Here is a question that came up recently. With all the changes that we are seeing, what will be the most important revenue stream for publishers in the future? Obviously, the answer to this is direct revenue, but I would like to answer that in a slightly different way.

I came across Brian Morrissey’s latest newsletter, where he talked about the problem with Gen Z. As he wrote:

If millennials were mildly skeptical of institutional news media, Gen Z is outright hostile.

Mistrust is rife. In a new survey by the News Literacy Project, 45% of U.S. teens said journalists do more to harm democracy than protect it, and 80% said journalists fail to produce more impartial information than other online creators.

Short-video has taken over. According to Pew, 43% of those 18-29 get news from TikTok.

News is often a bummer. According to the Reuters Digital News Report, 40% of people across all age groups avoid news because it has a negative impact on their mood.

Individuals have replaced institutions. Pew’s 2025 research on news influencers reports that 38% of those ages 18–29 regularly get news from influencers on social media.

I agree with Brian on this. I have seen the same studies (and many others), and this is happening. However, our most important revenue stream in the future is Gen Z. But it’s not the Gen Z we see here. Instead, it’s the Gen Z that we can build a new future with. And before we can do that, we need to address why this is happening.

So, let me ask another question. Why is Gen Z skeptical of traditional publishers, and why are they turning to influencers instead?

We can certainly point to a lot of bad reasons. There are many very bad influencers out there, with large audiences, who focus on culture wars, misinformation, antagonism, and have basically created a cult-following of angry people.

But I can also point to good influencers, who are doing an incredible job informing their audiences, diving deep into important topics, and, again, have huge audiences of people who love that far more focused form of information and insights.

However, neither of these really explains ‘why’. Why is the traditional form of journalism not something people seek out? Well, it actually is. As I pointed out in “The direct traffic misconception ... it’s not as bad as it seems” from last year, people are very much seeking out the news.

If we look at a country with very low willingness to pay, and the youngest demographic, we see that people going directly to news sources out-competes every other channel. Yes, about 40% say they get news via social channels, but far more get it directly.

And, as I pointed out in ‘A deeper look at people’s willingness to pay for news’, people’s willingness to pay is massively defined by direct traffic.

This is not surprising, but it’s incredibly important to remember. Yes, some people might say they get news via social channels, but that’s not where you market it, and trying to reach your audience that way will lower people’s affinity to pay for your journalism.

But what this all means is we don’t have a problem with reach. People are coming directly to the news more than anything, and they are far more willing to pay when they do compared to any other strategy. So, why are we still struggling?

The answer, to put it simply, is because we have an ‘outcome’ problem. In other words, after people come to newspapers directly, the outcome is that many people feel that the journalism wasn’t worth paying for, isn’t trustworthy, doesn’t provide the level of information needed, and is not focused enough.

In fact, as a media analyst, there are five elements that I have identified as to what is going wrong.

1: The shift to explanatory journalism

When we look at what the influencers are doing, they are not just ‘reporting the news’. Instead, they are focusing on explaining it. So when we see that more people get their news from influencers, the real trend is actually that people are seeking out a different form of news. Instead of just something telling people what happened, they are seeking out people who can explain what it means, and what impact it has.

For instance, I recently saw a video by Hank Green (2.8 million subscribers on YouTube) explaining the circular investment that the AI companies are doing: The State of the AI Industry is Freaking Me Out.

This video feels far more informative than traditional news reporting, and because of this it is something that people feel is far more useful than traditional journalism.

2: Influencers are the experts, while traditional journalists are not

Another big difference is that when you go to an influencer for information, they are the ones who have looked into the story and investigated what it means. Again, the video above is a good example. It’s Hank Green explaining what is going on based on his investigations and analysis.

Traditional journalists, on the other hand, report about things from “a place of nowhere” where the journalists or even the publication has no part in the story. Even when it has to be explained, journalists will interview a third-party, rather than explain what they themselves have discovered through their journalistic analysis.

This means that traditional journalism feels disconnected and … even amateurish.

3: (good) influencers are defined by facts and data, whereas traditional journalists see fact and opinion as equals.

Again, there are good and bad influencers, but when you look at what good influencers do, they explain the facts and the data to you. True, the bad influencers often just make shit up, but the good influencers don’t. The good influencers try to explain why something is happening by showing you the data that backs up that conclusion.

Traditional journalism, however, doesn’t do this. They should be doing it, but they don’t. Instead, every time something happens, it’s always reported as “he said, she said”. Even when you have clearly defined facts on one side, it’s always countered by the opposing side saying the opposite. Many times the facts are not even prioritized, focusing instead mainly on what different people have to say about it.

Traditional journalists call this balanced reporting, but there is nothing balanced about it. And, this is the main reason why so many Gen Z say that “journalists do more to harm democracy than protect it”.

4: Focus

Another thing that influencers do is to focus. Most influencers operate within a niche. Some of those niches can be bigger than others, and some of them are not centered around a topic. But, they are focused.

Traditional journalism, however, is very much not focused. It’s just random news for random people. And we can see this clearly when we look at the individual journalists. In any given week, they cover everything from the war in Ukraine, to local crime stories, to something that happened in nature, something about an asteroid, to food prices in your supermarket.

In other words, it’s completely unfocused, making it impossible to really connect with it.

5: Audience focused

Influencers are also audience-focused, meaning every single thing they produce was made with the audience in mind. This is what influencers think about 24/7. They are constantly thinking about what would be valuable, interesting, and useful for their followers to know.

Traditional journalists, however, have completely separated themselves from their audiences. The focus is instead on news for the sake of news, regardless of whether that is relevant or not for people to know.

The result is that traditional news scores exceptionally low in terms of relevance, while influencer content scores very high for their respective audiences. Also, in traditional journalism, concepts like audience focus have been relegated to something called ‘audience engagement’ (which is a really disconnected way of talking about your readers), and it’s often placed outside the newsroom so as to not interfere with the daily news production focus.

It’s not surprising that Gen Z feels skeptical about newspapers. It’s so disconnected that it’s hard to make sense of.

These are the things that we have to address.

So, when you ask me what the primary revenue stream will be in the future, it’s obviously going to be revenue from an audience that comes to us directly. But, it’s not because the traffic is direct, it’s this kind of news.

It’s this shift towards explanatory, focused, fact-based (rather than opinion-based), audience-centric news where the journalists are the professionals that people connect with rather than mere reporters who pretend to know nothing while providing random news.

Gen Z are not looking to get thousands of random news stories. They are looking for journalism that can help them, that helps our world, and that provides the information and perspective needed to make sense of it.