Old Media Finally Wakes Up from a Coma

The empire strikes back—or at least it will try

A little over a year ago, I announced that new media would triumph over old media in 2024. That happened with a vengeance.

• You can love him or hate him but Joe Rogan is now more powerful than any establishment journalist.

• Elon Musk, for better or worse, drives the news cycle as Twitter CEO in ways Walter Cronkite never dreamed of. (And I’m not even including the news Musk causes, just what he amplifies.)

• Cable news can’t match the impact of the biggest YouTube channels and social media accounts. Many influencers have audiences ten or twenty times larger than Fox or CNN hosts.

• Substack has moved out of the fringes of the media world, and is just as influential as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal—and breaks just as many big stories.

But is the game over? Does legacy media shrink into irrelevance?

No, that will not happen.

2025 will be different….

---

If you want to support my work, please take out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).

---

Old media is now scared stiff. They finally have figured out that they must adapt—or die.

In fact, they got such a jolt recently that they are finally waking up from their dogmatic slumbers. And they will change more in the next year than they have in the last quarter of a century.

Old media is finally waking up.

The CEO of CNN admitted yesterday (in the New York Times) that the company won’t exist unless it embraces radical change.

And we now know what that change looks like: Old media will imitate new media.

Mark Thompson, CNN’s chief executive, spelled it out:

“If we do not follow the audiences to the new platforms with real conviction and scale, our future prospects will not be good.”

The New York Times has already figured it out. They are now releasing podcast interviews with the same guests as Joe Rogan.

Six weeks after Rogan talked with venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, the Times did the exact same thing. That’s not a coincidence.

But it won’t be easy catching up with new media. Rogan’s interview got 2.8 million views, while the Time only reached 31,000 people.

So a few days later, the Times went totally rogue. It interviewed Curtis Yarvin, who is far outside the mainstream—he’s an actual monarchist!—and maybe even a bridge too far for Rogan.

I must say I was surprised. The idea that the New York Times would host a polite conversation with Curtis Yarvin was not on my bingo card.

Well, it wasn’t entirely polite.

Times interviewer David Marchese pushed back aggressively—their dialogue soon resembled more a debate than an interview. The conversation was testy and in-your-face, and that made it fascinating to watch.

I’ve never seen this kind of rough-and-tumble journalism before from the New York Times. Sure, they’ve always known how to play hardball, but usually in subtle Ivy League-ish ways.

If they didn’t like you, you were just excluded from the country club. Mr. Yarvin would get turned away at the front door. But not anymore.

Now they’re inviting alternative voices into the boxing ring, rolling up their sleeves, and throwing punches.

You should expect more of this in the future. It will probably be the role model for people who want a “leftist version of Joe Rogan.”

But it isn’t only the Left that is imitating new media. The Right is doing the exact same thing. Sean Hannity has launched a longform interview show on Fox News, and it’s clear that he is also trying to imitate the Joe Rogan playbook.

Something similar is underway at the Washington Post. They call it the “Third Newsroom,” and it’s still not entirely clear what it will do.

The Post is tossing around a lot of buzzword. They plan to pursue “experimentation, learning, and adaptation as we explore opportunities and new formats…”

Blah, blah, blah….

But the basic idea appears to be another feisty new media approach. I expect big changes.

Like CNN, the Post is deathly afraid. In a recent announcement, the newspaper admitted that:

The need to move faster to reach untapped audiences and innovate is urgent, given the broad, and rapid, industry shifts in reader habits and economics.

That’s an understatement.

The Washington Post lost $100 million last year, and digital visitors dropped from 114 million in November 2023 to 54 million in November 2024—a collapse of 53%. During that same period many alt media outlets doubled in size, but the Post’s online readership fell by more than half.

And it could get worse before it gets better. The Post newsroom is angry, and some of the best known journalists have left, slamming the door on the way out.

Those who stay must feel a little envious of Jennifer Rubin, who left the Post in a huff on January 13, and just ten days later had a stunning 335,000 subscribers on Substack. That’s an extraordinary achievement by any measure—and a useful reminder of why new media is triumphant right now.

(In fact, Substack as a whole is on a growth tear so far this year. At least it feels that way at The Honest Broker. And I don’t think my case is unique.)

Like the Washington Post, CNN is in a tight spot right now—revenues have fallen $400 million in the last three years. And so is MSNBC, which recently got spun off by owner Comcast, probably in anticipation of a sale. But any buyer will need to have a strategy for regaining the cable network’s audience, which is down 57% in the aftermath of the election.

I expect both of those networks to make a similar attempt to imitate new media—with something looser, fresher, less formulaic than the familiar talking heads approach of the past.

The audience wants something more conversational and interactive. The whole tone of public discourse has changed. Old media needs to get with the program, and as soon as possible.

That’s really the only viable strategy.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the new style of communication in America. I pointed to six big changes.

Source

When you consider these, you understand immediately why free-wheeling podcast interviews are so popular right now. They capture all six of the new norms.

It’s not easy for the New York Times to learn this. But it’s happening. And others will soon move in the same direction. Some will move faster, and reap benefits. Others will move slowly, and perhaps not survive.

These old media companies are still making mistakes. They are still hiring from each other, instead of tapping into the alt media talent base. But even that will change.

Just consider that when Amazon hired MrBeast, he had been posting videos online for 12 years. They waited until he reached 2 billion monthly views before waking up—but they did finally wake up.

I have mixed feelings about MrBeast. I know some of you do, too—I hear gripes every time I mention his name. And I also have misgivings about many alt media stars.

But even if you disagree with them, you can still learn from them. You imitate some ingredients, but add improvements of your own.

That’s how you really tame the (Mr) Beast. Or Rogan or whomever. And there’s a whole zoo of those alt media beasts out there that need to be tamed, if old-school journalism wants to survive.

When legacy media figures out how to do that, they will be formidable. They will have reinvented themselves, and maybe survive another hundred years.

If it’s going to happen, the time is now. A few months ago, that was just my opinion, but it’s now the reality. Legacy media bosses are saying it themselves.

The next moves are theirs to make. And there will be lots of pushback (especially from inside their own organizations). It will be fascinating to watch this play out.