News and creators: the convergence reshaping media

“I want to build a business worth a billion dollars,” broadcaster-turned-entrepreneur Piers Morgan told a packed auditorium at The Podcast Show in London last week – and he was not being rhetorical.

The former ITV anchor and tabloid editor had spent the previous half hour explaining why leaving institutional broadcasting to launch his own podcast company on YouTube had been the best decision of his career.

Morgan described ambitions spanning long-form interviews, vertical channels and even “a literally living, breathing AI version” of himself that users can “ring up to have a row with”. His operation, he argued, already dwarfs what he left behind.

A single interview clip generated 40 million views on TikTok before driving 16 million viewers to YouTube to watch the full segment. “You've got to be authentic, you've got to be interesting,” he said. The institution matters far less than the individual fronting it.

It was perhaps the clearest illustration yet of a debate now reshaping the news industry: what role creators will play in the future of journalism.

Earlier this month, former BBC News chief executive Deborah Turness warned in the Guardian that the industry must act now or the Joe Rogan/Piers Morgan ecosystem will leave it far behind, arguing that audiences are seeking more direct forms of journalism.

That same week the EU Council confirmed it would open ministerial summits and leaders' meetings to content creators from July. The move drew an immediate response from the Brussels press corps, whose representatives argued that unlike accredited journalists, creators attending such events would face no obligation to disclose who pays them.

Whatever the competing arguments, the underlying shift in how people consume news – particularly among younger audiences – is already well established, and it is placing creators increasingly close to the centre of the media ecosystem.

Creator-led media

The debate has data behind it. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025, social media overtook television as a news source in the United States last year for the first time, with 54% of Americans now accessing news via social media and video platforms, ahead of television at 50%. Among 18 to 24-year-olds, it is now the primary source. One in five Americans said they encountered Joe Rogan’s commentary in the week following January’s presidential inauguration alone.

The news industry is acutely aware of what that shift means. A Reuters Institute survey of 280 news executives from 51 countries, published in January, found publishers expect search traffic to fall by more than 40% over the next three years, while Google search referrals to news sites had already fallen 33% globally and 38% in the United States between November 2024 and November 2025.

More than two-thirds of publishers surveyed said they were concerned creators were taking time and attention away from their content, while four in ten worried about losing editorial talent to the creator economy altogether.

Rather than resisting the shift, many publishers are now reorganising around it. Three-quarters of executives surveyed said they would be getting journalists to behave more like creators this year. Half said they would partner with creators for distribution, while 31% planned to hire creators directly.

Google has drawn its own conclusions. As The Daily Influence previously reported, the company’s News Initiative announced plans earlier this year to expand its Project Oasis publisher database to include 1,000 news creators globally, alongside 20 emerging news voice bootcamps and closer collaboration with YouTube and Search on how credible creators are ranked and discovered.

The platform dynamic now runs in two directions at once. Google is investing in creator-led distribution while its AI Overviews and broader shift toward conversational search continue reducing referral traffic to the publishers those creators often rely on for reporting in the first place. 

As the Reuters Institute survey put it, search engines are becoming “AI-driven answer engines”, raising fears publisher traffic could “dry up” entirely.

The train has left the station

Broadcasters spent years treating streaming as a separate category before reorganising around where audiences had already gone. Podcasting followed the same arc – once distinct from radio and television, it is now filmed, clipped for TikTok, distributed through YouTube and monetised through subscriptions and live events simultaneously.

As the formats converged, the boundaries did not hold – and there is little reason to think news will be any different. Creators are being framed as disruptors, partners, competitors and threats to editorial standards, often in the same breath. 

Morgan’s operation – personality-led, direct-to-audience, without the cost base of institutional journalism – represents one side of that argument. The EU’s decision to open summit access to creators, and the disclosure and accountability questions it has immediately raised, represents another.

Publishers must now contend with a core question: how will they compete and adapt to creators who are increasingly staking their claim on the news ecosystem.