Media industry

Media industry

Our work delving into the businesses of independent news publishers through LION's Sustainability Audits has given us a unique window into the operations of more than 500 newsrooms across the country. Each is trying to build a digital business around local news; some are rural, some are urban; some are relatively large with staffs up to a few dozen, but the vast majority are small.

The early web required that many newspaper journalists learn content management systems and repurpose their work for online spaces while maintaining their print duties. Social media platforms layered on demands to engage audiences where they gathered, to participate in every conversation as fast as possible, and make the news literally dance to new trends. Mobile technology untethered journalism from the desktop, creating an expectation of always-on availability and real-time responsiveness.

Khaleej Times, the UAE's first English daily, was launched in 1978 and remains one of the most trusted news sources in the region. Its digital platform along with its social media channels, reaches over 15 million users every month. Published by Galadari Printing and Publishing Co., the brand has expanded into a diverse media portfolio, including City Times, WKND, BTR, Young Times, and KT LUXE. KT Events convenes policymakers, businesses, and thought leaders through domain-focused forums and platforms.

Earlier this week, I detailed how journalism lost its ability to set the terms of public reality—dismantled not by its own failures, but by algorithmic systems that reward emotional intensity over accuracy and affirmation over verification. Editorial judgment, imperfect yet guided by civic purpose, has been replaced by engagement-optimized algorithms. The result is fragmentation severe enough to undermine shared reality itself—or worse, to convince us objective truth no longer exists.

Sony is paying approximately $460 milliion to purchase Peanuts [PDF] and its characters, including Snoopy and Charlie Brown, created by Charles M. Schulz. That's a 41 percent stake Sony is buying from Canadian firm WildBrain. Since Sony bought 39 percent of the franchise back in 2018, this will give the company an 80 percent stake. The deal is still subject to regulatory approvals, but Peanuts will become Sony's consolidated subsidiary once it's closed. Schulz's family still owns the remaining 20 percent stake in the franchise.

This isn't as much as a prediction for 2026 as it is my hope: that the media will not be so entranced by President Trump's compulsion to dominate every news cycle and instead focus limited resources on stories that matter, stories that hold the powerful accountable, and stories that help people make the best decisions about their lives. In our determination to keep up with Trump, many news organizations, including my own, have out of necessity focused on the pandemonium in government and society.

For decades, philanthropy has reinforced a media landscape that favors the biggest (and whitest) news organizations, whether they be nonprofit, for-profit, or startups, while chronically underinvesting in ethnic and community media. I predict that 2026 will see one or more failures of newsrooms conceived of or propped up by funders, forcing a reckoning about how we support journalism in America.

This year, as legacy news outlets slashed diversity teams, eliminated community beats, and gutted cultural coverage, they undermined the very asset that determines relevance in today's fragmented media environment: cultural fluency. These cuts were framed as cost-saving measures, but in reality, they stripped away the expertise that allows media institutions to build trust, resonance, and meaningful connection with the audiences they claim to serve.

Public media outlets entered 2025 on a wave of unease between declining on-air audience, waning underwriting revenue, post-election news fatigue, and the looming uncertainty about federal funding. The latter sadly became a reality on July 18 when Congress voted to claw back $1.1 billion in public media funding, leaving NPR, PBS, and more than 400 member stations across the country to figure out what to do next.

In the post‑pandemic news cycle, it became easy to treat charts as a kind of journalistic spell: visualize the data and legitimacy will follow. But the flood of partisan "stat dumps" has trained plenty of people to see numbers as just another weapon in a never-ending culture war. In 2026, the task for data journalism is not to make more extravagant visualizations, but to rebuild data as a shared language between people who no longer trust one another.

Over the last few years, publishers have watched their major distribution partners, first social and now search, become volatile and unreliable. Constant shifts have weakened the relationship between publishers and the platforms that once delivered their audiences. The AI era is pushing this to a breaking point. As generative interfaces replace traditional search, it has become clear that publishers cannot depend on discovery happening elsewhere. The only durable asset left is the audience's recognition of and loyalty to each publisher's brand.

Once I cooled off, I realized that counsel, which arrived in a LION sustainability audit, was wise if difficult to achieve. Try finding a grant for a business partner. Go ahead, I'll wait. Not getting "operational" money is, of course, a complaint not limited to news organizations, nonprofit or otherwise. Program officers are generally disinclined to pay for your overhead. But let me propose something radical: If we're saving journalism, it's going to require overhead.

It's an efficient way to get information, and it lives in a space that combines many information sources. Social feeds are places where audiences can get updates about the many facets of their life - community events, road closures, upcoming local issues, updates from friends and family, advice for working more efficiently - in one place, making it especially ripe to soak in new information.

Our starting point: Let's agree that journalism is not content. It's not a product. It's not an export. It's a shared resource. Treat it that way and everything changes. The idea of a journalism commons is not new (certainly not to Nieman Lab predictions), nor is it a metaphor; it's a tried-and-trusted, locally owned governance model that anyone can take part in,

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The old model imagined journalism as a set of headlights that froze wrongdoing in the glare of publicity. But today, the information environment is constantly illuminated with infinite content. When everything is bright, nothing stops. Nothing changes. The spotlight has become ambient light. For years, journalism relied on a simple chain of accountability: expose wrongdoing and someone would apply pressure. Public institutions, regulators, voters, shareholders, civic groups, or even social norms were expected to take the next step once the facts were visible.

Forty years of toxic media policy, the libertarian ethos of big tech, the collapse of the 20th-century business model, the paranoia and extremism of online life, the rise of the far right: when stirred together, these nutrients do not constitute the soil for a healthy free press. This is certainly not the first time people have found themselves with a dearth of formal news structures. Besides most of human history, one could point to present-day Hungary or Turkey or Saudi Arabia.