Over the past few years, the online creator world has gone mainstream. More journalists are building and leveraging their online followings, and an increasing number of homegrown content creators are covering big news events. With these changes, the media landscape is becoming more fractured and legacy corporate media is hemorrhaging talent and relevance among young people.
I predict that this year we’ll begin to see the emergence of a real and robust alternative to traditional corporate media in the form of highly engaging creator-driven independent media, and we’ll see rich and powerful people working aggressively to preserve their power in this new landscape.
This shift is evident when you look at the major news events this past year. The war in Ukraine was broadcast on TikTok. Millions of people followed the Depp v. Heard trial, or the FTX meltdown, solely through the lens of YouTubers, Twitter accounts, Substack writers, and podcast hosts. And it’s undeniable that Platformer, an independent news Substack founded by Casey Newton, has broken some of the most talked about and impactful coverage of Musk’s Twitter takeover.
Perhaps the most significant example of this fracturing in the media world is seen in coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. As thousands of people continue to die a week, millions become disabled by Long Covid, and our leaders leverage corporate media to normalize unprecedented mass death and disability, a whole new class of independent creators has captured audiences by producing essential public health journalism.
Death Panel, an independent podcast, hosted by the authors Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, provides a level of policy analysis almost wholly absent in traditional media. A myriad of independent Substack writers have pushed back on political leaders’ dominant narratives. And Peste Magazine, which produces deeply reported health journalism and commentary, continues to publish the sharpest writing on our current moment.
While there are many thoughtful and responsible creators who abide by journalistic principles, others will do or say anything to attract attention and make money. It’s easy for people who don’t know any better to be led down a rabbit hole by creators pushing conspiracy theories or hyper-politicized misinformation.
Still, young people are gravitating toward this new landscape. Feeling utterly unserved by traditional media, they are significantly more likely to seek out news on social media and to get that news from an online creator.
For everyone who wants to leverage this new, creator-driven media landscape to build a better world, there are as many who seek to use it to reinforce old systems of power. These people constantly attempt to politicize the shift in media consumption, saying that young people are rejecting traditional media for becoming too “woke.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The shift away from legacy media is a broad, technological shift, not a singularly ideological one.
It’s a shift that the political right is aggressively trying to capitalize on. Take Bari Weiss, for instance, a Substack commentator who recently took time away from doing comms work for Twitter to announce a new media venture.
Though Weiss continually positions herself as a “fiercely independent” journalist, she, like many right-wing content creators, is simply selling old, legacy power structures back to the public in new shiny packaging. It’s why members of the legacy media class are so quick to excitedly and uncritically promote her endeavors.
Weiss is not the only online creator masquerading as “anti-establishment” media while working tirelessly to serve the interests of the richest and most powerful. Chaya Raichik, the woman who runs Libs of TikTok, has had a longstanding financial relationship with Seth Dillon, owner of the right-wing media site The Babylon Bee. Right-wing influencer Glenn Greenwald, who once did journalism, now takes an “ample funding package” from Rumble, a far-right YouTube competitor backed by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Many legacy media journalists fall for these creators’ false positioning as outsiders because their view of the media world is so limited. They aren’t knowledgeable about the broader online creator landscape, and so they can’t properly contextualize people like Weiss, Raichik, and Greenwald. These creators are only known so well in traditional media because they remain tools of the establishment, backed by rich and powerful people who prop them up in order to retain their power and control in the new creator-driven landscape.
We are at an inflection point, and traditional media beginning to crumble provides a huge opportunity. We finally have the chance to build a more diverse and inclusive system that amplifies independent voices who are truly interested in holding power to account. To do that, we need to not only hold the platforms that incentivize outrage, harassment, and disinformation accountable, but we must also be sure not to replicate the flaws of traditional media in a new setting.
We cannot allow rich and powerful creators to disguise themselves as grassroots or to seize power online in order to promote extremist ideology. We must also encourage traditional media, which can still provide a crucial check on power, to learn, grow, and adapt to serve a broader, younger, more diverse audience.
Taylor Lorenz is a technology columnist for The Washington Post.
Over the past few years, the online creator world has gone mainstream. More journalists are building and leveraging their online followings, and an increasing number of homegrown content creators are covering big news events. With these changes, the media landscape is becoming more fractured and legacy corporate media is hemorrhaging talent and relevance among young people.
