Star Talent: Journalism’s Influencer Era — AMT Lab @ CMU

Star Talent: Journalism’s Influencer Era

In an age when content creation is set to hyper-speed and cast across chaotically-changing social media platforms, journalism has become embroiled in the crossfire. Some approaches to the form have embraced such change, turning to more decentralized and personality-driven forms of reporting and analysis to survive the ever-choppier digital waters.

Journalism, for most of the 20th century, was typically defined by rigid standards of objectivity, significant involvement from editors, and fact-checking as means of winning both trust and legitimacy from the public. 

Figure 1: A simple diagram of the traditional distribution of news-content. Newsrooms composed of teams of journalists would compile stories, periodically published and distributed to readers typically as papers or regularly scheduled broadcasts.

However, with both Artificial Intelligence and partisan alternative news outlets now competing alongside legacy news in the 21st century, the lines between fact and opinion have become significantly blurred. This creator-fication of the news ecosystem has seen a growing number of American adults (21%) admitting they “regularly get news from influencers on social media, with much of the content focused on politics.” These ‘news influencers’ tend to blend news with entertainment and opinion in a way that attracts and retains audiences, in spite of the fact that 77% of these news influencers had no journalistic experience. 

It is an ironic twist of fate that the newspapers, who have historically and systemically cut arts and entertainment-related journalism (such as theater criticism columns) as cost saving measures, should start having their lunch eaten by digital content creators who, at times, lie closer to artists and performers than hard-boiled journalists. 

This new breed of digital messengers has begun to directly challenge traditional journalists for eyeballs and their resulting subscription and advertising revenues, leading to a tension developing between the economic and social value of a news brand versus that of  an individual reporter. With rising stars increasingly leaving established newsrooms to strike out on their own in the way of podcasts, Substack, and other alternative outlets, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism predicts that this will lead to far more complex, ongoing negotiations with talent, potentially altering traditional compensation structures, retention incentives, and exit agreements. 

Case in Point: The Washington Post’s PR Purge

This tension has already made itself apparent at the dawn of 2025. In January, The Washington Post eliminated 73 positions within its advertising department, effectively gutting its public relations and advertising infrastructure. 

Advertising is, as with most newspapers, The Post’s primary source of revenue. The PR team is also the department responsible for promoting The Post’s journalism across traditional broadcast media outlets to maximize coverage. This PR renovation paves the way for an alleged new “Star Talent Unit” comprising a high-profile bullpen of journalists that The Post plans to leverage as direct-to-consumer marketing vehicles by way of the stars’ personal platforms and audience. 

A promotion strategy more in line with contemporary social media’s talent-driven content economy, the Star Talent Unit is a major shift made by a legacy media outlet in its attempts to connect its advertising clients with an increasingly fickle subscriber base. 

The Star Talent Unit aims to “ensure our audiences know who our journalists are and rely even more on these trusted voices” pushing the role of journalists more toward that of influencers and content-creators than the flies-on-the-wall of yesteryear. 

It seems as if The Post took heed from an article that it published almost a year prior, recognizing the surging popularity of content creators over legacy media. Commenting on data from the Reuters Institute’s 2023 Digital News Report, the article notes that more people now consume their news on social media platforms than traditional outlets.

News Influencers and the Creator Economy

Figure 2: A simple model of the reporter as news-influencer. Direct access to individualized audiences and niche, personality-driven content drives this model. Information is not unilateral, with readers being allowed to give feedback in the form of likes, shares, comments, and tiered subscriptions.

This reshaping of traditional strategies and viewpoints is exemplified by reporter Taylor Lorenz’s departure from The Post in favor of Substack to pursue a type of internet journalism that, in her words, “has become increasingly difficult to do in corporate media.”

This sentiment shift from such a name-brand reporter only helps typify such emergent tensions. Lorenz’s new outlet, User, presents readers with both original reportage, interviews, and suggestions for content in which Lorenz is also engaging. This alignment between audience and personality gives a reporter like Lorenz broad control of her own message, creative direction unstifled by corporate restraints, and more direct access to audience engagement and profits from subscriptions.  

In this way, journalists are joining the ranks of the digital creator economy composed of artists, bloggers, streamers, musicians, and celebrities of all forms. This leap into the digital creator economy sheds an older model of industrial news production, linearly and unilaterally shipped from the newsroom to broadcast to consumer, instead entering into what is better understood as a creative ecosystem whereby content creators carve out niches within larger platforms shared by their audiences, mediated by a plethora of digital marketers both within and across competing platforms in order to maximize attention and engagement. 

Writers and journalists extending their voice into more independent platforms is not new, however. At its peak around 2008, blogging was once considered a staple medium for political commentary, legal interpretation, public policy, and human interest stories like art and celebrity culture. Many journalists from prominent publications, like Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, began independent blogs to exercise such creative freedom. The days have waned on blogging, however, with Kristof shutting down his blog in 2017. It would seem that bloggers were to web 1.0 what news influencers are to web 2.0. 

