Embrace journalism's star system

A friend of mine was, 20 years ago, something of a news media visionary. It wasn’t something he set out to do – he’s a corporate lawyer by trade.

He was a committed newspaper consumer, someone who took a competitive, almost athletic pride in how quickly he could devour a morning edition, skimming the main stories and then picking off the columnists he liked. He would tell me with pride that he had read the newspaper for which I worked, one of many in his daily diet, in seven minutes flat.

He remains a devoted subscriber, incidentally, which rather proves the point that speed of consumption and depth of loyalty are not mutually exclusive.

His idea was that I should break away from my employer and form something like a United Artists for journalists: find someone with capital, attract only the very best talent, and distribute their work on its own, stripping out all the workaday output of a traditional newsroom and leaving only the stars.

I wasn’t in a position to act on it at the time, and I was, if I’m honest, rather enjoying my job. But there was something in his idea that, obviously, stuck with me.

You could argue that he had invented Substack. At the very least, he identified the trend we are seeing towards “creators” and, viewing it in a traditional context, the primacy of journalistic stars who can produce the kind of stories that will not be superseded by AI-produced content.

I am told by executives from news organisations across the world that there is, at this moment, an intensifying battle for talent. Top reporters and editors are being aggressively headhunted by rivals. One journalist I know of has received three pay rises already this year, as a succession of suitors have come calling and been seen off by their employer. This should change how news companies think about the people who work for them.

We have always operated, as an industry, on the assumption that the brand of the publication matters more than the brands of the individuals within it. To a degree, I still think that’s fair. But news organisations are being forced to learn how to manage an increasingly empowered star system, and those that don’t learn quickly will find themselves losing the people their audiences actually come for.

A most telling sign that something fundamental has shifted is what is happening at The Economist, a publication whose journalists have, since its founding in 1843, written anonymously: no bylines in print, no bylines online, its columnists hidden behind pen names like Bageshot, Charlemagne and Lexington. It is, or has been, the purest expression of the belief that the brand is everything.

And yet The Economist is now actively pushing its writers forward through its Play and Insider video strands as public authorities on their areas of coverage, encouraging them to build profiles. If that is not a canary in a coalmine, I don’t know what is.

What does this mean in practice? First, it means properly identifying your stars: not through the old methods of gut feeling and proximity to ownership, which tended to reward the columnist who was an impressive performer at lunches and cocktail parties. Rather it should be done through data, which now makes it genuinely possible to see whose work is driving engagement and loyalty. I have always maintained that there would be greater disparity among the pay of newspaper columnists if management dug deeper into the data.

There has been much discussion this week about the creator economy and its implications for journalism, prompted in part by a lecture from Deborah Turness, the former head of news at the BBC, who argued that this is the defining challenge facing news media over the coming decade.

She is right, though I’d push back gently on the suggestion that the industry has been largely asleep on the subject, because a great many companies are already building infrastructure around their star talent, developing them as brands in their own right, and equipping them with the social, video and audio tools they need to reach audiences in new ways.

This is happening quickly, and the shape of it is becoming clearer. Arguably the most dynamic UK media company of the moment, Goalhanger, has been built almost entirely on this model. It has grown rapidly by anchoring its podcasts, and now diffusion products, around its talent and is famously willing to pay them well and give them a big share of the upside.

The anxiety I hear most often from publishers, when the conversation turns to investing in individual journalists as brands, is: what if we build them up and they leave? To which I always give the same answer: they will leave; they always do. Look at your newsroom today and compare it to 15 years ago: the people will be mostly completely different and that’ll be true in 15 years’ time too. I say make the most of your stars while you have them. And, in doing so, understand that you are looking like a good employer to the next generation of high-perfomers.

And remember, too, that news organisations have far more to offer than they sometimes give themselves credit for. Lucy Küng has outlined with great clarity the pressures that the creator economy places on individuals who strike out alone, chief among them being burnout – the grinding, relentless difficulty of sustaining a single-person brand at the output level the market demands. The early bloggers discovered this in the Noughties, and the lesson hasn’t changed.

A news organisation provides something that is genuinely hard to replicate on your own: legal support, financial infrastructure, distribution, editorial companionship and the simple relief of not having to do everything yourself. That matters enormously, and it is the strongest argument for enticing your stars to stay in-house rather than watching them walk out the door to go it alone.

Lucy spoke at the PPA Festival in London this week and afterwards reflected: “For me, the discussion is now moving from individual creators to the organisations forming around them: creator studios; talent agencies; newsroom collectives. Media companies built around distinctive people, formats and communities.”

Newsrooms have a great opportunity to be the organisations to which creators gravitate. We should embrace the star system, with clear eyes and without sentimentality, because if handled well it can be very much to our advantage.

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