendy McMahon, president and CEO, CBS News and Stations and CBS Media Ventures. Jim VandeHei, co-founder and CEO, Axios; co-founder, Politico.

From left: Wendy McMahon, president and CEO, CBS News and Stations and CBS Media Ventures. Jim VandeHei, co-founder and CEO, Axios; co-founder, Politi… more
From left: Wendy McMahon, president and CEO, CBS News and Stations and CBS Media Ventures. Jim VandeHei, co-founder and CEO, Axios; co-founder, Politico.

From left: Sam Dolnick, deputy managing editor, the New York Times. Kaitlan Collins, anchor, CNN’s The Source.

From left: Sam Dolnick, deputy managing editor, the New York Times. Kaitlan Collins, anchor, CNN’s The Source.

From left: Ben Shapiro, host, The Ben Shapiro Show; co-founder, The Daily Wire. Samira Nasr, editor-in-chief, Harper’s Bazaar.

From left: Ben Shapiro, host, The Ben Shapiro Show; co-founder, The Daily Wire. Samira Nasr, editor-in-chief, Harper’s Bazaar.

Graydon Carter, founder and co-editor, Air Mail.

Willa Bennett, editor-in-chief, Cosmopolitan and Seventeen.

“Beats the shit out of me.” — Jim VandeHei

“Oh, you’re funny. Any media operator who looks at the unit economics of print will have a hard time answering that question.” — Jon Kelly

It’s not completely obsolete and has become a way for publications to attract and retain subscribers and lure in both celebrities and high-end writers who still care about appearing in print (just the other week, The Atlantic announced it was upping its frequency from ten to 12 print issues a year). And magazines are still riding the pandemic luxury-fashion boom; those fashion advertisers are hungry for glossy pages to appear in.

“Print is a luxury item.” — Mel Ottenberg, editor-in-chief, Interview magazine

“I’m trying to think of what to say instead of ‘a business card,’ but it really is like a business card. It’s a manifesto for what your brand stands for.” — Willa Bennett

“We obviously care deeply about print, but in terms of growth, it’s not where our focus is.” — Emma Tucker

“Keanu Reeves, Frank Ocean, Rob Pattinson, Beyoncé — they are not coming to a GQ Instagram shoot.” — Will Welch, global editorial director, GQ and Pitchfork

Magazines Still Need Celebrity Covers …
“It’s an incredible point of access, and it gives us the opportunity to create an iconic image with a point and a purpose and a message that then permeates all our other platforms. Chappell Roan was shot by Inez & Vinoodh, and she’s at this incredible moment in her rise in her career, and it’s a deep interview and the writer spent days with her, and without print, that wouldn’t have happened. And then there’s video and all these other assets. Print is the tip of the spear, but the majority of it is digital. The impact of it, the symbolism of it, opens a door for us. That’s really, really critical.” — Gus Wenner

And the Celebrities Still Need Them, Too.
“Magazines may not be as important as they were a decade ago, but the fight to get on covers has never been greater. And that’s because there are ten times as many famous people now as there were a decade ago. And on average, each of them is one-tenth as famous with the exception of Taylor Swift. There’s a lot of people clamoring to be recognized and to get that cover.” — Bryan Goldberg

“Having a cover of Vogue or Vanity Fair or doing something that might change their image, or doing something that might be a breakout, Star Is Born moment for them — being on the cover of W, for instance — where it kind of casts them in a new light, perhaps an edgy light, I still think it has a lot of impact.” — Eva Chen, vice-president of fashion, Meta

“It’s an endorsement, and it’s a certain degree of validation that you don’t get if you just stay on your own channel and in your own world.” — Samira Nasr, editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar

Celebrities, Though, Now Have the Upper Hand.
“Some people would say to you [after seeing the Beyoncé GQ cover, for which she conducted the interview with the writer over email], ‘Well, at least she gave them an email interview.’ Normally, she doesn’t talk. Other people would say to you it’s a real demonstration of how traditional media brands like GQ and Vogue have lost their power to call the shots in interviews like that. And the truth is those media brands, they really rely on those big covers to generate conversation and to telegraph their power and influence, which are undeniably waning in the era of social.” — A digital media executive

“It’s Not Enough to Just Have a Cover.”
“I do think that having a really sophisticated and 360-degree approach to a cover and to a moment and to an issue is critical. It’s not enough to just have a cover. You have to think about what is the real strategy — what are the sound bites that will be everywhere on Reels? Like, any magazine that is not sending a social-media person on set for the cover to get behind the scenes is frankly behind.” — Eva Chen

But Also, What Even Is a Cover Anymore?
“The state of the fashion-magazine cover is somewhat diluted by the fact that anything can be a cover. So anyone could put a big logo on an image and call it a cover. And brands — even really, really prestigious media brands — are doing digital covers, whatever that means, right?” — Imran Amed, founder and editor-in-chief of The Business of Fashion

Resuscitations and expansions of print products announced in the past 12 months: The Atlantic, Complex, i-D, Life, Nylon, Saveur, Sports Illustrated, and Vice.

