Welcome back to the Mediabistro Weekly Drop. We heard your feedback that sometimes this newsletter runs a bit long, so we’re switching things up.

After all, we don’t get paid by the word. Which is really too bad.

This week, we’re keeping things terse and focusing on short form content, since we’re both self aware and pretty big fans of irony.

Short form media has become a big business. It’s basically the engine driving most of today’s media economy. And that’s not even counting OnlyFans.

Short form now plays a critical role in defining media careers. It’s replaced sizzle reels and spec scripts in determining who gets hired, who gets paid, and what’s resonating with audiences.

Figure out short form, and you’ve figured out how to keep making money from content creation. At least until the algorithm starts pushing someone younger, better looking, and more relevant.

If you work in media, entertainment, publishing, design, or content marketing, you’re already focusing on short form, or you’re already operating on borrowed time.

Speaking of, let’s lose the fluff and go straight to the stories.

The Data Download: Short Form Careers and the Big Picture

Here are some stats on career and income growth for creators. No context necessary.

TikTok generated $23.6 billion in advertising revenue last year.

The average user spends 108 minutes a day on the app. Long attention for short form.

Creators made around 2-4 cents for every thousand ‘qualified’ views, with the new Creator Rewards program reportedly paying more like around $.30 – $1.00. The average upload is viewed around 25 times.

So a million views will earn creators between $300-$1,000, depending on the audience and the ad rates.

The global creator economy generated about $205B in 2024, and is expected to grow at more than 23%.

Analysts estimate that by 2033, the global creator economy will grow to $1.35 trillion a year.

The number of full time creators is rising too, from around 200k to 1.5 million in the US alone over the past 4 years.

Only 4% of full time creators make over six figures a year.

Additional source: Deloitte

Note: TikTok figures are from ByteDance. Now that it’s operated by Oracle, it’s probably going to start costing creators money to post on the platform during the five minutes a day it’s not completely down or totally throttled.

Now, FYP can just be an f and you to Paramount – and the Ellisons.

Source: your overly loquacious editor

Brand partnerships make up around 75% of creator earnings, with under a quarter coming from platform payouts.

61% of consumers trust creators more than brand advertising.

US businesses will generate an estimated $2.9 trillion in direct revenue from social selling in 2026.

Accounts vary, but the average full time influencer generates around $200 to $578 of that revenue for every $100 spent on brand partnerships, so it seems to be working.

Source: Forbes

TL;DR: if you work in media, don’t quit your day job. But if your day job quits you, then you’ve still got options.

At least until they switch up the algorithm or pay rates.

The CTA

Short-form content isn’t killing traditional media careers.

It’s just exposing who was protected by legacy advertisers and captive audiences, and who can survive creating content where the audience is an algorithm, and there’s no one else to blame (or anywhere to hide) when something doesn’t land with the public.

“We tried to shorten that sentence, but we’re not eligible for parole.” – maybe Andy Rooney

The upside and earnings potential are real. So is the constant pressure to produce, and the relentless burnout that follows.

OK, so this newsletter was still a bit long. We did our best, since even short form content requires a little context and clarity.

Unless it’s a job posting, that is. Speaking of, here’s a rundown on the hottest and latest openings on Mediabistro.

Applying will probably take longer than reading this newsletter. The good news is the odds of getting an offer for any listing on Mediabistro are still way higher than making six figures this year from content creation.

• Media Director, Marketing for Change
• Digital Strategy Manager, National Association of Letter Carriers
• Digital Fundraising and Marketing Associate, WUNC Public Radio
• Product Marketing Specialist, Murmuration
• Senior Producer, Status Coup News
• Content and Community Manager, Hay House
• Producer/Showrunner, Mustard Squad HQ
• Digital Media Campaign Strategist, Schaefer Advertising
• Deputy Editor, Poets & Writers Magazine

Size doesn’t matter, except when it comes to word count. So, here’s to all the short form kings (and queens) out there. This brevity thing is harder than it looks.

Matt Charney

Seriously, though.

After all, we work in media. We’re supposed to know how to do this stuff.

Content used to be king. Well, the king’s dead.

If you work in content marketing, congratulations on turning a bit of talent, a lot of luck, and a really expensive liberal arts degree into what passes for a career.

After all, student loans for private liberal arts colleges are pretty steep these days, and when finance majors and MBA grads are struggling to find jobs, it’s not like the Fortune 500 are competing to hire all the top comparative lit and philosophy majors out there.

Late-stage capitalism sucks, mostly. It’s gotten you trapped in a crushing cycle of debts, interest, and fees (hey, you played by their rules long enough, which is why you know more about Moliere than macroeconomics).