I predict that this year we’ll begin to see the emergence of a real and robust alternative to traditional corporate media in the form of highly engaging creator-driven independent media, and we’ll see rich and powerful people working aggressively to preserve their power in this new landscape.
This shift is evident when you look at the major news events this past year. The war in Ukraine was broadcast on TikTok. Millions of people followed the Depp v. Heard trial, or the FTX meltdown, solely through the lens of YouTubers, Twitter accounts, Substack writers, and podcast hosts. And it’s undeniable that Platformer, an independent news Substack founded by Casey Newton, has broken some of the most talked about and impactful coverage of Musk’s Twitter takeover.
Perhaps the most significant example of this fracturing in the media world is seen in coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. As thousands of people continue to die a week, millions become disabled by Long Covid, and our leaders leverage corporate media to normalize unprecedented mass death and disability, a whole new class of independent creators has captured audiences by producing essential public health journalism.
Death Panel, an independent podcast, hosted by the authors Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, provides a level of policy analysis almost wholly absent in traditional media. A myriad of independent Substack writers have pushed back on political leaders’ dominant narratives. And Peste Magazine, which produces deeply reported health journalism and commentary, continues to publish the sharpest writing on our current moment.
While there are many thoughtful and responsible creators who abide by journalistic principles, others will do or say anything to attract attention and make money. It’s easy for people who don’t know any better to be led down a rabbit hole by creators pushing conspiracy theories or hyper-politicized misinformation.
Still, young people are gravitating toward this new landscape. Feeling utterly unserved by traditional media, they are significantly more likely to seek out news on social media and to get that news from an online creator.
For everyone who wants to leverage this new, creator-driven media landscape to build a better world, there are as many who seek to use it to reinforce old systems of power. These people constantly attempt to politicize the shift in media consumption, saying that young people are rejecting traditional media for becoming too “woke.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The shift away from legacy media is a broad, technological shift, not a singularly ideological one.
It’s a shift that the political right is aggressively trying to capitalize on. Take Bari Weiss, for instance, a Substack commentator who recently took time away from doing comms work for Twitter to announce a new media venture.
Though Weiss continually positions herself as a “fiercely independent” journalist, she, like many right-wing content creators, is simply selling old, legacy power structures back to the public in new shiny packaging. It’s why members of the legacy media class are so quick to excitedly and uncritically promote her endeavors.
Weiss is not the only online creator masquerading as “anti-establishment” media while working tirelessly to serve the interests of the richest and most powerful. Chaya Raichik, the woman who runs Libs of TikTok, has had a longstanding financial relationship with Seth Dillon, owner of the right-wing media site The Babylon Bee. Right-wing influencer Glenn Greenwald, who once did journalism, now takes an “ample funding package” from Rumble, a far-right YouTube competitor backed by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Many legacy media journalists fall for these creators’ false positioning as outsiders because their view of the media world is so limited. They aren’t knowledgeable about the broader online creator landscape, and so they can’t properly contextualize people like Weiss, Raichik, and Greenwald. These creators are only known so well in traditional media because they remain tools of the establishment, backed by rich and powerful people who prop them up in order to retain their power and control in the new creator-driven landscape.
We are at an inflection point, and traditional media beginning to crumble provides a huge opportunity. We finally have the chance to build a more diverse and inclusive system that amplifies independent voices who are truly interested in holding power to account. To do that, we need to not only hold the platforms that incentivize outrage, harassment, and disinformation accountable, but we must also be sure not to replicate the flaws of traditional media in a new setting.
We cannot allow rich and powerful creators to disguise themselves as grassroots or to seize power online in order to promote extremist ideology. We must also encourage traditional media, which can still provide a crucial check on power, to learn, grow, and adapt to serve a broader, younger, more diverse audience.
Taylor Lorenz is a technology columnist for The Washington Post.
Rodney Gibbs Recalibrating how we work apart
Brian Stelter Finding new ways to reach news avoiders
Mario García More newsrooms go mobile-first
Khushbu Shah Global reporting will suffer
Taylor Lorenz The “creator economy” will be astroturfed
Nikki Usher This is the year of the RSS reader. (Really!)
Johannes Klingebiel The innovation team, R.I.P.
