First published August 16, 2026, by TechCabal (techcabal.com)

Something funny is happening in the media business today. The Internet spent 20 years teaching publishers to chase scale, and just as many of them got pretty good at it, the Internet decided that scale was no longer the prize. Google wants to answer the question instead of sending you to the article; AI wants to summarise the reporting instead of sending you to the homepage; and social platforms want your headline, your video and your journalist, but preferably not the bill for the newsroom that produced them.

This sounds like a disaster for media, and in part it is. But there is another way to look at it. The Internet may finally be forcing publishers to answer a question they have been able to avoid for years: what, exactly, are people paying you for? That question becomes more interesting when you look at what some media companies are doing about it.

Puck News is giving journalists equity and tying their pay to the subscribers they attract. Defector Media has gone in the opposite direction, with its journalists owning the company. Hunterbrook has decided that readers are not necessarily the customers at all and is using financial markets to fund investigative journalism. These are very different businesses, but they are variations on the same idea: if distribution is becoming a commodity, the value has to move somewhere else. And that, the author argues, may be good news for journalism.

The middle is where the trouble is

Media has always had seasons, a point brought home recently by a friend who works at Microsoft and has started thinking about his own career in exactly those terms. He is a software developer, but he joked that he might not be one forever, since he is now building tools that could eventually replace parts of his current work. He seemed to understand technology's seasonality — that the skills that made him valuable in one cycle might not be the ones that mattered in the next.

Media has followed the same pattern. Print had its monopoly. Then came digital publishing, when a website could reach a global audience without physical newspapers. Social media followed, with Facebook and Twitter (now X) becoming enormous free distribution systems — channels Meta has since narrowed by phasing out news in several markets — before publishers figured out search engine optimisation (SEO) and discovered there was money to be made by answering almost every question anyone had ever typed into Google. The arrangement worked like this: write an article, Google finds it, someone clicks, an ad follows them around, and everyone gets paid. The catch, as the developer's story makes clear, is that every season eventually produces the technology that makes the previous season less valuable.

The deeper problem was that publishers never really owned the most important part of that arrangement. Now, if Google can answer a search directly, there is less reason to click. If ChatGPT can explain a company, market or technology in a paragraph, there is less reason to open multiple tabs. If an AI-generated answer can absorb the work of tens of SEO articles, the publisher producing those articles has a problem that no amount of better headline writing can solve. The strain is already visible across the industry: BuzzFeed News shut down in 2023, the same year Vice Media — reportedly once valued at $5.7 billion — filed for bankruptcy. Publishers have responded unevenly to the AI version of the squeeze: the Associated Press, Axel Springer and the Financial Times signed licensing deals with OpenAI, News Corp struck one reported to be worth as much as $250 million over five years, and The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023 over the use of its journalism to train AI systems.

The publishers most exposed are the ones sitting in the middle, where the business requires a reasonably large newsroom but the journalism is not differentiated enough to command a direct relationship with the reader. It is important to note that the problem is not that people have stopped wanting journalism. People still want someone to tell them what happened, what everyone else is missing and what might happen next. They just have more ways to get the first answer for free. The "awkward" part is that this could also make journalism a better business.

The strange economics of being worth paying for

Puck News believes people do not subscribe because they need another article about whatever matters to them, but because they want to know what people inside those worlds know. It sounds like a small distinction, but it changes the economics: the platform has built its newsroom around personalities and expertise, with annual subscriptions ranging from about $100 to $250. Its journalists can receive equity in the company and earn bonuses linked to the subscribers their work generates.

A reporter traditionally builds an audience, owns the subscriber relationship, and receives a salary and perhaps a raise. Puck is effectively arguing that if the reporter is the reason someone pays, perhaps the reporter should own some of the upside. The company has about 240,000 total subscribers, including roughly 40,000 paid subscribers, and raised $10 million in a Series B round that valued it at $70 million, as reported by Axios. The Verge has examined whether Puck can reinvent the news business for the influencer age.

