Recent flubs committed by influencers selected to lead high-profile interviews have left many onlookers asking, where are the journalists?
They’re still here—straddling the fine line between digital influencing and reporting in an industry that continually prioritizes content creation over traditional journalism to stay operational.
Nearly 4,000 layoffs across newspapers, news broadcasters and digital media businesses were publicly announced or reported in 2024. This compares to the at least 8,000 journalism job cuts made in the UK and North America in 2023, Press Gazette reports.
This is primarily explained by a splintered media landscape forced to cater to niche interests, steering attention away from legacy journalism platforms. While this shift has its benefits, the enormous responsibility that trained journalists hold is being put in the hands of individuals who, simply put, haven’t done the work. This has since left reporters, namely millennials who weren’t raised by social media, between a rock and a hard place: do I focus on the story or content?
Asia Milia Ware has mastered the art of balancing both. As the senior beauty editor of New York Magazine’s The Cut, she has also juggled a career as a successful influencer for nearly a decade.
At just 15 years old, Ware knew she wanted to be a journalist. At 17, she realized writing wouldn’t be enough, so she started intentionally branding her Instagram. She’d regularly try products, style clothing and offer her opinions. By the time she was a senior in high school, she was brokering brand deals.
“I was 16 years old in 2012/2013 when blogging was still a thing,” she explains. “I was doing paid partnerships going on spring break. It’s so funny that things are what they are now. I always joke with my friends that if TikTok were out in college, I definitely would have been one of these young girls with millions of followers because I was always on the pulse of that.”
In her role as a beauty editor, she says both sides of her profession seamlessly blend. She occassionally promotes her most coveted stories on social media to help drive her combined 70k+ TikTok and Instagram followers to click them.
“Since I’ve been at The Cut, social media and journalism have had this weird synergy over the past few years, so it hasn’t ever been a challenge. The conversations the editorial staff have about story ideas are all informed and driven by what’s happening in niche social media communities. That’s what matters honestly; that’s how we appease both ourselves and the audience.”
Kaitlyn McNab, culture editor at Teen Vogue, says she’s grappled a bit more with fully embracing jinfluencing (being a journalist and influencer).
“I don’t really feel comfortable pivoting into content creation because I’m a writer first. But then, like everyone else in journalism, I look at the influencers getting opportunities that seasoned interviewers aren’t,” she says. “What affirms me though, is that I know if I was put in that same place, it would look completely different than what it looked with them. That helps me focus on my own capabilities; knowing that no matter what, they may get that podcast or opportunity, but it still isn’t going to be what it could be if someone with my level of expertise, formal training and education, had done it. And really, that’s not on me. It’s on the outlets giving these opportunities out. That’s why I don’t feel territorial anymore.”
Morgan DeBaun has a bit of a different vantage point.
In 2014, DeBaun founded Blavity, a digital platform aimed at empowering Black millennials and Gen Z through original content, video, and experiential moments. Over the last ten years, it has evolved into Blavity Inc., an enterprise that houses nine niche digital and IRL brands, including TravelNoire, a travel-focused website, and AfroTech, an annual tech conference.
DeBaun explains that one reason the company has survived and expanded over the years is its willingness to quickshift.
“Digital media was inevitable,” DeBaun says. “Brands emerging as a central platform for content conversations was a natural evolution from newspapers, magazines and local news stations.”
A 2024 Pew Research Center study indicated that 86% of U.S. adults at least sometimes get news from digital devices, with 57% doing so often. Traditional mediums like print are seeing diminished usage, with only 26% accessing news in print.
To her point, independent journalism has overtaken mainstream platforms (self-funded podcasts, personal social media accounts, etc.). This is evidenced by the top-ranked MeidasTouch News podcast of the MeidasTouch Network, an upstart online media company.
“We have now moved into a new generation, but for 10 years, digital mainstream media was king. Things have shifted in the last 2-3 years, where content creators and individual brands have a higher sense of trust and relationship with their audience; people are choosing to accept the truth from someone they believe, not necessarily a brand they trust. That evolution is alive and well and we’re just in the infancy of individual brands becoming the new media empires.”
