Can the Media Survive?

Imran Amed, founder and editor-in-chief, The Business of Fashion. | Willa Bennett, editor-in-chief, Cosmopolitan and Seventeen. | Jeremy Boreing, co-founder and co-CEO, The Daily Wire. | Graydon Carter, founder and co-editor, Air Mail. | Sewell Chan, executive editor, Columbia Journalism Review. | Leroy Chapman Jr., editor-in-chief, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. | Charlamagne tha God, co-host, The Breakfast Club. | Eva Chen, vice-president of fashion, Meta. | Joanna Coles, chief creative and content officer, The Daily Beast. | Kaitlan Collins, anchor, CNN’s The Source. | Sam Dolnick, deputy managing editor, the New York Times. | Mathias Döpfner, CEO, Axel Springer SE. | Stephen Engelberg, editor-in-chief, ProPublica. | Bryan Goldberg, CEO, Bustle Digital Group. | Emily Greenhouse, editor, The New York Review of Books. | Glenn Greenwald, host, System Update; co-founder, The Intercept. | John Harris, co-founder and global editor-in-chief, Politico. | Radhika Jones, editor-in-chief, Vanity Fair. | Almin Karamehmedovic, president, ABC News. | Jon Kelly, co-founder and editor-in-chief, Puck. | Lauren Kern, editor-in-chief, Apple News. | Gayle King, co-host, CBS Mornings. | Jessica Lessin, founder and editor-in-chief, The Information. | Hamish McKenzie, co-founder, Substack. | Wendy McMahon, president and CEO, CBS News and Stations and CBS Media Ventures. | Kevin Merida, former executive editor, the Los Angeles Times. | John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief, Bloomberg. | Janice Min, founder and CEO, Ankler Media. | Neal Mohan, CEO, YouTube. | Matt Murray, executive editor, the Washington Post. | Samira Nasr, editor-in-chief, Harper’s Bazaar. | Mel Ottenberg, editor-in-chief, Interview. | Bill Owens, executive producer, CBS’s 60 Minutes. | Jonah Peretti, co-founder and CEO, BuzzFeed, Inc. | Jimmy Pitaro, chairman, ESPN. | Ramesh Ponnuru, editor, National Review. | Keith Poole, editor-in-chief, the New York Post Group. | Betsy Reed, editor, The Guardian US | Alison Roman, writer and chef. | Maer Roshan, co-editor-in-chief, The Hollywood Reporter. | Carolyn Ryan, managing editor, the New York Times. | Ben Shapiro, host, The Ben Shapiro Show; co-founder, The Daily Wire. | Sam Sifton, assistant managing editor, the New York Times; founding editor, New York Times Cooking. | Bill Simmons, founder and managing director, The Ringer; head of podcast innovation and monetization, Spotify. | Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief, Semafor. | Andrew Ross Sorkin, founder and editor-at-large, the New York Times’ DealBook; co-anchor, CNBC’s Squawk Box. | Simone Swink, senior executive producer, ABC’s Good Morning America. | Jake Tapper, anchor and chief Washington correspondent, CNN. | Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic. | Emma Tucker, editor-in-chief, The Wall Street Journal. | Jim VandeHei, co-founder and CEO, Axios; co-founder, Politico. | Bari Weiss, founder and editor, The Free Press. | Will Welch, global editorial director, GQ and Pitchfork. | Gus Wenner, CEO, Rolling Stone. | Michael Wolff, author. | Matthew Yglesias, writer, Slow Boring; co-founder, Vox.com. | Jeff Zucker, CEO, RedBird IMI.

When this magazine revived the annual “Power Issue” last year, we assembled a list of secretly powerful New Yorkers in an effort to explain how the city actually works. This year, we were curious to understand how the news media is surviving in a time of imploding business models and record public distrust. We gathered 57 of the most powerful people in media — and rather than simply anoint them, we put them to work. What follows is a tour through the state of journalism, assembled from dozens of hours of extremely candid conversations.

