Media Trendlines — October 26, 2026
📰 Key Themes
- Kevin Roose and Casey Newton left The New York Times and Marina Hyde left The Guardian for the same reason: they wanted to own the audience their old employers had been renting from them.
- The Verge is answering a steep traffic decline by building an app around community, as The Wall Street Journal’s digital chief predicts websites will become “a service for agents.”
- Skydance’s first company-wide memo after absorbing Warner Bros. Discovery paired a five-day office mandate with buyouts, the oldest way to cut staff without announcing layoffs.
- A New Zealand publisher who sold his house to buy his paper makes the clearest case yet against AI opt-out regimes: a right you can’t afford to enforce isn’t a right.
- Quartz now publishes up to 52 stories a day under one AI-assisted byline, which is what a famous masthead looks like once the newsroom behind it is gone.
Jump to: 📺 Big Media Moves · 💡 Business Model Innovation · 🎙️ From the Pods · 📎 Also Noted · 🧭 Takeaways
📺 Big Media Moves
Kevin Roose and Marina Hyde’s Exits Show Newsrooms Can No Longer Rent Their Stars’ Audiences
Source: 🎙️ Decoder (The Verge, Nilay Patel with Kevin Roose) · 🎙️ The Future of Media, Explained (Press Gazette, Dominic Ponsford with Charlotte Tobitt and Rob Waugh) · A Media Operator
On Decoder, Kevin Roose explained why he and Casey Newton walked away from The New York Times and Hard Fork to launch Machine Gods, a video-first show produced in partnership with NPR. His argument was blunt: YouTube is “clearly the most important media platform in the world right now,” high-quality journalism is “a vanishingly small part” of it, and legacy institutions aren’t “equipped to like make that kind of a long-term bet.” The most surprising part of going independent, he said, is how much he enjoys the business side, though he’d skip “negotiating the insurance quotes for our defamation coverage.” Host Nilay Patel noted that Joanna Stern has also just left to start her own operation.
The same week, Press Gazette’s podcast walked through Marina Hyde‘s exit from The Guardian after 26 years. According to Private Eye, as relayed on the show, the Guardian proposed a podcast series with Hyde, she asked for a share of the revenue like the one she gets reading ads on The Rest Is Entertainment, and the paper said no. She launched a Substack and YouTube show with day-one columns and videos on culture and sport, free until a paywall arrives in November. She’s doing it as the first signing to Goalhanger X, the new creator division of the company behind The Rest Is podcasts, whose revenue split the panel guessed at “like half of everything.” The panel set her alongside Amol Rajan, who left the BBC’s Today programme for a £6-a-month membership, twice-weekly interviews and a live tour, and Piers Morgan, whose 4.5 million YouTube subscribers now outnumber The Guardian‘s 4 million and trail The New York Times‘ roughly 5 million. Morgan is now adding a paid tier, four weekly newsletters and a website.
Put these exits together and they stop looking like a series of personal decisions. For two decades, publishers rented their stars’ audiences, paying a salary in exchange for the relationship and keeping the upside. That bargain held while the masthead was the distribution. On YouTube and Substack, the person is the distribution, and the Guardian’s reported refusal to share podcast revenue with one of its most-read columnists is what it looks like when an institution misprices that. Roose’s line about institutions that can’t make long-term bets is an indictment of how newsrooms budget, not of video. The publishers who keep their talent will be the ones that offer a Goalhanger-style split before the talent goes looking for one. Everyone else is running a farm system for a creator company.
Skydance’s Office Mandate Is a Layoff That Lets Employees Sign Their Own Paperwork
Source: Status (Oliver Darcy) ⚠️ Paywalled — summary based on available preview only.
Roughly three weeks after bringing Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery under one roof, David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz told staff across Skydance on Monday that they must be in the office five days a week, and in the same memo offered a Voluntary Buyout Program for those who “will not see their future here.” According to Status, CNN chief Mark Thompson and CBS News leaders Bari Weiss and Tom Cibrowski followed up with notably different memos to their own newsrooms, which may hint at which news division Skydance is protecting as it moves toward eventually combining them. Pairing a return-to-office order with buyouts is a cost cut that doesn’t count as a layoff, and the sharpest reporters with the best outside options are the ones most likely to take the money. Read alongside the Roose and Hyde exits, that is exactly the talent a merged CBS-CNN can least afford to lose.