There’s one silver lining to it, though- without the collision of classism, consumerism, and capital markets, content marketing wouldn’t exist, and you wouldn’t be a decade into your Plan B of writing copy about crap you don’t care about for an audience you secretly loathe. You’d be writing the Great American Novel instead of, well, B2B newsletters or LinkedIn posts.

This Article Was Produced Without AI. Which is why it’s late.

Now that you know what my internal monologue sounds like, please also know that I’m in the same boat as you – and while the medium sucks, and the message is worse (basically, “buy stuff from us” is a leitmotif in this business), we’re pretty lucky to have a job to begin with – especially right now.

It’s no secret that the content marketing function has recently been put under an unprecedented stress test that was, by most objective measures, a complete structural, spiritual, and systematic dismantling over the past two years.

Put less delicately, it’s been a total shit show ever since the world first saw generative AI and how “easy” content creation has become.

Because those of us who managed to survive as content marketers know that it’s actually really, really hard if you care about stuff like quality, or clarity, or extraneous emojis and em dashes.

And it’s getting harder every time an LLM throws out a new model, or another product promises that it’s capable of the alchemy that is turning mediocre prompts into memorable prose.

Not because AI is a threat – rather, it’s sort of the only moat left for content marketing careers. It’s largely because our audience believes the hype about AI that the bottom of the content marketing job market has fallen out, the illusion that productivity is more important than creativity, and the belief that emotional connections aren’t required in content marketing to create meaningful engagement.

That parasociopathy is the root cause for the fact that so much traffic, and so many jobs, have been sacrificed to an LLM that doesn’t need to cite its sources, fact-check, or rely on rewrites or redlines to turn a rough draft into a polished product.

Content marketing has always been about quantity over quality. It’s just that not too long ago, those two concepts could peacefully coexist before all that quantity created so much noise that no one even bothers listening to the signals anymore. Reach has become relevance, which is bad news for those of us in the business of content marketing.

The good news is that content is more important than ever before. They aren’t wrong; it’s just that the role of content – and that of the marketers who create it – has completely changed.

Which brings us to this week’s Mediabistro Weekly Drop. This week, we’re breaking down the state of content marketing jobs and looking at short-term trends and long-term career implications of what happens when you replace writers and designers with prompt engineers and project managers.

Spoiler alert — 💩💩💩

The Lead:

The Content Regicide

This week, SEMrush released a fascinating deep dive into content marketing job data, analyzing 8,000 US content marketing-related job postings from November and December 2025.

The results read less like workforce analytics and more like an obituary for content marketing professionals, which figures, given that it’s an Amazon subsidiary reporting on a data set largely developed from paid job ads indexed from Indeed. Yeah, we hate it here, too.

According to the report, job postings for Content Marketing Managers dropped by 73% from 2023; in those two years, postings for Content Marketing Specialists fell by 74%. That’s not a rounding error – that’s a body count, considering these are by far the two most prevalent job titles in the content marketing profession.

It also explains why we’re stuck writing weekly SubStacks for a living (and feel lucky to do so): there really aren’t many options for anyone who’s built a career (or something closely resembling one) in this business.

These jobs have been replaced by two roles that, on the surface, seem to exist at opposite ends of the content marketing spectrum.

At the tactical, execution, and operational end, listings for “Content Producers” jumped by a staggering 1,261% in the past 48 months, which makes it the professional equivalent of buying stock in NVidia or buying up Bitcoins. “Content Creator” jobs, similarly, rose 410% in the same time period.

These two closely correlated roles accounted for 34% (or about one out of three) of the total number of content marketing job posts analyzed in the report, a significant plurality that’s only continuing to grow, albeit at a slightly slower rate.

At the other end of the content careers spectrum, postings for “Head of Content Marketing” grew by 376%, and “VP of Content” (and equivalent titles) rose by 308%. This is reason for cautious optimism, but the growth in these divergent roles- at the expense of most other content marketing jobs – can also be interpreted a bit more cynically.

Companies want people who will do the work and people who will own the strategy. They aren’t willing to pay for anyone who exists anywhere in the middle, which is bad news for anyone looking at content marketing as a long-term, viable career choice. These experienced, mostly mid-career sort of roles are unlikely to be saved by the bell curve, even one that’s so patently problematic.

Another interesting finding, for anyone working in media or entertainment – beyond content marketing, across industries and markets, the number of senior and executive level postings (defined as director level or above) listing “storytelling” or an equivalent soft skill as a basic job requirement rose from 8% in 2024 to 29% today.

By comparison, that’s one percent higher than executive roles listing AI expertise or experience, which is great news for anyone in this industry – for now.

The moral of the story: content is no longer considered brand marketing, but increasingly, as operational infrastructure. Content marketing is entering its second act, and with one helluva plot twist, apparently.