Sarabeth Berman Nonprofit local news shows that it can scale
Simon Galperin Philanthropy stops investing in corporate media
Joanne McNeil Facebook and the media kiss and make up
Mariana Moura Santos A woman who speaks is a woman who changes the world
Mael Vallejo More threats to press freedom across the Americas
Jennifer Brandel AI couldn’t care less. Journalists will care more.
Emma Carew Grovum The year to resist forgetting about diversity
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau More of the same
An Xiao Mina Journalism in a time of permacrisis
Juleyka Lantigua Newsrooms recognize women of color as the canaries in the coal mine
Christoph Mergerson The rot at the core of the news business
Sue Schardt Toward a new poetics of journalism
Cindy Royal Yes, journalists should learn to code, but…
Kaitlin C. Miller Harassment in journalism won’t get better, but we’ll talk about it more openly
Raney Aronson-Rath Journalists will band together to fight intimidation
Andrew Losowsky Journalism realizes the replacement for Twitter is not a new Twitter
Molly de Aguiar and Mandy Van Deven Narrative change trend brings new money to journalism
Janelle Salanga Journalists work from a place of harm reduction
Karina Montoya More reporters on the antitrust beat
Peter Bale Rising costs force more digital innovation
Eric Thurm Journalists think of themselves as workers
Ryan Kellett Airline-like loyalty programs try to tie down news readers
Jaden Amos TikTok personality journalists continue to rise
David Cohn AI made this prediction
Kirstin McCudden We’ll codify protection of journalism and newsgathering
Alex Sujong Laughlin Credit where it’s due
Parker Molloy We’ll reach new heights of moral panic
Don Day The news about the news is bad. I’m optimistic.
Jarrad Henderson Video editing will help people understand the media they consume
Moreno Cruz Osório Brazilian journalism turns wounds into action
Snigdha Sur Newsrooms get nimble in a recession
Danielle K. Brown and Kathleen Searles DEI efforts must consider mental health and online abuse
Amy Schmitz Weiss Journalism education faces a crossroads
Sue Cross Thinking and acting collectively to save the news
Sarah Alvarez Dream bigger or lose out
Kaitlyn Wells We’ll prioritize media literacy for children
Laura E. Davis The year we embrace the robots — and ourselves
David Skok Renewed interest in human-powered reporting
Basile Simon Towards supporting criminal accountability
Amethyst J. Davis The slight of the great contraction
Peter Sterne AI enters the newsroom
Andrew Donohue We’ll find out whether journalism can, indeed, save democracy
Alan Henry A reckoning with why trust in news is so low
Ståle Grut Your newsroom experiences a Midjourney-gate, too
Doris Truong Workers demand to be paid what the job is worth
Jim VandeHei There is no “peak newsletter”
Elite Truong In platform collapse, an opportunity for community
Alexandra Borchardt The year of the climate journalism strategy
Barbara Raab More journalism funders will take more risks
Gina Chua The traditional story structure gets deconstructed
Pia Frey Publishers start polling their users at scale
Joni Deutsch Podcast collaboration — not competition — breeds excellence
Dominic-Madori Davis Everyone finally realizes the need for diverse voices in tech reporting
Priyanjana Bengani Partisan local news networks will collaborate
Bill Grueskin Local news will come to rely on AI
Eric Nuzum A focus on people instead of power
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Well-being will become a core tenet of journalism
Jessica Clark Open discourse retrenches
Anita Varma Journalism prioritizes the basic need for survival
Sumi Aggarwal Smart newsrooms will prioritize board development
Victor Pickard The year journalism and capitalism finally divorce
John Davidow A year of intergenerational learning
Anika Anand Independent news businesses lead the way on healthy work cultures
Alexandra Svokos Working harder to reach audiences where they are
Tre'vell Anderson Continued culpability in anti-trans campaigns
Mauricio Cabrera It’s no longer about audiences, it’s about communities
Kerri Hoffman Podcasting goes local
Megan Lucero and Shirish Kulkarni The future of journalism is not you
Surya Mattu Data journalists learn from photojournalists
Jesse Holcomb Buffeted, whipped, bullied, pulled
Francesco Zaffarano There is no end of “social media”
Paul Cheung More news organizations will realize they are in the business of impact, not eyeballs
Joshua P. Darr Local to live, wire to wither
Dannagal G. Young Stop rewarding elite performances of identity threat
