Finally, the Media Is Pivoting to Video

The infamous “pivot to video” in the 2010s was a disaster for publishers. The scars of that mistake still linger in newsrooms, magazines and digital media outlets everywhere, like the splatter of that watermelon that BuzzFeed exploded by constricting it with rubber bands.

But the outlets that got hosed in that shift weren’t making a mistake, they were just early to the game, and had become too compliant to the tech platforms that had been feeding them audience for years.

This week New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn appeared on Peter Kafka’s Channels podcast, where he framed the outlet’s rush into video as a “race against time” and “as big a transformation as the print-to-digital transformation.” It garnered the expected snark from media veterans who still hold the scars from the last pivot to video, but as with most strategic maneuvers in media, the Times simply has its pulse on the moment better than most in the space.

Video has been the dominant form of media for decades, it’s just that until now, it was defined by the form factor: TV screens. But 2026 isn’t 2015: All video can be TV now. The floodgates are open, and it would be a dereliction of duty for legacy media brands to ignore it.

To go back a decade or so: Beginning in 2015, many hot digital publishers (like Vice and BuzzFeed) and legacy media brands (like The Washington Post and Vanity Fair) cut staff and resources in their core text offering and shifted spend to video content. It wasn’t as nearly as strategic as it sounds.

In fact, publishers had grown dependent on digital platforms, primarily Facebook and Google, to drive audience to their websites. A decision by Facebook to prioritize video content in its newsfeed precipitated the pivot, forcing what became something of a mad scramble for video content, any content.

The result were raw stream of thought videos (which look prescient given the streamer culture of today!), and strange experiments, like cooking videos on platforms not known for food, and wacky experiments (like the infamous BuzzFeed watermelon).

Ultimately, of course, the promised audience never arrived, Facebook’s algorithms shifted some more, and publishers were left holding the bag, with many journalists turning the “pivot to video” into a punchline.

But 2026 is not 2016. Nielsen reports from that era consistently showed that the preferred form of media in 2016 was… video. But in 2016 that video consumption overwhelmingly happened on TV sets, where cable and broadcast TV, as well as Netflix, reigned supreme.

YouTube, Facebook and all the rest (at the time it was Meerkat and Vine lol) were resigned to laptops, tablets and smartphones, where video was fighting for time with word processors, spreadsheets, and the rest of the internet.

The biggest shift in video history, it turns out, happened right as the pivot to video was drying up: Fall 2017, when YouTube launched its first dedicated TV app. That move would, eventually, turn YouTube into the dominant source of video on TV sets, and it’s why Instagram’s current TV push should scare the pants off of legacy entertainment companies.

But for publishers, that change in the landscape is a golden opportunity: For the first time, TV’s grasp on video is up for grabs, and the zero-sum nature of TV (people may have their phones out while they watch, but the big screen only has one video app open at a time) means that creators, digital upstarts and legacy outlets can steal viewers from traditional TV.

When a viewer is streaming Megyn Kelly on their TV, it may be coming at the expense of Fox News; When someone chooses to watch Bon Appetit’s YouTube channel it may be coming at the expense of Food Network; When a parent turns on Ms. Rachel for their kids it may be at the expense of Nickelodeon; MrBeast’s high-stakes games may come at the expense of game shows on ABC; And, yes, a report from The New York Times could be replacing journalism from CNN.

TV still has plenty of cards to play, of course: Traditional TV news organizations and entertainment studios are very, very good at producing video content, and live news is an area where publishers just may not have the budget or runway to compete, but the platform lock that TV once had on video is gone.

That’s also why TV channels like MS NOW are inking deals for YouTube shows from the likes of Crooked Media, and why Netflix is picking up short-form programming from the likes of People Inc. and, yes, The Hollywood Reporter.

And there are meaningful signals that the public writ large is choosing to consume more video, at the expense of audio and text.

In a provocative cover story for The Atlantic this week titled “The End of Reading Is Here,” Rose Horowitch suggests that in an AI-powered world where “entertainment is limitless,” “the literate era will prove to be a brief interlude between the oral and digital ages.”

That’s the context behind Kahn’s strong endorsement of the Times‘ video push, which includes in-app vertical video and longer-form fare. The outlet is acutely aware of what its paying subscribers want, and what it takes to drive new subscribers. Video won’t change that economic strategy, but the Times sees where things are going, not because a platform tweaked an algorithm, but because of how consumers themselves are changing where they place their attention, and with TV’s grasp on that attention more tenuous then it has ever been.

“It has the potential to allow us to bring really good quality original reporting to a much larger audience than what we currently have,” Kahn told Kafka. The TV masses are up for grabs, and the Times knows it. Will the other publishers get their cut in time?