Puck is treating journalism as a creator business without pretending journalism is just content creation. The approach may become more important as AI makes generic information cheaper. If a chatbot can tell you what happened, a journalist has to offer something the chatbot cannot easily manufacture: access, judgement, sources, taste, accountability, and a reason to believe that this particular person is worth listening to. That sounds suspiciously like a good journalist.

Then there is the anti-VC argument

Defector Media's journalists did not want a venture-backed media company; they wanted to own the company themselves. Defector was founded in 2020 by former Deadspin journalists after they left the site following a dispute with its private equity owner, a story covered by Business Insider. They created a worker cooperative, meaning the people producing the journalism also own the business, and have since published their own reflections on five years in worker-owned media.

This is unusual in an industry where the standard sequence is founder, funding round, growth, another funding round, strategic investor, acquisition, and then a long meeting about why revenue did not grow quickly enough. Defector skipped most of that, and its business is deliberately smaller. The company had about 42,500 active subscribers in its fourth year, generating roughly $3.8 million in subscription revenue and about $800,000 from podcasts, merchandise and other revenue.

Defector is therefore asking whether a media company needs millions of readers if tens of thousands of readers really care. This is a useful question for African media, where the temptation is often to measure success through audience size because advertising has trained publishers to think that way. But 500,000 casual readers are not necessarily more valuable than 20,000 people who will pay, attend an event, buy research, recommend the publication to colleagues and open every newsletter. A small, loyal audience can be a much better business than a huge, indifferent one. Some African publishers are already probing that logic: Nigeria's Stears has built its model on paid subscriptions and data products, while The Continent, the pan-African weekly, is distributed directly to readers through WhatsApp.

No outside investor is waiting for a giant exit, so the company does not need to become giant simply because companies with investors are supposed to. It can be a media company, not one waiting to become something else.

The newsroom that wants to make money from the story

Hunterbrook has the strangest model of the three, because its proposition is that people may not pay enough for investigative journalism, but financial markets might. Hunterbrook Media operates alongside Hunterbrook Capital, an affiliated investment fund, an arrangement The New Yorker has profiled. The newsroom investigates companies and markets, while the investment business can trade on the research. The underlying logic is not unprecedented: activist short-sellers — most prominently Hindenburg Research, which wound down in early 2025 — built businesses by publishing investigations while holding market positions that would profit if the reporting moved prices. In other words, instead of asking whether x number of readers will pay an x amount of money a month, Hunterbrook can ask whether a piece of reporting is valuable enough to generate returns in the market. According to The Australian Financial Review, the company raised $100 million in seed capital and reported a 23% return in the first nine months of 2025.

It is an odd model because it exposes one of media's oldest contradictions: journalism can create enormous value without capturing much of it. An investigation can uncover fraud or reveal that a company is not what investors thought it was, and the consequences can run into millions or billions of dollars. Hunterbrook is asking what happens if the business captures some of the financial value created by the information. There are obvious questions about conflicts and independence, but those questions are not a reason to dismiss the model. It has value to people making decisions: an investor, regulator, company executive or policymaker can sometimes gain far more from one well-reported fact than a reader ever could from generic explainers.

Journalism still has something to sell

AI will make some kinds of journalism cheaper and part of it less valuable. That is painful for publishers whose businesses depend on volume, but it creates a clearer premium around the work that cannot be cut to a summary. Who knows the regulator? Who has spent six months following the money? Who can call the founder and actually get an answer? Who understands why a government policy that sounds boring could change a billion-dollar market? Who has built enough trust that readers will pay before they even know what tomorrow's story is?

Puck, Defector and Hunterbrook have arrived at different answers to the same economic problem. One gives journalists more ownership of their reputation; another gives workers ownership of the company; and the third tries to capture the financial value of information itself. None of these models requires abandoning journalism to save journalism, but they all assume that journalism is valuable enough to build a business around — provided the business stops confusing reach with value. The open question — for African publishers as much as American ones — is how far models built on ownership of the work travel in markets where far fewer readers are able to pay for news at all.

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Kenn Abuya is a senior reporter at TechCabal, where he leads the Startups Desk.