💡 Business Model Innovation
The Verge’s 2027 App Shows Publishers Now Build for Humans and Leave the Website to the Agents
Source: A Media Operator (Christiana Sciaudone)
The Verge will launch an app in 2027, James Denis said at the AMO Summit in New York, as traffic to its website has fallen “considerably.” “It might sound crazy that we’re launching an app in 2027,” he said, but it’s meant to be “a bit more than a reader app,” with customization and features that let readers talk to one another. The Verge, free and ad-supported for its first 13 years, now sells subscriptions, has stopped prioritizing page views in favor of repeat visits and logged-in readers, and plans products around how often they deliver value: hourly, daily, weekly and up. The app is there to raise “those hourly reps.” About half of its subscribers arrive directly at the signup page rather than through an article, and it’s testing Reddit and Yahoo for discovery. “We’re not really putting all of our eggs in the basket of folks coming to the website anymore,” Denis said.
Onstage with him, The Wall Street Journal‘s head of digital Taneth Evans gave the line of the day: “Websites will become a service for agents. Apps are gonna be the thing that humans will connect with.” The Journal’s app pitch rests on utility: market data, vertical video and audio.
Evans’ framing is right, and it’s more uncomfortable than it sounds. If the open web becomes the place machines read and the app becomes the place people gather, then publishers are running two products with two different jobs, and most are staffed and measured for neither. The Verge has an advantage few can copy: a loud, loyal audience that already wants to argue in the comments. An app built on community works when the community exists. For the general-news publisher with a large drive-by audience, an app is just a smaller website. And Denis’ own description of the strategy, thinking “more like a creator,” connects straight back to the Roose story. The Verge is trying to behave like the independent operations its peers’ best people keep leaving to start.
The WordPress angle: “Websites as a service for agents” is a content-architecture problem before it is a product problem. A publisher that wants the same journalism to feed an agent-readable web, a community app and third-party discovery surfaces needs content stored as structured, reusable pieces rather than pages built for a browser. Whatever CMS sits underneath, the ones that treat the article page as just one output will make Evans’ two-track future much cheaper to run.
NBR’s Owner Shows Why an AI Opt-Out Is a Right Only Large Publishers Can Afford
Source: Mumbrella (Todd Scott, opinion)
Todd Scott, owner and publisher of New Zealand’s National Business Review, opens his piece by noting that he and his wife sold their home to invest in NBR, which has since dropped print and advertising to bet entirely on subscriptions. He’s responding to reported Australian proposals for an AI-training opt-out, which 63 international media and creative organizations have warned against. Under opt-out, he argues, a publisher has to identify every AI developer, work out how to object, check compliance and pay for enforcement. Having chased New Zealand government agencies that shared NBR journalism beyond their licenses, he knows what winning costs: “A right you cannot afford to enforce offers very little comfort.” His other line should be on every policymaker’s desk: “If I must opt out, you’ve already decided that my permission doesn’t come first.”
Scott’s argument lands harder than most because of who is making it. The large publishers can afford lawyers, licensing teams and bot-blocking infrastructure. Opt-out regimes protect them. A subscription publisher that already put its home on the line can’t fund an enforcement department. Every opt-out proposal is a transfer of compliance cost from the companies that want the content to the companies that made it, and the smallest independent publishers pay the highest rate.
