When the cameras start rolling at the Critical Role studio in Los Angeles, Ed Lopez and Ben Van Der Fluit are never in front of them. There are eight far more famous faces that front the operation. Critical Role's cofounders, a team of self-professed nerdy voice actors, have been streaming their show, going on tour, and starting their book business and game publishing arm.
Carine Abouseif, Senior Editor: As an editor, my ears always perk up when I hear a story described as "juicy." That's how we talked about contributing writer Tajja Isen's essay, " The Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem," as it made its way through our editorial process. Tajja interviewed writers, book editors, and literary agents about the concept of "sales track"-a term for the number of books a writer has sold. Low sales numbers can cut down a writer's career before it's even really begun, shaping how an agent pitches their second book and whether editors will buy it.
The most dangerous part of Bari Weiss's decision to pull a 60 Minutes segment last weekend isn't that she exercised her authority. It's the precedent she set that refusing to comment can function as a veto over investigative journalism. That is the line journalists inside CBS are now staring at. Once it exists, there's no unseeing it. Over the weekend, Weiss shelved a report by correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi examining Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to CECOT, a notorious maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
Henry is joining us as a staff writer. He comes to us from Slate, where he covered housing, infrastructure, and urban life. In more than a decade on that beat, some of his many memorable stories include an account of his battle with knotweed, an urban planning diary of the Paris Summer Olympics, an investigation into why Americans don't live in hotels anymore (but should!), and a 99% Invisible episode about kids who get around town by themselves.
Samantha Johnson looks at how audience, attention and money are reshaping modern boxing. Jake Paul is a YouTuber with a global audience. Anthony Joshua is a former unified heavyweight champion. And the two go head to head in Miami. But this fight isn't about rankings or legacy. It's about the audience, attention, and money. Samantha Johnson asks what does boxing value more today, titles or attention?
In 2023 we wondered whether the broadcaster had burnt his bridges, but two years at Virgin Radio established his renaissance The carousel of Irish radio and radio presenters never stops moving. At the end of a year that saw the biggest RTÉ Radio 1 shake-up in years and a number of big-name departures, and coming mere days after Newstalk announced its biggest reshuffle in a while, we get news of another major change in the career of Ryan Tubridy.
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.
The most telling point (so far) of Netflix's proposed acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, HBO and streaming businesses came from the company itself. In pushing back on claims that the deal would be anti-competitive, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters pointed to YouTube as a bona fide rival that it would still trail with Warner Bros stack - a point that would've sounded far-fetched not that long ago.
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.