Some executives we spoke to are in the business of keeping legacy institutions like the New York Times or the Washington Post viable; some are trying to build new media companies like Puck, The Ankler, or The Free Press; some are sole proprietors of their own brands via newsletters or audio. We focused largely on the news media: the organizations and individuals responsible for producing and distributing information to the public, whether it concerns politics or fashion or sports. And because news organizations are obviously no longer the only places — or, in some cases, even the main places — people get their news today, we didn’t look just at traditional news outlets. We also included people like Neal Mohan, head of YouTube, the platform where zoomers are increasingly likely to get their news, and Lauren Kern, head of Apple News, essentially the world’s largest newsstand.

All of these media insiders have watched up close as the business that undergirds journalism changed dramatically in the past decade, and almost all of them would agree that it hasn’t, for the most part, been for the better. We wanted to understand not just what this new state of media looks like but what the future of getting reliable news out in the world might actually be. Which news organizations are struggling most to find their footing, and which seem to have figured out how to find an audience? Can any of those companies get people to pay for their journalism? What’s the point of print? Are Facebook, Google, and X the enemies of the press or still, somehow, its salvation? What happened to the industry that scaled up to manufacture clickbait? And who’s going to train the next generation of journalists? Is getting 9,000 steady paying readers better than trying to reach a mass audience? And can anyone besides TikTok and Facebook even reach a mass audience these days?

Some unquestionably powerful figures declined to participate, and to avoid the obvious conflicts, we didn’t include any current employees from, or any conversations about, New York or its parent company, Vox Media. We also allowed those who spoke to us to be anonymous as often as they wished since our driving interest was in having genuinely honest conversations with people important enough that they can’t always be candid when quoted by name.

One question that emerged was whether any organization or individual has the ability to influence culture or shape perspectives as was once common in this business; that role today seems to rest more with social platforms and search engines, as well as the singular figure of Elon Musk. Our sources struggled to identify how power in the media works now. It’s not that no one has power anymore, but their reach is increasingly narrow and threatened by the rapidly eroding agreement over the facts.

Still, we found a lot of optimism about the media business and its future. Even those who are gloomy about the state of the industry see a lot of good work being done in their own shops and those of their rivals. As one editor-in-chief impishly put it, “Everyone who’s not having fun and just doing 20th-century stuff is so boring. It’s too much work to not have fun in it. The media universe will keep transforming, and some changes will be for the better. Five years from now, we’ll all be different because it feels like we’re on the cusp of some crazy new thing.”

“Collapsing as always, I’m reliably told.” — Ben Smith • “Going to hell in a handbasket. There may be, down the road, a way out of it, but I just don’t know what it is.” — Graydon Carter • “Like the fire swamp in The Princess Bride. It is treacherous in places, you could go up in flames, you could be attacked by a rodent of unusual size, but you can be a little bit of a pirate and anticipate those threats and figure out how to defuse them.” — Radhika Jones • “It’s in flux, and the small and strong will survive.” — Janice Min • “I don’t feel like employees understand how precarious it is at all.” — Carolyn Ryan • “Going to look very different over the next five years than it did for the previous 50.” — Jeff Zucker • “I think you’d have to be crazy to begin a career in journalism right now.” — A media executive who knew better than to say it on the record

According to five media executives.

“We lost our business model because of the internet, which everybody knows, but not for the reasons they think. It was simply that the tech companies built a better advertising model and we weren’t able to respond quickly enough. The newspapers lost their classified ads, the local newspapers lost their monopoly on distribution for certain regions, and the magazines lost their monopoly on distribution among different interest groups. If you wanted to, 20 years ago, sell golf balls, you bought an ad in Golf magazine; now, you buy a Facebook ad targeted to people who have re-upped their golf-club memberships. So there just was a better way of advertising. And we did not see that at the beginning of this tech revolution. We were so excited about infinite free distribution we didn’t see that the whole premise of the business model that supported this thing was getting undercut relatively quickly. We didn’t respond appropriately and didn’t build the right business models quickly enough. Then by the time we did, most of us had our lunch eaten. What is one main way The Atlantic and other serious publications drive subscriptions? They buy ads on Facebook.” — Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic

