Three months ago, I sat in a conference room with twelve media executives. Smart people. Experienced. Running organizations that collectively reach hundreds of millions of readers monthly.
One of them—let’s call him David—was explaining why his homepage redesign would solve their engagement problems. Better navigation. Cleaner layout. Faster load times. The works.
I interrupted him. “When did you last open your own homepage?”
Silence.
“I mean it. When did you personally navigate to your site’s front page and consume content the way you’re expecting your audience to?”
More silence. Then nervous laughter.
Because here’s the thing: David opens TikTok. His kids ask ChatGPT for homework help. His wife gets news from Instagram Stories. But his organization is still optimizing for a behavior pattern that exists primarily in conference room PowerPoints.
We’re broadcasting to empty space.
We’re broadcasting to empty space.
The Great Sorting
I’ve been calling it Audience 3.0 for two years now, but that makes it sound evolutionary. Progressive. Like we moved from Model T to Tesla.
Wrong metaphor entirely.
What happened is more like speciation. The same humans now live in completely different information ecosystems. And most media companies are feeding the wrong ecosystem.
Audience 1.0 was appointment television. Everyone watched the same newscast at 6 PM. Read the same newspaper over coffee. We controlled the schedule, they controlled the remote. Simple transaction.
Audience 2.0 brought us websites and apps. Suddenly people could read what they wanted, when they wanted. We built recommendation engines and email newsletters. They gave us their data, we gave them some control. Still a recognizable exchange.
Audience 3.0 broke the entire framework.
They don’t visit news sites—news finds them in feeds. They don’t trust mastheads—they trust creators. They don’t read articles—they consume stories that morph based on their context, their history, their current mood. A 30-second TikTok explains inflation. A three-hour YouTube video breaks down Ukrainian politics. ChatGPT summarizes the morning’s headlines.
And here’s what we refuse to acknowledge: They’re not shallow. They’re not lazy. They’re not destroying democracy.
They’re just living in a different reality than the one we built our businesses around.
I’ve Seen This Movie Before
We built better printing presses while our audience moved to television.
Back when I was helping build the content management systems that power CNN, BBC, Reuters—the software infrastructure that runs modern newsrooms—we had a saying: “Optimize the workflow, not the world.”
Made sense then. Our job was making existing processes more efficient. Help journalists publish faster. Give editors better tools. Streamline the machinery.
But we were optimizing for a world that was already disappearing.
Those systems assumed every story has one canonical version. They measured success through pageviews and time on site. They organized content into sections and beats—categories that make perfect sense if you’re publishing a newspaper, but are meaningless abstractions to someone scrolling through TikTok.
We built better printing presses while our audience moved to television. Then we built better websites while our audience moved to feeds. Now we’re building better CMSes while our audience moves to AI.
Pattern recognition, anyone?
The Defensive Crouch
In every room I enter, I hear the same refrains. “This audience is shallow.” “They have goldfish attention spans.” “TikTok is digital junk food.” “Real readers still come to homepages.”
Bullshit.
The Audience 3.0 cohort will watch a four-hour video essay about Roman history from a YouTuber they trust. Then context-switch to a 15-second breaking news update. Then dive into a Reddit thread for nuanced discussion. They fact-check through parallel sources, not single authorities. They can smell institutional BS from orbit.
They haven’t abandoned depth. They’ve abandoned our containers.
They haven’t abandoned depth. They’ve abandoned our containers.
When TikTok knows you’re interested in climate science, it doesn’t just show you climate content. It shows you climate content from creators you’ll trust, at the complexity level you can handle, in the format you prefer, at the moment you’re most receptive. Then it watches your response and adjusts.
That’s not personalization. That’s metamorphosis.
Meanwhile, we’re still publishing the same article for everyone and wondering why engagement is declining.
The Structural Impossibility
Most media organizations are architecturally incapable of serving Audience 3.0. Full stop.
Our CMSes publish articles. Our workflows assume one story, one version. Our metrics were designed when we controlled distribution. Our org charts divide digital from print from broadcast—distinctions that map to our internal structure, not audience reality.
We’ve spent a decade making our Audience 2.0 products incrementally better while our actual humans migrated to Audience 3.0 platforms. We optimized the wrong machine.
And the brutal truth? Some of the most sophisticated media technology in the world—systems I helped architect—made this problem worse. We automated and optimized workflows that were fundamentally misaligned with where audiences were heading.
What They Actually Want
Strip away the platform complexity. This audience is asking for something surprisingly simple: stories that understand them as individuals, delivered in formats native to their actual lives.
They want the news to find them, not vice versa. Complexity that matches their context—sometimes a summary, sometimes a deep dive. Voices they recognize and trust, not institutional anonymity. Content that assumes they’re smart but busy. Experiences that improve through interaction.
They don’t hate journalism. They hate how we package it.
They don’t hate journalism. They hate how we package it.
The Uncomfortable Math
If we accept that Audience 3.0 represents the future—and demographics guarantee it does—then several uncomfortable truths follow:
Our core products are misaligned. Articles, sections, homepages? Artifacts from a broadcast world.
Our brands mean less than our creators. People follow individual journalists, not mastheads. Taylor Lorenz has more influence than most news organizations.
Distribution is outside our control now. We can figure out how to thrive in feeds and chats, or we can become irrelevant.
One-size-fits-all content is dead. The same story needs to exist in radically different forms for different contexts and consumption patterns.
LLMs will intermediate our relationships. Our content will increasingly be consumed through AI interfaces we don’t control.
These aren’t trends to resist. They’re realities to design for.
Building the Bridge
I’m not suggesting we chase every platform or abandon journalistic principles. I’m suggesting we recognize that our audiences have already moved and build products that meet them where they live.
This means creating content systems that output to infinite formats, not just article templates. Investing in personalities and voices, not just institutional brands. Building for feeds and conversations, not just destinations. Preparing for LLM consumption as rigorously as we once prepared for SEO. Measuring impact and outcomes, not just engagement.
Some organizations get this. The New York Times’ games and cooking apps acknowledge that not everything needs to be an article. Individual journalists building massive followings on Substack and YouTube understand that trust is personal, not institutional.
But these are exceptions. The industry’s mainstream remains structured for a world that no longer exists.
The Portal Closed
Every day we delay adapting to this reality, we cede more ground to creators, platforms, and AI systems that have no such hesitation. Our audiences aren’t waiting for us to figure this out.
They’ve already passed through the portal.
The question isn’t whether to serve Audience 3.0. It’s whether we’ll have any audience left by the time we try.
The question isn’t whether to serve Audience 3.0. It’s whether we’ll have any audience left by the time we try. The divergence is complete. The old world and the new world are no longer connected.
I believe in journalism’s necessity. I chose this industry because stories shape the world. But if those stories can’t reach people in the reality where they actually live, we’re just talking to ourselves in empty space.
Time to build our own way through.