New media rules
What is it about influencer-led new reporting that elevates it above legacy media publications?
Despite being an enthusiastic guitarist, music theory leaves me cold. I know enough to be dangerous, mainly thanks to my friend James helping me learn the minor pentatonic scale (and also reading
).Learning scales was a big step, as it unlocked actual jamming (as opposed to fucking around with random songs, “expecting things to happen”, as James also says). But it also unlocks loads more questions too.
A set of notes fits within the scale, so you can be sure if you hit one of those notes, what you play will sound good. But sticking in the scale is what your brain expects, so it can end up sounding dull. So you do what countless musicians and songwriters have done over the past 70-odd years and throw in some other notes that still sound good but don’t fit the “correct” key/scale/progression you’re using.
The challenge, particularly for anti-theorists like me, is distinguishing between acceptable transgressions and unlistenable white noise. It took Sonic Youth five years and hours of experimentation to hit their musical stride on the albums EVOL and Sister, crafting proper tunes amid the avant-garde noise. I don’t have time for that journey - I have a family, a job and a newsletter to write.
Plenty of creative endeavours stem from the identification of such acceptable transgressions. In comedy, it’s often defined as mild absurdity - bringing together incongruous combinations or ramping up exaggeration for comic effect. Pep is the master of it in football - his obsession with systems and structures helps him find the areas he can subtly twist and exploit. Think of the “false 9” or “inverted fullbacks”.
Sometimes, these subtle changes and transgressions can be frowned upon when they emerge into the mainstream. Traditionalists rail against the lack of a striker providing the focal point for a team, or The White Stripes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs rising to prominence without a bassist (scandalous!). However, the effectiveness of such changes is that acceptance comes over time.
We can see similar changes happening across the media landscape at the moment. One of the meta-trends of 2024 was the increasing influence of creator-led news. TikTok news consumption hit record levels, alongside a feeling that podcasters like Joe Rogan were crucial in securing Republican victory in the US presidential election.
But beyond the apparent desire of audiences to consume the kind of news they want in a format they like, what subtle structural changes do creators make to news reporting that appeal more than legacy news media?
Charlie Warzel’s article on The End of News, featuring an interview with Julia Angwin, offers some clues. Angwin is an investigative reporter who “spent a year studying journalism’s trust crisis and how the media might reverse the trend” (understanding the system being a crucial step).
Angwin highlights the alternative starting point creators use when delivering information - “they lead with credentials, and then they demonstrate their expertise”. Much of our mainstream news, particularly legacy media titles, assumes reader trust in their expertise and credentials because of their name. It’s the FT, we’re The Times, so we know what we’re talking about.
Angwin also highlights how often creators begin their videos with a question: “Which one’s the best? What is happening with [x news situation]?” Whereas that might seem like lazy writing to many people, the sense is that questions offer honesty and transparency in a world where people feel media coverage comes with inherent bias and hidden agendas.
Warzel and Angwin highlight how this model, this way of presenting information, often also leaves the posed question unanswered. It’s not the point to reach a position on a subject. The question is the lead-in to the discussion, and the discussion is the point. Angwin and Warzel suggest that this model's appeal is that it feels more participatory and honest than a more “lecturing” tone engendered by a headline.
To echo Warzel’s finishing line, structuring your stories to prompt discussion rather than land a point also means facts don’t have to be front of centre. Objectivity isn’t the end goal; showcasing points of view as a vehicle for delivering information is.
You might reasonably think at this point, that’s fine for influencers. It won’t work for news stories. And there’s plenty of topics where that analysis is spot on. Financial news, for example, relies on facts, delivered with robust analysis and informed opinion. Any differing viewpoints from analysts or investors provide all the discussion most people.
But for politically loaded stories, which are a big chunk of reporting these days, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility to see more discursive, more opinion-led videos and articles refresh the relatively staid world of journalism.
There are already examples of this format in action. Ros Atkins’ explainers on BBC’s social channels are hugely popular, and taking deep dives into topics with no assumption of prior knowledge. Vox’s Explainers series is a few years old but remains an essential gateway for bringing readers up to speed on stories they might have missed.
Even if the idea of broader news coverage becoming more discursive and losing its veneer of “objective reporting” seems a little far-fetched, there’s definitely an argument that it must be better than where our media organisations are.
More and more people actively choose to avoid the news, with politicians continually using this downturn in popularity as a stick to beat their own drum of political agenda.
Nearly ten years ago, when presenting some media trends sessions to clients, we talked about the death of the homepage in favour of more relevant entry points via social or search.
Yet news websites remain largely the same, no matter the fact that they are, to quote Simon Allison in Nieman Lab, “terrible at distributing news”. They’re ugly, they’re overwhelming, they live and die by traffic, meaning they’re often optimised to show the clickbait and most salacious headlines.
Flicking through the Reuters Institute’s “Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions” paper for 2025 continues this theme of a dearth of creativity in the media (accepting, of course, that you probably wouldn’t give away your best ideas to your competitors). #
Another pivot to video. Relationships with AI platforms. Games and educational products. The vibe is “everyone loves Britpop, we should go Britpop too!”. Arguably, it needs to be more “We’ve done the classic British thing to death, and Charmless Man is rubbish. What if we mixed our British essence with Pavement-style art rock? That might be fun” (Beetlebum was on the most recent Top of the Pops I watch on BBC4).
Looking beyond the media into communications and campaigning, we’ve seen these trends of being more audience-led and less broadcast in action for some time. Here’s three ways it manifests into campaigns.
Adopting an influencer-style, discursive approach requires businesses to relinquish a degree of messaging control. While this may seem like a bold move, it’s more about empowering people - whether that’s partners, employees or senior leaders - to adapt a strong key message to suit their audience. You can provide guardrails (ChatGPT is great at helping with such tasks) and still allow spokespeople to tailor their posts to feel relatable and authoritative.
It’s also vital to re-state that while facts have their place in campaigns, stories need an emotional hook, too (or a balance of left-brain and right-brain, as my colleague Yani puts it). If there’s no emotional heart to your idea or its execution, it’s unlikely to earn attention in-feed or stick in the mind when the post is gone.
Finally, there’s the simple creative trick of identifying the acceptable transgressions and mild absurdity within your industry or sector. As mentioned earlier, comedians are the masters of this art. So next time you have a brief that requires a killer insight to unlock, head over to YouTube and search for “[topic] stand-up routine”, and watch some comedy. It’s proper research, and I can guarantee it works. Chris Rock’s sketch on “jobs vs careers” ended up being the entry point to a fresh campaign response on that overdone topic of “the future of work”. All this advice is provided by the excellent
and Justin Lines.Of course, that all sounds great in theory, but as mentioned above, sometimes theory can leave people cold. As with guitar, football, or any vaguely creative pursuit, it’s all about applying the theory in your practice.
And practice is a volume and consistency game. Do it lots, do it often. Build habits, and make it second nature to try and find mild absurdity in a situation. Be the right-brain person in a planning meeting, encouraging clients and colleagues to identify the heart of the story. Do it enough, and suddenly, you’ll find breaking the rules (in an acceptable way) will feel like the most natural thing in the world.