“One brand-new thing in the teens was this fantasy that you could become tech-rich off journalism. Certain places began playing a scale game, thinking they could get a toehold against Google and Facebook. Of course, to grow as fast as they thought they would need to, they decided they had to take venture money — that felt like, We want to be a tech company, and we’re going to do what tech people do. It had shades of WeWork, trying to tell a story about yourself that investors could get behind while raising money, when really you’re doing what everyone else is, which is pretty straightforward: making content and trying to sell sponsorship against it. Then everyone got underwater. I liken it to everyone who got an easy mortgage on a home in 2007 not knowing they were already in default.” — Janice Min, founder and CEO, Ankler Media

“Nobody wants to be in a position where their company is overwhelmingly reliant on any trillion-dollar entity for distribution or monetization, right? That’s just a very vulnerable position to put your business in. There are plenty of recent examples of companies that learned the hard way.” — Jon Kelly, editor-in-chief, Puck

“I was very hopeful that the big tech platforms would see us as very complementary. There was an amazing ten-year run of a symbiotic relationship and then the social platforms got powerful and strangled a lot of the companies that were the most focused on making content for them. It was painful for us. We are finally on the other side of this shift and building our business on direct traffic. But it was a death sentence for some of the publishers that were really focused on getting their audience from Facebook.” — Jonah Peretti, CEO, BuzzFeed

“Google really undermined professional journalism when they moved away from PageRank. It’s one thing to place less emphasis or weight on authority. It’s another to actively harm those publishing houses that have reputations and authority. And I think that they spent the past ten years seeing how far they can push their monopoly and what they can get away with. What they found is they can get away with a great deal.” — Bryan Goldberg, CEO, Bustle Digital Group

It’s pretty simple, explains Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait: “You produce good content; you get people to pay for it; the money you get from those people paying for it, you produce more good content. If you don’t have a system whereby you have consumers paying for your content, then you are generally in a perilous state.” It helps that many people use Bloomberg’s content to direct their investment decisions, so they will definitely pay for it. But his larger point stands for everyone building a paywall. “The business no longer is ‘You want to sell a couch? We’ll charge you a lot of money to reach every one of our readers,’” says ProPublica’s Stephen Engelberg. “It’s now ‘Do you want to have the journalism that keeps democracy alive? Would you be willing to pay $10 a month?’” Not every outlet charges, of course. But if you can persuade readers to subscribe, you’ve created a more direct model for making money off them. “Subscription revenue is the important business metric,” says an editor-in-chief. What’s unknown is how many subscriptions readers will pay for. “A sustainable business model for journalism is going to need people willing to pay for five or seven or ten new subscriptions instead of one or two,” explains Columbia Journalism Review’s Sewell Chan. “The Times or The Wall Street Journal presumably, or maybe CNN if they’re wildly successful, is spot No. 1. And everybody else, from Vanity Fair to the Miami Herald, is competing for spot No. 2. That’s not sustainable for our industry.”

To many, the most instructive failure of 2024 was The Messenger, an all-things-to-all-people news site run by ex Condé Nast and People executives with a “chief growth officer” formerly of Gawker Media. It planned on building out a 550-person newsroom and flooding the internet with viral scoops but instead burned through most of its $50 million in funding within a year and shut down. “I’m always suspicious when someone has a huge splashy launch saying they’re going to get up to 300 million page views in six months and reach a massive national audience,” says Betsy Reed, editor of The Guardian US. “I just feel like you can’t do that out of the gate. You need to have a much clearer grasp of who you’re reaching and why you’re going to be relevant.” What actually has succeeded this year are operations — many of them run through Substack — that have low overhead and a focused appeal. Some longtime media executives find this new world befuddling. “I’m surprised that people are okay with the subscription model, where they don’t have that many listeners or viewers but are making money, so they’re just good with it,” says one of them. “The Substack writers, people with Patreon podcasts. My generation was wired completely differently. We wanted to be read or listened to by as many people as possible. And now this new generation is like, I’m totally cool with having 9,000 die-hard fans.”

