"Media is a famously myopic and sclerotic industry. The big changes that take place within it often go unnoticed, at first, by the people who are paid to set its future course. Sometimes, the stuff that we in the industry miss out on is obvious to the rest of the world. We were not the first to notice, for example, that features and news stories were being cannibalized by social media, slowly at first, and then thoroughly."
"Beginning in mid-November, shortly before Thanksgiving, the journalist Ryan Lizza turned his Substack newsletter, "Telos," into a tell-all account of his messy relationship with his former fiancée Olivia Nuzzi, who was about to publish a memoir. He began with the story of Nuzzi's alleged affair with the former Presidential candidate Mark Sanford before getting to her relationship with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and he presented everything in serialized form, with a series of cliffhangers."
A.I. emerges as a major influence, but other less obvious trends will also shape how news is understood. Media often remains myopic and sclerotic, causing the industry to miss gradual but consequential shifts. Social media gradually cannibalized traditional features and news, transforming distribution and audience attention. Small cultural changes can quickly escalate into dominant phenomena, such as the widespread adoption of narrative true-crime podcasts. Journalists and writers are experimenting with serialized, paywalled personal revelations on platforms like Substack, using cliffhangers and subscriptions to monetize intimate storytelling, though such serialized scandals may lose momentum over time.
Read at The New Yorker
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