Disrupting the newsroom: How news creators are redefining media
Download our latest report to explore how the creator economy is reshaping news and what it means for established media. Q5 Media Lead Katie Burridge and Q5 Media Sector Lead Graham Page examine the changing relationship between creators and institutions, and the strategic questions publishers and broadcasters need to consider next.
Reading time: 4 minutes
In September 2025, our report The New Newsroom: How the Relentless Rise of Video Must Reshape Journalism explored a fundamental change in audience behaviour. Video was becoming central to how people consumed news, forcing publishers and broadcasters to rethink formats, skills, workflows and distribution.
That shift has not slowed down. But the question has become bigger.
Audiences are not simply consuming journalism in different formats. They are increasingly encountering it through different people, personalities and platforms.
Independent creators can now build significant audiences, establish their own brands and monetise their relationships directly. At the same time, journalists and presenters working within established media have more opportunities to build profiles and audiences that extend beyond the organisations that employ them.
For media leaders, this creates a new set of strategic questions.
If audiences increasingly follow people rather than institutions, where does the value of journalism accumulate? Who owns the audience relationship? And what should established media do about it?
Creators and established media are getting closer
It is tempting to frame the creator economy as another battle between new and old media, but the reality is more complicated.
Publishers and broadcasters are already adopting many of the behaviours associated with creators, from vertical video and direct-to-camera explainers to personality-led newsletters and video podcasts.
At the same time, creators who successfully scale encounter challenges that look increasingly familiar to established media businesses.
This creates an interesting tension. Each side has something the other wants.
The question is how far that convergence should go, and what established media should protect, change or build as a result.
A format change or something more fundamental?
For media organisations, simply producing more creator-style content is unlikely to be the whole answer.
As we explored in Designing ‘audience-first’ newsrooms that work, responding to changing audience behaviour requires organisations to make choices about priorities, rather than continually adding new formats and channels, and those choices have consequences.
What happens when a journalist’s individual profile becomes part of the audience proposition? How should media organisations think differently about talent, incentives and ownership? When should they build capability themselves, and when might working with the creator economy make more sense? Most importantly, what is the organisation actually trying to achieve?
The operating model question
These challenges also expose a broader issue. New propositions can be relatively easy to launch. Building an organisation that can sustain them is harder.
In Publishers have diversified their commercial models. Their operating models haven’t kept pace, we explored how growth into new products and revenue streams can create organisational complexity if structures, accountabilities and ways of working fail to evolve alongside them.
The creator economy adds another dimension to that challenge. It raises questions about where new capabilities should sit, how much autonomy they need, how editorial and commercial teams should work together, and where ownership and decision-making should remain. These are organisational questions as much as editorial ones.
So, what should established media do?
There is no single answer.
The right response depends on the audience an organisation wants to reach, the relationship it wants to create and, crucially, where it wants the resulting value to sit.
Our new report, Disrupting the newsroom: How news creators are redefining media, explores the choices available to media leaders and the trade-offs behind them.
Drawing on conversations with media leaders in the UK, US and Australia, alongside industry research and examples from across the market, our media team examine how the relationship between creators and established media is evolving, and what that means for organisations deciding their next move.
The report asks two deceptively simple questions:
- How should your organisation work with the creator economy?
- And what are the assumptions, investments and trade-offs attached?
For media leaders grappling with changing audience behaviour, new forms of competition and increasingly complex questions around talent and ownership, those questions are becoming difficult to ignore.
Download the full report to explore the strategic choices facing established media and what the rise of the creator economy could mean for your organisation.
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If you have any questions regarding Q5’s work in Media, or would like to hear more about our insights into the trends across the sector, please reach out to our team, we’re always up for a chat!
Media Lead
Media Sector Lead
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