When Emma Stefansky was in college in the early 2010s, she remembers feeling like “getting an internet media job was the cool thing to do, and everyone could do it.” Those were the days when new media upstarts like BuzzFeed, Vice, and Gawker were cultural trendsetters, with tech-level valuations, fast-growing staffs, and world-beating ambitions.
Stefansky graduated from college in 2015, just as that ecosystem was being disrupted. The ensuing decade has been defined by doom and gloom when it comes to the news media. Sites that had been thriving on digital ad revenue lost those dollars to Facebook and Google. And the companies that once appeared to be the future of the industry are now mostly gone or zombified shells of themselves. “I don’t think that my perception of digital media was true back then, but it’s definitely not true now,” Stefansky says.
Stefansky is one of many journalists I know—and yes, I include myself in this group—who have built impressive bodies of work, with stints in formidable newsrooms (she worked as an editor at Vanity Fair and then a staff writer at Thrillist) and clips at storied publications (The Atlantic, GQ, Esquire), but who have found it increasingly difficult to sustain a career. Budgets are in decline, jobs scarce, and attention fractured.
If there’s been a glimmer of hope, it’s that out of the rubble have come more sustainable structures. As publications have largely been forced to move from an ad-based model to a subscriber-based one, it’s led many of them to shift their focus from chasing clicks to serving core audiences.
New publications like Semafor and Puck, as well as older ones like Politico and The Wall Street Journal, have thrived by providing high-level professionals with valuable insider information and opportunities for connection. Many of these companies are no longer just publications but multi-pronged businesses, layering journalism with events, memberships, and experiences. The Atlantic has built a formidable events business, and The New York Times has become not just the dominant player in news, but a source of fun and useful complementary products like Cooking, Games, and Wirecutter.
Elsewhere, companies like Wonder are acquiring editorial sites like Tastemade to vertically fuse content with commerce. JPMorgan Chase did something similar when it bought The Infatuation, folding a trusted editorial city guide into a broader consumer ecosystem. And OpenAI just bought the tech news podcast TBPN.
Meanwhile, editorially independent writers have created a whole new category of media success by growing methodically. Substackers like Emily Sundberg, Hunter Harris, Amy Odell, and Matthew Yglesias built substantial communities around niche subject areas and their own cults of personality.
The problem with these offerings from prestige writers isn’t that there’s no market demand for great journalism. If anything, demand has never been more apparent. For all the turmoil in the business, one thing has not changed: the enduring appeal of strong writing. Voice, insight, intellectual clarity—these are not relics of a bygone media era but persistent, almost stubborn consumer demands. In fact, they’ve become more valuable as everything else has gotten noisier, thinner, and more disposable. Substack demonstrates that people will seek out and pay for writing that feels alive.
But if Substack represents a breakthrough in distribution and monetization, it has also revealed new limits. The freedom it affords has, in many cases, come at the expense of editorial rigor and ambition. On the consumer side, there are too many options, and too many recurring charges. Subscriptions have begun to feel less like micro-taxes that rarely deliver proportional value. The result is a kind of low-grade fatigue: readers grazing across many voices while committing to few.
Yes, Substack proved that people will pay for writers. It did not prove that writers are best left alone. And right now, the gap between those two truths is where the new writer-driven media model breaks down. Something has to give.
And that something involves consolidation. Now, before you throw me off a very tall building, let me explain: I’m not some corporate cheerleader who gets off on mergers and acquisitions. No, what I’m talking about is a joining together of small and medium-sized outfits with complementary focuses and like-minded missions. The point wouldn’t be growth for the sake of shareholder value; nor would it be growth for the sake of some advertorial product marketplace. It would be growth for the sake sharper, better, more ambitious journalism—and ultimately, long term viability.
At the moment, there aren’t a lot of incentives for successful solo creators or micro outlets to team up with peers. To do so risks a watering down of voice and a loss of autonomy. And in most cases, the math simply wouldn’t add up for the star creator; they’d wind up making less money.
But there are limits to what anyone can do on their own—not just in terms of output, but in terms of excellence. “A type of quality often comes with scale,” notes NYU journalism professor Mitchell Stephens. “Editors can contribute something.” So can fact-checking, copy editing, travel budgets, access to lawyers, and above all else, ambition—the kind that is difficult to sustain in isolation.
What consolidation offers, then, is not a retreat from the creator economy but its next evolution. A reintroduction of collaboration. A model in which individual voices remain distinct, but are amplified through shared infrastructure, editing, and collective ambition. Something like a media Voltron: a structure where distinct voices combine without disappearing, gaining power through collaboration rather than conformity.
Crucially, this model does not need to follow the path of commerce-driven expansion. Where some media companies scale outward into products, platforms, and commerce, the best creator-led collectives would scale inward—toward sharper thinking, stronger editing, and more genuinely great writing. The kind that surprises, challenges, and occasionally benefits from a larger editorial budget. The goal is not to become a lifestyle brand or a marketplace, but to produce work that is unmistakably excellent.
I could imagine a group of the best writers on Substack joining under one roof. I’d personally be more inclined to subscribe to a best-of-both version of The New Republic and The Nation than either one individually. There’d be a lot of value in the worker-owned New York news outlet, Hell Gate, beefing up its arts coverage by adding the local repertory cinema mecca, Screen Slate, to its offerings. Maybe you even throw some viewpoint diversity into the mix with The Bulwark or The Free Press. Remember when Andrew Sullivan used to brawl with Ta-Nehisi Coates across their dueling blogs on The Atlantic?
I got into media at the same time as Stefansky—a point at which the halcyon days of editors’ endless expense accounts and writers’ star treatment were firmly in the rearview. That may explain why, recently, when I read Graydon Carter’s memoir, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, the thing I envied wasn’t the ample extravagances; it was the ambition and ideas that came from collaboration. In one telling anecdote, Carter mentions a favorite Vanity Fair writer who “had a habit of coming in with ideas that I thought were less than inspired.” Carter would respond to the writer’s pitches by telling her that “she was a home-run hitter and that even if she did a brilliant job on the story she was suggesting, it could never be more than a double.” Inevitably, in a few days’ time, she’d “come up with an idea that would allow her to hit another home run.”
Perhaps Carter’s tooting his own horn. But the anecdote is instructive for evey superstar substacker, no matter how talented. Great editors don’t constrain great writers; they challenge them to be more themselves, more ambitious, more surprising. If anyone’s going to weather the current chaos and capture audience in the long-term, they’re going to need to swing for the fences.