Today’s conversation: Caliber’s Ramin Beheshti on why social media influencers are beating news publishers with young audiences. Ramin is the former Dow Jones CTO who founded The News Movement, and he makes the case for why news publishers have made the error of thinking new audiences will adapt to publisher legacy products rather than publishers adapting their products to new consumption patterns.
Join TRB Backchannel. I’m adding an option to receive SMS updates from me. These will be limited to 3-4 a day and focused on what I’m hearing and seeing, as well as weekly requests for input as I craft my stories and prepare for conversations. I’m doing this through Subtext, and the part I like most is that this is interactive but not like a group text. I’ll be responding to as many texts as I can.
Newsweek is making the move to beehiiv
Why is an industry leader like Newsweek migrating their newsletter program to beehiiv? Let’s get it straight from the source: "We needed to be able to run newsletters as its own business within Newsweek, and a platform like beehiiv gives us more capabilities and opportunities to monetize those newsletters," said Bharat Krish, Chief Product Officer at Newsweek.
beehiiv’s ecosystem of tools is core to their ambitious growth plans, as they look to scale their flagship Bulletin newsletter while launching new subscriptions. Krish added, "I'm excited about partnering with a team that's tech-first and has an entrepreneurial mindset." Keep an eye out for Newsweek’s partnership with beehiiv launching in mid-December, and learn more about working with beehiiv here.
Gen Z hates the news
You know you’re getting old when you’re onto hand wringing about another generation that doesn’t like news. I’m reminded of something once said about young people’s tastes: If they never changed, there would be no red wine industry.
The millennial news graveyard includes: BuzzFeed News, Mashable, Vice News, Mic, Ozy, AJ+, Fusion, Upworthy, Circa, Great Big Story, NowThis, Cheddar. The biggest success story is probably Morning Brew, which had the sense to skip politics and general news for business.
The reasons these efforts failed were varied, of course, but involved some combination of the following:
Dependence on Facebook traffic. This proved a fatal error.
Over-capitalized. Vice at $6 billion.
Built on scaled ad models. Programmatic turned out disastrous for publishers.
Over-reliance on tone. The great Skimmification.
Now, we are onto Gen Z, the age cohort landing between the ages of 13 and 28. All signs point to a far more acute issue facing the news industry. 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.
The news landscape is under compression from all sides. The president is maintaining a “Wall of Shame” for news organizations he is warring with while calling reporters names without much protest from his own party. The specter of Google Zero is evaporating traffic to major news publishers. Advertisers often want to avoid news altogether. Leading newspapers like The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have struggled. The U.S.’s leading industry, tech, ignores institutional news providers and outwardly attacks them with Trumpian screeds in instances like this weekend’s New York Times story about the conflicts of interests David Sacks has in serving as AI czar. And, of course, the Olivia Nuzzi psychodrama does little to instill confidence of anyone, of any age, that the institutional news companies are on the up-and-up.
It’s important to restate that news is a subset of publishing, which is a subset of a far broader Information Space. Everyone is competing with everyone for attention, ad dollars and influence. Professional news organizations don’t compete only with each other. It isn’t NBC vs CBS vs ABC. It isn’t MSNBC vs Fox News. It’s comedians with podcasts, white nationalists with Rumble talk shows, Tucker and Candace, Harry Sisson and Hasan Piker, and on and on.
By the metrics, the institutional news industry is losing this battle badly.
“They don't want to be talked down to,” Ramin Beheshti, CEO of Caliber, a company creating news products for younger audiences, told me on The Rebooting Show. “They don't want to be made to feel stupid. News does that.”
Ramin is a veteran of News Corp, where he was CTO of Dow Jones. He split off to start The News Movement, along with now Washington Post CEO Will Lewis. The News Movement’s goal was to reach younger audiences who were not consuming traditional news by meeting them on social platforms with native, explanatory video. It subsequently added The Recount, a well-funded progressive video news startup that fizzled out, lifestyle newsletter Capsule and a news creator app SaySo.
The bet Ramin is making is that rebuilding trust with young people starts with rebuilding the product. I do not have a ton of confidence in legacy players executing on this fundamental imperative when they talk of getting people to come to their homepages again. I do not believe the way to win over more teens is having them surf to your dot-com.
“They’re consuming information in different ways, and we haven't changed our product in 20 years,” Ramin told me
Ramin’s case is that the news industry has lost young people because it built a product for itself, not for them. The only way forward is to redesign news around The realities of how people consume information now. It’s easy to say Pivot to Video 2.0, but institutional news providers have little choice but to adapt to the information marketplace without losing their grounding.
“Audiences have already moved away from consuming news in the way that news organizations would like them to.”
Introducing The Audience Revenue Lab The Audience Revenue Lab is a collaboration between The Rebooting and House of Kaizen. The Audience Revenue Lab will work directly with publishers as an extension of their teams to assist them in implementing to audience-focused strategies. |
We’re combining The Rebooting’s insights into where audience behaviors are shifting and what best practices have emerged from industry leaders with House of Kaizen’s wo decades optimizing subscription growth across industries. |
Troy, Alex, Anonymous Banker and I discuss why hustler energy is poised to be an even greater advantage going forward. We contrast genuine hustle – resourceful, opportunistic, often born from constraint – with the branded grind culture Silicon Valley popularized. Topics discussed include:
ChatGPT’s group chat feature as “deranged TikTok,” Sergey Brin rollerblading back into the Googleplex and turning around its AI efforts, OpenAI’s defensive posture under Sam Altman, Nvidia’s valuation pressure, Apple and Google’s distribution advantage, Claude’s coding strengths, Suno’s $2.5 billion valuation, Canva-style AI design, the specter of AI Thanksgiving recipes gone awry, Holiday Inn Express as an analogy for AI slop, Nano Banana video generation lacks taste, ChatGPT as a fourth participant in the group chat, puns as the lowest form of humor, the case that Ben Faw was just too early, Business Insider’s adoption of AI, Alex’s ‘eggscellent’ People vs Bananas AI slop, Waymo vs Uber, the New York Times’ shift to reporter-led video, Micah Gelman on why publishers usually fail at video, Fidji Simo’s argument that AI raises the floor, corporate grind-culture co-opting hustling, Alex’s story of leaving high school in Europe, AB’s bootstrap path and high-agency thesis, Pieter Levels as the archetypal solo-coder hustler, immigrant hustlers, Coming to America as hustler artifact, why hustlers don’t stop hustling even when they get rich, Cluely and Friend.com as examples of fake hustle, trauma as hustle fuel, AB says my cleaning lady should build an app, Warner Bros. Discovery deal speculation with Paramount and Comcast, and Sinclair’s bid for E.W. Scripps reshaping local TV.
Listen on Apple or Spotify. Or watch on YouTube
In the PvA newsletter, Troy detects snobbery in the AI slop label: “We forget that for a massive amount of people, this technology raises the floor. If you don’t have access to experts or high-end production, “good enough” isn’t slop, it’s a miracle. At its best it’s this “democratization” tech has been pitching for years.”
For sponsorship information, see how The Rebooting works with partners.