Editors perhaps envious of the publisher’s resources through the years had a lot to say about how it squandered them. Here’s one such tirade from an anonymous executive.

“I mean, Condé Nast is the most pathetic company I’ve ever seen in my life. They’re so stupid. And some of it is like the hubris of 1990s media. You’re sitting there, believing you rule the world, not knowing the world has completely changed and fallen out of your grasp, but you still conduct yourself with an arrogance that eventually the market rejects. It is so bananas, and the fact that they don’t change that whole model there is wild. They think their brands mean more than they do, and therefore they approach the market with an hauteur around sponsorship and ad sales, and yet they have turned all the content into content-farm stuff at the same time out of necessity.”

(Roger Lynch and Anna Wintour declined to participate in this project.)

Despite cord-cutting and aging demographics, the people who make TV news seem confident they’ll find a way to keep doing pretty much what they’re doing — while finding new ways to distribute it.

“The bottom line is that the total time spent with our original programming across television and streaming combined is actually up year over year,” says CBS News’ Wendy McMahon. “When you look at the total time spent — with the lion’s share of it still on television — it’s still a reach vehicle. Are there declines? Yes. Is it relatively stable? Yes.”

Says another TV executive, “In terms of viewership and availability, news is more successful than ever because it’s more available than ever. You can access news on all platforms, not just linear, but through social-media platforms from Twitter to Facebook to getting your news on TikTok.”

But no one knows what’s next, exactly. “Something big is about to happen,” says another top TV executive. “There’s no doubt about that, whether or not megastreamers become the platforms for some of these news divisions or networks decide just to provide some of their content to the streamers. There’ll be some sort of consolidation.” A senior TV executive says, “You could see a combination of tie-ups, perhaps with some of the streamers. It would be really interesting if Netflix or Amazon decided to go into news.” “I think the legacy in the brand helps a lot,” says 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens. “We haven’t deviated or changed. It still looks the same. The story selection is the same.”

In other words, steady as she goes. “Well, the path forward for CNN, I think,” says anchor Jake Tapper, “is for us to keep doing what we’re doing and providing an attempt at fair and objective news that is not ideologically driven. And I think that’s the recipe for ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS as well. How do we keep that going in this world of cord-cutting and smartphones and a million new sources and the like is for bigger brains than mine to figure out.”

“Why is an anchor on a television network making between $10 million and $20 million a year, but a similar talent on social media doesn’t enjoy the same revenue and salary opportunities? There are structural reasons in the business that have explained that, and they’re shifting really quickly. And I think that these are as important in many cases as the story that these companies tell.” — Jon Kelly

“The days of these ridiculous anchor salaries have to be over. It’s not worth it. The business model doesn’t support it any longer. If you were to combine all the GMA anchor salaries, I guarantee you their news-gathering budget is less than that.” — A TV executive

“Rachel Maddow’s deal would not happen today. If I’m paying you a ton of money, then I expect you to be everywhere. I expect you to be on in the mornings, to be in prime, to do that podcast, to host this event. There’s a bit of an ROI that should be part of this process.” — A news executive

“Networks will always figure out a way to pay when they want to pay … No one has ever said to me, ‘They slashed my salary.’”

Younger people don’t tend to watch network TV or pay for cable. Instead, many have grown up getting their news on YouTube. News divisions are following them. Take ABC: It isn’t “producing vastly different content for YouTube, but we are hitting nearly 18 million subscribers,” says ABC News president Almin Karamehmedovic. “The demographic is way younger than what we have on linear television.” Which suggests that the problem for TV news is not so much what they make as where they put it. “The main thing we do is distribute their content in a way that users, especially younger users, want to consume it,” says YouTube CEO Neal Mohan. “We built products that cater to that news use case. So we have the breaking-news shelf when there’s a big event happening. We have top news and search results. We have a local-news shelf.” And not just TV news: “If we do a successful video, its views on YouTube just dwarf its views on our platform,” observes one newspaper editor. Along with podcasts, it’s another way to reach people. “The surge of video podcasts — people wanting to spend more time on their screens and wanting to watch somebody staring at their screen — was a big surprise to me,” says Sam Dolnick. Charlamagne Tha God, whose radio show is also a YouTube hit, says it’s about adaptation. “Television has evolved into what people are watching online,” he says. “It is just viewing habits, right?”