🎙️ From the Pods
Quartz’s 52-Stories-a-Day Byline Shows What a Masthead Is Worth Once the Newsroom Is Gone
Source: 🎙️ The Future of Media, Explained (Press Gazette) · Press Gazette (Rob Waugh)
Rob Waugh walked through his investigation into Quartz, where most of the site’s output now comes from a single byline with no photo, no bio and no working contact. On one day, the byline filed 52 stories, on topics ranging from family dog breeds to cybersecurity to AI drug discovery. About 9,200 articles, counting syndication and translations, are listed since roughly March. Waugh says the pieces score as wholly or mostly AI-generated, and signals point to a low-cost contractor in the Philippines. Quartz has changed hands four times in seven years and once had more than 200 journalists working in 19 languages. It still pulls nearly 2 million monthly visits, per Similarweb, and Waugh’s theory is that the real business is monetizing a newsletter list of around a million subscribers with ad-stuffed AI copy. Quartz didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment. Fortune’s editorial director reshared the story with a one-line review: “this is how not to use AI.”
This is domain arbitrage, and it works only until it doesn’t. The asset being drained isn’t the content. It’s the trust Google and readers built up in the Quartz name over a decade of real reporting. That trust is finite, and a manual search review or a wave of unsubscribes will end the experiment. The lesson for anyone buying distressed mastheads is that a brand’s search authority and newsletter list are depreciating assets the moment the journalism stops.
Metro and the Standard Show Free Print Can’t Survive Once Its Commute Has Wi-Fi
Source: 🎙️ The Future of Media, Explained (Press Gazette) · Press Gazette
Charlotte Tobitt laid out the state of London’s free papers. Metro, after the sudden exit of its editor-in-chief and the interim return of Ted Young, has told 90 staff their jobs are at risk and plans 61 redundancies, saying its roughly 900,000 daily print distribution is too expensive. Online, it fell from the UK’s 8th-biggest news site with 16.1 million monthly readers in May 2024 to 14th with 11.4 million, a 29% drop. The Evening Standard has lost about £157 million since going free in 2009, lost £8.3 million in the 15 months to the end of 2025 as revenue fell 40%, and moved its digital newsroom and ad sales to The Independent. Of 75 staff at the start of the year, 16 remain on the weekly print edition. General news with no niche is the hardest thing to sell in print or online, because it’s the easiest for AI answers to copy and the commute that once made a free paper worth picking up now has 5G.
📎 Also Noted
- 🔹 Pete Pachal, who “lived through the pivot to video two or three times” at Mashable, argues the economics have changed: video was always “the most valuable thing we could make, and the most expensive,” and AI editing is collapsing the second half of that sentence. — The Media Copilot
- 🔹 Status reports that Pivot, the Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway podcast, is launching a newsletter, another talent-led brand moving into text. — Status ⚠️ Paywalled
- 🔹 Digital agency GammaDX says only 12 of 50 Australian brand websites it tested are fully ready for AI agents, and has launched an “agent experience design” practice. — Mumbrella
- 🔹 The Australian Taxation Office says creators must declare products, services and experiences received in exchange for promotion at market value. — Mumbrella
- 🔹 WPP Production Australia hired Thinkerbell’s Felix Ettelson as head of creative craft to expand generative AI workflows. — Mumbrella
- 🔹 Olay Australia’s “Rewrite the Signs of Ageing” campaign targets AI answers that reduce ageing to “deeper wrinkles” and “sagging skin,” a sign that brands are starting to treat AI answer engines as a reputation channel. — Mumbrella
🧭 Takeaways
- Talent revenue-sharing is now a retention tool, not a perk. The Guardian reportedly refused Marina Hyde a cut of podcast revenue and lost her to a company that offers one. Publishers should put creator-style splits on the table for their best-known people before a Goalhanger does.
- The website and the app are becoming different products. If Taneth Evans is right that websites become a service for agents, publishers need to decide what the human-facing product is for and measure it on return frequency, not page views.
- Opt-out is a subsidy for AI companies paid by small publishers. Industry groups should press for permission-first rules and put independent owners like Todd Scott, not just the biggest groups, at the front of that argument.
- A masthead without a newsroom is a wasting asset. Quartz shows that search authority and a newsletter list can be milked with AI copy, but only for a while. Buyers of distressed brands should value them on the journalism that sustains them, not the traffic they still get.
- Undifferentiated general news is the first casualty everywhere. Metro and the Standard are losing in print and online for the same reason: nothing they publish is hard to find elsewhere. A niche, a voice or a community is now the price of staying in the business.