In the early 2000s, digital-native outlets like Gawker and BuzzFeed helped redefine online journalism around clicks and virality. The explosion of platforms like Facebook and Twitter pushed publishers to reshape their business models around traffic.
As was widely noted at the time, that process had profoundly negative consequences for journalism. Now, the obsession with site traffic itself is no longer enough. For the first time in history, a greater number of Americans are getting news from social media and video platforms than from TV news broadcasts or news websites and apps.
In one study, over one‑fifth of respondents reported encountering news or commentary from a podcaster like Joe Rogan in a given week, illustrating how noninstitutional figures are filling an attention vacuum that legacy brands once dominated. Younger adults in particular follow traditional national and local news far less closely than older groups, gravitating instead toward social feeds, video, and podcast content.
Even for those who consume longer-form media, the dopamine hits that platforms like Instagram Reels and TikTok provide are difficult to compete with. To stand a chance in the digital-native landscape, legacy media outlets have thus been forced into making short-form video content. But their competition isn’t just other newsrooms; it’s the broader social media ecosystem. This includes everything from stand-up comedy clips to influencer content to celebrity interview shows such as Good Hang with Amy Poehler, It’s Open with Ilana Glazer, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, or On Purpose with Jay Shetty. Legacy outlets are increasingly looking at this landscape and deciding to play the same game.
This shift is especially visible in how legacy outlets now structure their video and audio content. Launched in 2017, the New York Times show Popcast’s bread and butter used to be having in-depth discussions about the music industry, ranging from Juice WRLD and SoundCloud rappers to the rise of Tracy Chapman. But over the last two years, much of that content has been replaced with celebrity interviews that resemble PR more than anything else. In just the last six months, interviews with famous music figures have accounted for more than half of Popcast’s recent episodes. The show’s regular fresh cultural criticism has been largely replaced by reliable, non-adversarial, personality-centric artist promotion.
Popcast is hardly an outlier. NPR’s Wild Card with Rachel Martin, launched in May 2024, centers conversations with actors and musicians through a personality-driven, game-like format, featuring guests like Matthew McConaughey and Issa Rae. That same year, the New York Times introduced The Interview, while WIRED launched The Big Interview, both built around long-form conversations with high-profile cultural and political figures.
Even when it comes to pure entertainment programming, legacy media organizations have ramped up their output. The New Yorker recently began a “Starter Pack of Cultural Essentials” series, which lives on the publication’s YouTube channel and Instagram Reels, where celebrities like Mitski, Paul Mescal, and Sarah Michelle Gellar give culture recommendations in front of a camera. Similarly, NYT Cooking launched “Celebrity ‘Chefs,’” where celebrities from Ariana Grande to Amanda Seyfried are invited to cook in the Times’ kitchen studio.
Across these formats, celebrities appear friendly, casual, and approachable. The content may look fresh and highbrow, but it often relies on many of the same storytelling conventions long used by mainstream celebrity media, from personal health journeys to intimate accounts of relationships and family life.
The problem isn’t that journalists at prestige outlets are interviewing celebrities in an intimate setting. From Terry Gross to Barbara Walters to Ira Glass, serious journalists have made careers from doing just that, as indeed the famously adversarial interviewer Isaac Chotiner does today. The problem is that many of the newer offerings appear less interested in interrogating fame and power than amplifying them. Conversations often revolve around the subject’s own narrative and understanding of self, rather than attempting to surface paradoxes or reveal more uncomfortable truths.
Meanwhile, as journalists’ faces are increasingly put in front of the camera to produce short-form video content, the distinction between journalists and entertainment figures is becoming hazy. Accompanying WIRED’s interview with venture capitalist Bryan Johnson is a Reel where another WIRED journalist asks its global editorial director, Katie Drummond, about her interview with Johnson, creating a never-ending loop of journalists interviewing influential figures, and journalists interviewing other journalists about interviewing influential figures.
This is the environment Friedman warned about decades ago: one in which credibility is increasingly measured by exposure. As trust in institutions continues to erode across media, government, and beyond, celebrities are filling the vacuum instead, offering a form of authority rooted not in expertise but in familiarity. When accumulated across platforms and outlets, it risks surrendering one of journalism’s most important assets of accountability: distance from power.