The economics of such web 2.0-communications like social and alternative media have been expanding consistently since 2017 as well. The Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes reports on their Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account (ACPSA), a basket of industries broadly considered as part of the creative industries ranging from museums and performers to publishing houses, architects, advertising, and telecommunications. In this dataset there is a sub-sector considered Information Services which includes broadcasting, sound recording, motion pictures, audio/visual production, and other information services. This “Other” category (coded as NAICS 519) is important as it has become the catch-all category for internet-native publishing and broadcasting activities, encompassing the digital ecosystem of influencers, content creators, podcasters, and more. 

Figure 3: Total direct real output (Millions of dollars) - ACPSA Information Services Jobs

Of note is the fact that, from 2017 to 2022, NAICS 519 enjoyed the greatest growth in direct real output among its peers in the information services sub-sector at 83%. This consistent climb in output resulted in “Other” becoming the second largest economic driver of the sector behind standard broadcasting. It was also the only industry within the sub-sector to grow instead of contract during the onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020. The pandemic propelled the internet-native producers’ outputs to new heights while other industries like Audio/Visual Production and Motion Pictures have struggled to climb back to even pre-pandemic levels.  

This new ecosystem pursued by both reporters and news brands signals a critical shift in the approach to news production, with strategies now being dictated more so by audience preferences over news consumption. 

This strategic shift among news producers toward online, platform-based strategies may have partially been the result of increased competition for eyeballs by alternative media and news influencers, but now exposes the entire news ecosystem to a large and powerful force: the technology companies that own and govern such platforms.

Artificial Intelligence and its Impact on Journalism

Figure 4: A.I. mediation of the news ecosystem involves aggregation of information and summaries derived from multiple publishers. Algorithmic curation targets audiences best fit to engage with specific content

News Influencers may be a visible, direct competitor putting pressure on traditional journalism, but the rapid development of artificial intelligence and its continued integration into platforms is seismically reshaping both how audiences engage with the news, how the news is circulated, and how the news is made to begin with. 

In Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Report, this new topography of the public arena is broken down, with particular attention being paid to the potential power imbalance created by newsrooms' increased reliance on a select-few hegemonic tech companies for their A.I. infrastructures.

The report details how AI innovations are helping streamline the production of news for the better, with emphasis on AI as a retooling of the news production process rather than a foundational disruption. The tools used, however, are often not proprietary outside of the largest and richest newsrooms and, as such, expose smaller reporting outfits to outsized influence from technology providers which creates an additional layer of dependence and potential conflict over time which should be scrutinized.

This enmeshment can already be seen in the way that AI companies have been engaging with various news outlets:

  • Google and the Associated Press (AP) cut a deal in January to feed Google’s AI Gemini with a steady stream of content from the news publisher. In a first for Google, this partnership between tech giant and news outlet hopes to satisfy Google’s demand for high-quality and ethically-sourced training data for its AI models, while further diversifying the AP’s revenue stream in an age of declining income from traditional sources. 

  • The AP signed a similar deal with OpenAI in 2023 allowing them free use of the AP’s news archive to train ChatGPT.  

  • OpenAI similarly entered into a three-year partnership with Axios to finance the local newsletter’s expansion into four new markets: Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Boulder, and Huntsville. This now leaves OpenAI with a bullpen of licensing and content-sharing partnerships with news sites, counting the Financial Times, Vox Media, and The Atlantic among its media-partners. This deal is the first time OpenAI has directly funded a media-partner’s business operations, potentially signaling deeper ties emerging between AI companies and the media. 

What can be seen by these patterns is a dependency of newsrooms on new sources of reliable revenues paired with tech companies needing to legitimize their A.I. tools with quality training data among accusations of gross inaccuracies and AI slop suffocating the internet as we know it. With major companies like Apple suspending news alert AI software due to inaccuracies and poor data, this trend is only likely to continue in order to further perfect AI-driven reportage.  

This behavior underscores the Tow Report’s warning of power imbalances emerging from increased dependence of newsrooms, alternative media, and news influencers alike on the various platforms and AI infrastructures which the attention economy now lives and dies by. 

Exacerbating the influence of such technology on the public sphere, 80% of journalists in the Global South and other developing countries report using A.I. to some degree in their work, despite only 42% reporting optimism about its adoption while a mere 13% of their newsrooms have a written A.I. use policy. By injecting such dependencies into developing newsrooms that are already grappling with digital divides, one can only wonder what implicit influence these tools may exert on the public discourse of such nations. 

With major outlets reorganizing their audience engagement and star talent striking out on its own platforms, it's becoming harder and harder to distinguish alternative media, with all of its partisanship, entertainment, and personality, from the now-scattered fragments of legacy media. 

All forms of news, opinion, and spectacle now compete on the same digital platforms for the same eyeballs, so it is only natural that news producers of all stripes begin adopting more artistic, subjective, and narrative-driven media as a way to cut through the noise and build an audience base. The new measures of legitimacy are arguably having a relatable identity and clear brand — tactics that artists, entertainers, and celebrities have mastered for some time now. 

The struggle for relevance demands it. 

The shifting technological platforms on which our new public discourse rests not only challenges the 20th-century standards of objectivity long-upheld by legacy journalism but simultaneously subjects this multiplicity of content to the centralizing, self-devouring gravity of algorithms in lieu of yesterday’s editorial boards. The news is now asked to compete across lines of code, the court of public opinion, and popularity contests all spectacularly at once. 

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