DeBaun points out that while individual branding is the current darling, established organizations can keep up as long as they’re willing to be ambidextrous. For example, her company recently launched the Blavity Creator Program, a paid program with a standard rate card for Black creators in different interest groups including travel, home, design and wellness. Their content is then distributed on Blavity Inc.’s platforms.
“Blavity is a media company—we’re not a news organization,” DeBaun explains. “That’s another shift that has to happen among journalism organizations. Being a media company means creating content that other people consume and that advertisers and/or subscribers pay for. On the contrary, being a news organization means having specific responsibilities as journalists and reporters.”
As she points out, some legacy news organizations have become media companies, partially because aggregate platforms like Facebook and Google have deprioritized news in their searches and feeds.
“They said, ‘We do not want our ads to run against news content because it’s controversial and hard to fact check.’ It’s much easier for us to do a piece of content about how to buy your first home or how to arbitrage and make a lot of money. That’s not news, though. That’s content. Blavity used to prioritize public affairs news, with reporters on the ground, going to protests, doing all types of stuff. Vital work. But the funding, financing, and advertising dollars have completely shifted away from that.”
DeBaun adds: “I hope aspiring media figures pay attention to warning signals and instead of saying, ‘I want to work for {a legacy publication} or be the so and so for so and so…’ I’d say that ship has sailed. You had that opportunity 10 years ago. It’s a different now. You should say, I want to be Alex Cooper. I want to be Charlemagne. I want to be Alix Earle.“
On the contrary, creative consultant Robert “Bobby Trendz” Samuels Jr. hopes his new project will emerge as an authority in emerging media while retaining the traditional journalistic style.
At the start of the year, he launched AOD, a fashion and design magazine that will center both digital and print narratives. This is a risk, considering circulation rates have steadily declined for years.
“I’ve always wanted to do this,” he says. “It’s been on my heart for five years, so I decided to prioritize it finally.”
Samuels built the magazine to be supported by a tiered subscription model that includes access to its digital content, quarterly print magazine, and national in-person events. This wrap-around experience is a winning formula that has kept another publication, Complex, in a healthy place for 23 years. Launched by fashion designer Marc Ecko in 2002, it has evolved from a print magazine geared toward urban male youth to an inclusive brand led by a woman.
“We are a reflection of the evolving times,” Aria Hughes, Complex’s editor-in-chief, says. “That, of course, is an essential element of surviving in the landscape now. However, it’s important to consider which tenets should be upheld regardless of what’s mainstream.”
“Creators are obviously very entertaining, but I always want to make the distinction that they are not journalists, and they’re not covering anything from a space of editorial integrity,” Hughes explains. “However, we must understand they exist and are essentially competition, even if I don’t consider them journalists. We’re competing for eyes. We’re in the attention economy.”
Hughes says she’s relying on a winning formula to maintain engagement with the brand’s audience.
“I’ve always known we need to lean into doing what influencers can’t do. They cannot produce a beautiful photoshoot with a relevant celebrity or present a well-written profile about said celebrity.”
While individual-first journalism is rising, Hughes says collectivism still has value.
“We’re relaunching print after years of prioritizing digital content. The re-centering of print was important because it lays out exactly what journalism is and how it’s different from what a sole creator can do. It’s a group of people, sometimes like-minded, who bring their ideas together, edit pieces and fact-check pieces. It’s a different level of attention being brought to the stories, as opposed to somebody just getting on a stream and saying, ‘No, the sky is not blue, it’s red because so and so told me so.”
DeBaun acknowledges that, while journalistic integrity has its place, leaders should be realistic.
“Many media companies are run by journalists and people who feel deeply about how media is supposed to run instead of how a company is supposed to run. The most successful companies that have weathered the storm have strong operators and business people on their board and in the driver’s seat of the business.”
DeBaun adds: “The old-school approach was that the senior editors and the media executives were the most powerful people in the room. In a newspaper, for instance, the editor-in-chief would be the boss. But that’s had to change because content is king, and the person in charge needs to understand how content consumption has changed. People will take in a piece of content that took an editor or reporter a month to write and investigate. In contrast, pieces are now written in seconds due to evolving technology. So, how do you price those the same when receiving the same amount of ad dollars for both pieces of content? I don’t like that this is where we are, but I think the faster people accept what’s happening right now, the better…whether it’s good for society or not.”
This article has been edited for clarity and brevity.