Ben Werdmuller The internet is up for grabs again
Nicholas Thompson The year AI actually changes the media business
Michael Schudson Journalism gets more and more difficult
Delano Massey The industry shakes its imposter syndrome
Ariel Zirulnick Journalism doubles down on user needs
Walter Frick Journalists wake up to the power of prediction markets
Gabe Schneider Well-funded journalism leaders stop making disparate pay
Sue Robinson Engagement journalism will have to confront a tougher reality
Shanté Cosme The answer to “quiet quitting” is radical empathy
Eric Ulken Generative AI brings wrongness at scale
Zizi Papacharissi Platforms are over
Tim Carmody Newsletter writers need a new ethics
Rachel Glickhouse Humanizing newsrooms will be a badge of honor
Emily Nonko Incarcerated reporters get more bylines
Mary Walter-Brown and Tristan Loper Mission-driven metrics become our North Star
Burt Herman The year AI truly arrives — and with it the reckoning
Mar Cabra The inevitable mental health revolution
Kathy Lu We need emotionally agile newsroom leaders
Alex Perry New paths to transparency without Twitter
Brian Moritz Rebuilding the news bundle
Anthony Nadler Confronting media gerrymandering
Matt Rasnic More newsroom workers turn to organized labor
Errin Haines Journalists on the campaign trail mend trust with the public
Nicholas Diakopoulos Journalists productively harness generative AI tools
Michael W. Wagner The backlash against pro-democracy reporting is coming
Ayala Panievsky It’s time for PR for journalism
Martina Efeyini Talk to Gen Z. They’re the experts of Gen Z.
Jody Brannon We’ll embrace policy remedies
Janet Haven ChatGPT and the future of trust
Laxmi Parthasarathy Unlocking the silent demand for international journalism
Jacob L. Nelson Despite it all, people will still want to be journalists
Felicitas Carrique and Becca Aaronson News product goes from trend to standard
Leezel Tanglao Community partnerships drive better reporting
Jonas Kaiser Rejecting the “free speech” frame
Bill Adair The year of the fact-check (no, really!)
Nicholas Jackson There will be launches — and we’ll keep doing the work
Cory Bergman The AI content flood
Sarah Marshall A web channel strategy won’t be enough
Richard Tofel The press might get better at vetting presidential candidates
Sam Guzik AI will start fact-checking. We may not like the results.
Stefanie Murray The year U.S. media stops screwing around and becomes pro-democracy
Upasna Gautam Technology that performs at the speed of news
Jakob Moll Journalism startups will think beyond English
A.J. Bauer Covering the right wrong
Anna Nirmala News organizations get new structures
Larry Ryckman We’ll work together with our competitors
Esther Kezia Thorpe Subscription pressures force product innovation
Julia Beizer News fatigue shows us a clear path forward
Joe Amditis AI throws a lifeline to local publishers
Jennifer Choi and Jonathan Jackson Funders finally bet on next-generation news entrepreneurs
Eric Holthaus As social media fragments, marginalized voices gain more power
Masuma Ahuja Journalism starts working for and with its communities
Christina Shih Shared values move from nice-to-haves to essentials
Al Lucca Digital news design gets interesting again
Sam Gregory Synthetic media forces us to understand how media gets made
Cassandra Etienne Local news fellowships will help fight newsroom inequities
Ryan Nave Citizen journalism, but make it equitable
Gordon Crovitz The year advertisers stop funding misinformation
Julia Angwin Democracies will get serious about saving journalism
Jim Friedlich Local journalism steps up to the challenge of civic coverage
Cari Nazeer and Emily Goligoski News organizations step up their support for caregivers
Josh Schwartz The AI spammers are coming
Kavya Sukumar Belling the cat: The rise of independent fact-checking at scale
Hillary Frey Death to the labor-intensive memo for prospective hires
Ryan Gantz “I’m sorry, but I’m a large language model”
Lisa Heyamoto The independent news industry gets a roadmap to sustainability
Susan Chira Equipping local journalism
J. Siguru Wahutu American journalism reckons with its colonialist tendencies
Daniel Trielli Trust in news will continue to fall. Just look at Brazil.
Jessica Maddox Journalists keep getting manipulated by internet culture
Jenna Weiss-Berman The economic downturn benefits the podcasting industry. (No, really!)
S. Mitra Kalita “Everything sucks. Good luck to you.”
Sarah Stonbely Growth in public funding for news and information at the state and local levels