When we asked what the most common misconception about the media is, we heard the same thing over and over again: “That it’s all an interconnected corporate conspiracy with an agenda to propagandize,” says Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray. The reality, says Guardian US editor Betsy Reed, is that the way a big story gets covered in the “mainstream media” (meaning, journalistic entities not specifically aligned with the left or the right) “is really about individual reporters and editors making the decisions they think are right in the moment. And if that then ends up meaning there are 17 stories published on the same day, that doesn’t necessarily mean that was a plan by the editor. It’s the way things played out in a newsroom, which is composed of a lot of people who are generally trying to do the best, most responsible job they can in the moment.” Or as Graydon Carter says, “Some people in the political spectrum think that individual parts of the media work in dramatic concert with each other, and that’s just simply not the case. In reality, it’s a million mice running around in a cage, all with different trajectories, and all with different goals.”

“The Biden White House in particular cares about the New York Times. And if you look at what the Times did from the editorial page and how they stacked the editorials day after day from the columnists whom Biden cared most about, all calling for him to step down using very similar language and themes — “Do it! Be a hero like Washington was!” — I think that psychologically played a role. When he lost Morning Joe, that mattered because both he and his team legitimately do watch it on a regular basis. So there’s still moments when mainstream media can roar, but they’re just less frequent and heard by fewer.” — A digital media executive

“The media is extraordinarily powerful when it comes to just forming, What is the narrative of the day? Let’s put it this way: If the media were less powerful, I think Joe Biden might still be the nominee. The media basically spun up the narrative in the aftermath of the first debate that Biden had to inevitably go. Imagine if the media had pushed the other way and said, ‘You know what? It was a bad performance. It was a one-off like what Biden was saying. He’s totally fine.’ Would the Democratic donors have gotten onboard to throw him off a cliff?” — Ben Shapiro

“The thing about the debate is the eyes saw what they saw, everybody saw it, so it gave you a window. But day-to-day — having covered the presidency — it’s really hard. You can’t walk around the West Wing; you cover it from afar and then you rely on people inside. And I don’t know whether all of that information was at the level you need to have it. So I think some of it’s degree of difficulty in reporting.” — Former L.A. Times editor Kevin Merida

“I think the White House did a very good job in sequestering Biden, in sequestering the president. So they made him available for very limited periods of time. And I think the minute journalists asked about his health, they were seen as being partisan, and it made it difficult for White House correspondents.” — Joanna Coles

“I just disagree with this notion that we were undercovering his age. I think that reporters who cover the White House have been talking about Biden’s age endlessly. You can ask White House staff that because they’ve been annoyed by it for years and it’s something that we’ve always talked about. Was it covered the same way before the debate as after? No, because Biden had not self-imploded onstage before then. You cover as it happens and as it unfolds. That’s how journalism works.” — Kaitlan Collins

“Personally, I asked people whom I know, sources whom I have in the executive branch, sporadically for years about Biden and his age, and they always told me reassuring things and then after the debate, it’s not just that the reporting changed; what my sources in the government said changed. After seeing the debate, I think people working in the executive branch started reinterpreting some of their own experiences and started changing their level of candor.” — Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring

Most of the executives interviewed expressed anxiety over how artificial intelligence will affect the media industry. Two paths have emerged: Sue AI companies for copyright infringement or strike a deal to license your content for training AI models. The New York Times took the former, while many others have chosen the latter. “I worry that news organizations are going to keep taking money from AI companies and wake up and realize that wasn’t a strategy for growing their own audiences and businesses,” says Jessica Lessin. “Right now, there’s basically the New York Times on one side of it and everyone else on the other, and that scares me.”

Companies like Open AI and Perplexity are “doing these PR deals to stop the media revolting against them because they’re obviously just ingesting all their work and using it to improve their models and deliver information to people,” says Hamish McKenzie. “They defensively make these deals that actually do help media companies — because they’re worth a lot of money to media companies — in the meantime. But it’s definitely a Band-Aid type of solution until shit really gets real.”

Already, AI has partially taken over search. Earlier this year, Google launched “AI Overviews,” AI-generated summaries that now sit above the search page, allowing users to reap the work of publishers without ever leaving Google. As one top editor puts it, “This notion that Google, or whatever’s on your computer, is no longer going to send you to a trusted source of information — but instead summarize it there on your screen — is a little bit scary.”