The Congress-focused media company Punchbowl News, which was founded by Politico veterans Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer in 2021, is well read inside the Beltway. “It’s so small and it’s so particular, and yet it seems like it has impact,” says Carolyn Ryan of the Times. “I don’t even know how many reporters they have — it feels like just a handful — but they really seem to have a sense of mission and what value they bring.” That value is priced at $350 a year — a lot for a general reader, but, as with Politico Pro, such subscriptions are often treated as a business expense by anyone with a need to be in the know. “Instead of them being like, Okay, this newsletter is designed so that 10 million people will open it and read it,” says The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, “they’ve designed a letter that’s meant for 10,000 people to open and read it but to pay a higher rate in order to do that.” (There have been reports that the Washington Post is looking at buying it, which the Post denies.)

Apple News has essentially created an iPhone-based newsstand with actual human editors culling news from a variety of sources for its users, some of whom pay for access to journalism that publishers offer only to subscribers. “It’s going back to a very old-fashioned skill of human curation of what you’re going to highlight,” says The Ankler’s Janice Min. “It’s a little bit like the legacy-media jamboree.”

The editorial program is run by Lauren Kern, a former editor at New York and The New York Times Magazine. Her team spotlights features as well as breaking news stories, “narrowing down the best possible source of information at that particular time” in order to figure out, as Kern puts it, “how we reach the broadest possible audience with the best possible information.”

“Apple News provides a huge lift to our stories,” says Betsy Reed. “We reach this vast audience that otherwise we wouldn’t achieve on our own.” “If you’re a small publisher,” says Sewell Chan, “Apple News is like a godsend. It’s free traffic.”

Publishers behind the Apple News paywall also get paid in a system a bit like Spotify’s. All those monthly fees get pooled, and a portion is allocated to publishers based on how many minutes people spend on their stories. (The monthly rate works out to a few cents for every “engaged minute” an article attracts.) This Apple money has recently grown to be a significant contribution to many outlets’ overall business — and one that, they calculate, more than makes up for any direct-subscription revenue it cannibalizes.

What’s to stop Apple News from turning off the spigot? Not much. “I think there’s a lot of media businesses that are relying on Apple News right now and probably in too much of a way,” says Rolling Stone’s Gus Wenner. Like other relationships with tech companies that go awry, “it’s a double-edged sword: It can be good, but it’s out of your hands and it can get pulled away.”

With cable fees under pressure from cord-cutting, CNN CEO Mark Thompson, who previously was responsible for building the paywall around the New York Times, has introduced a subscription plan starting at $3.99 a month. If even a fraction of CNN.com’s 150 million unique monthly viewers choose to pay, the plan would provide a windfall. Will what worked for a newspaper work for cable news?

“If he can find a way to package video for consumer subscribers, then that’s interesting. The evidence so far is that it’s gone the other way around: The people who’ve got successful subscription models tend to be print people who’ve added video as part of that,” says an editor. “So there is a suspicion that to make a consumer-news thing work, you need to have a version of what we used to call ‘print’ in it.”

“All eyes are on Mark Thompson and what happens at CNN, in part because of how he overhauled the Times, and he seems like somebody who might try something a little bit more daring. He’s also got more at stake,” says a TV executive who notes that while CNN’s ratings and advertising are having problems, “it also has tremendous global resources, and how could it find different ways to deliver what people want? I mean, that’d be pretty exciting to watch and see.”

But not everyone is expecting much. “They haven’t figured out just fundamentally what they’re for, what their use is,” says one pessimistic editor-in-chief. And their past experiments have failed spectacularly. Remember CNN ?

Photographed over 12 days in ten cities on the iPhone 16.

It’s a tale of two cities. It’s almost like it’s the one percent and the 99 percent,” says a journalist surveying the field beyond the Times’ walled garden. As the rest of the industry scrambles for scraps, the Times has become the Amazon of legacy media — an everything store for blue-state America’s information needs (and more). “They’ve got Wordle and all the journalism,” says Hamish McKenzie. “Almost all the journalism talent and quality gets sucked up because it’s becoming the megalith, the giant in the room that can’t be stopped.”

“They sit on 10 million paid subs; that’s unlikely to dwindle. That’s just a very powerful base to operate from,” notes one rival editor-in-chief. “They figured it out first — how to make a killing off recipes and games that could sustain the rest of their journalism,” says former CNN boss Jeff........

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Can the Media Survive?

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