Beyond the Google of it all, one executive says, “AI will make it much easier for aggregators to rip off our content and that will lead to such a flood of information that the web goes to shit.” And then there is the ultimate fear: AI will displace journalists altogether. “People will get used to asking a chat interface what the news is, and that may become the default in the future,” says Emma Tucker.

Despite the risks, several executives think the technology will improve their operations.

1. “I really believe AI can and should be an enabler, a facilitator,” says Jimmy Pitaro, who adds that ESPN uses AI to identify clip highlights, convert stories to speech, and generate at scale game recaps “that otherwise would not be possible or wouldn’t exist.”

2. “Bloomberg probably uses far more technology than any other newsroom,” says John Micklethwait. “We do over 5,000 stories a day, and I think a third of them have some degree of automation in some part of it. We have computers scouring the world to look for news and to feed that toward our teams.” The technology has “sometimes changed people’s jobs, but it definitely hasn’t reduced the number of jobs,” he says. “So far, technology has been generally very good at dealing with what you might describe as the more boring sides of journalism.”

3. “I’m deeply convinced that artificial intelligence will be a booster for the quality and relevance in journalism. I think we can delegate everything that is kind of not a real competitive success factor or distinguishing factor to AI,” says Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, such as text translation, aggregation, or website production. One big caveat: “That intellectual property is protected by law, and if you want to use it for commercial purposes, you have to identify what you took from whom and you have to remunerate for what you took … Everybody understands if there is no legal framework for that, there is no business model.”

It’s become the primary source of information for millions of mostly younger people. A recent Pew study found that 39 percent of adults under 30 regularly get their news from TikTok, a fivefold increase from 2020. “The biggest problem for journalism is head-to-head competition with things that just aren’t journalism. Your Instagram feed, your Facebook feed — those are ways that people spend time, and they have advertising dollars on them, and they’re very compelling, and they’re totally new in a way. It is just a different kind of content, and it crowds stuff out,” says Matthew Yglesias.

“Anything that looks or smells like The New Republic. Including The New Republic, Fast Company, Inc. — all those types of publications. Fortune or Forbes or both of them, but apparently one of them is having a mini-resurgence. But that’s probably just PR bullshit.” — Hamish McKenzie • “I feel like it is plausible that you could see some kind of roll-up between the Washington Post, CNN, and Semafor.” — A veteran journalist • “I can’t imagine The Daily Beast will be around.” — An editor-in-chief • “I do think what’s most in jeopardy are these kinds of junior-varsity liberal outlets that don’t have a lot to offer. The New Republic, which used to be a very valuable brand, has been sold a bunch of times at bargain-basement prices. I think HuffPost is teetering, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were gone in five years.” — Glenn Greenwald, host of System Update, co-founder of The Intercept • “The streamers seem to me like the ones that are the most vulnerable. We have too many of them, and it feels like they have to consolidate in some way.” — A media executive • “I think probably The Hollywood Reporter will disappear in some form. There’s all this duplicative media owned by one person and they are all doing the same thing. Duplicative media brands within one company just can’t coexist.” — A media executive • “Newsmax. I don’t think their legal trouble is over, and they don’t seem like a terribly professionally run operation, and they’re not going to be able to adapt, I think, to a post-Trump landscape, which at some point we’ll reach.” — An editor-in-chief • “I would kind of be shocked if Rumble is operative five years from now.” — A media executive

“Cord-cutting and the impact to our business and the need to adapt. — Jimmy Pitaro

“That we are not bringing in the next generation of news readers; that we are just speaking to the same audience.” — Emma Tucker

“I’m kind of concerned at how people’s obsession with thinness and recreational Ozempic is going to affect my career because I think that there’s a drastic dip or drop-off of interest in consuming food. A lot of people pretend to like food, but to actually consume it — to buy a book, to then cook the recipe — is another level of commitment. And if you’re not eating or if you’re not actually interested in food, then you’re not going to participate in the things that I have to offer. And that makes me nervous.” — Alison Roman, writer and chef

“I mean, we all just think we’re going to fall off the balance beam. I think all any journalist really has is their credibility. And so doing something, anything, that could undermine that.” — A longtime journalist

“The difficulty subsequent generations of media consumers will have telling the difference between fact-based journalism and everything else.” — Carolyn Ryan

“I probably worry the most about the quality and creativity of content and where that’s going and how we’re going to find new voices, especially with writing. I just think there’s a sameness to everybody’s style now. Everybody’s afraid to experiment and try different things. I think that’s a big reason why writing has gone down the tubes in a lot of ways.” — A media executive

“All day, every day, I worry about misinformation.” — Charlamagne Tha God