You can read the full study at http://www.semrush.com/blog/content-marketing-job-market-study

Search Media & Creative Jobs on MB

PR Wants Credit for Inventing Content Marketing Now

Press releases are like participation trophies for corporations. No one asked for them, nobody really wants them, but they’re still an integral part of content marketing and corporate communications strategies – even though those same execs all pretty much know damned well that when they want to cover a story, the press actually reaches out to you directly.

They are, like most AI-generated content, ridiculously formulaic and mid, for lack of a better word. They all open with some variation on the fact that they’re “thrilled to announce” whatever the headline already has, which is corporate speak for “you can applaud now.”

Then, they go back to ignoring corporate press releases, just like everyone else.

Like Harlequin is to bodice-ripping paperback romances, “news” wire service PRNEWS is to this most generic of genres. For a nominal fee, they’ll let corporate comms teams upload and format their own press release, then “distribute it” to hundreds of outlets (which is technically true of an RSS feed).

Their business model is predicated on press releases somehow persisting, even in the face of budget cuts, media distrust, and the general collapse of attention spans or intellectual curiosity. They’re like cockroaches or Toyota trucks, but with boilerplates.

PRNEWS (the all-caps naming convention being very on-brand), likely realizing that their entire business is predicated on perpetuating the myth that press releases are not only a best practice but also carry some sort of cachet and prestige, has invented a similarly specious industry awards program. If the Cable Ace Awards or Daytime Emmys taught us anything, it’s that awards provide market validation that even the most cringeworthy content is worthy of recognition and praise.

So, on February 19, PRNews announced the 2026 winners of its annual Content Marketing Awards, which are like the other CMAs but somehow even less relevant to enterprise businesses. This version of the CMAs celebrates the fact that PR pros invented content marketing, and that entitles them to be independent arbiters of what quality content looks like.

The awards this year included categories such as branded podcasts (why is this a thing), “thought leadership campaigns” (definitely not a thing), AI-powered storytelling (God help us all), and “owned media platforms” (like Pravda in the former Soviet Union). The winners this year recognize some genuinely impressive accomplishments, all for the low, low entry fee of $550 per category.

For example, rbb communications (the ee cummings of brand naming conventions) took home two of the night’s top honors: Most Innovative Use of AI in Content Creation, with another win for “Best Evergreen Content Strategy.” Let’s hit pause on that, uh, interesting combination. Evergreen content and AI innovation are diametrically opposed concepts; one lives or dies on its longevity and utility, and the other completely ignores these factors while converging all content toward the median.

Winning both awards is a clear sign that content marketing success doesn’t take talent or require quality. It requires cash, connections, and the ability to keep a straight face. Here’s hoping they put the award next to their “Best Places to Work” plaque – they’re equally reputable, objective, and definitely not pay for play.

Check out the full list of winners here for inspiration (or proof that content marketing’s collapse continues unabated).

LinkedIn Would Like You to Know That It Is Absolutely Fine. Just Ask Clippy.

In mid-February, LinkedIn publicly disclosed that it had seen a nearly 60% decline in traffic over the last year, largely due to the rise of AI-powered search. This news was released at about the same time that many marketing agencies and analysts issued public guidance to double down on LinkedIn spend, particularly given TikTok’s imminent demise and, well, the decline in search engine volume, which is a real drag on sponsored results.

Man, you gotta love it when irony does its thing.

To be fair, this isn’t a LinkedIn-specific problem. It’s what happens when queries that used to drive clicks to websites now move to platforms built on AI summaries and preview panels that don’t require clicking any external links. News publishers have seen referral traffic drop by roughly a third since Google first launched AI Overviews, according to Chartbeat data of over 2500 major news outlets.

That’s bad, but LinkedIn’s 60% is notably way worse, probably because, unlike actual news sites, its content is already the same sort of generic copy stuffed with listicles and broken backlinks that AI now produces itself, without requiring users to leave their platform at all, much less for the world’s largest “professional network.” That’s what they call spam factories these days.

This doesn’t mean that LinkedIn is dead, as much as we’d all love to see that happen. It means that in content marketing, reach and traffic are no longer concentric concepts – they’re increasingly decoupled, and completely unattributable as far as source tracking is concerned.

Metrics built around click-through rates are now even less meaningful than ever before, since what they’re measuring is less meaningful than ever before, too.

Whether that’s good or bad news depends entirely on whether or not your content marketing can consist exclusively of AI-generated summaries and aggregated social media posts, which is a convenient segue into the next story.

AI Eats Content, Then Runs Out on the Bill.

Even in proposal form, these new requirements would establish a clear precedent that other regulators will surely notice, and that requires a public response – and public stand – by Google, whose Gemini LLM is quickly lapping most of its competitors in both sophistication and user volume.

For content marketers, the immediate implications seem clear: if brands can elect to meaningfully opt out, the value of continuing to voluntarily provide LLMs a high-quality source should significantly increase, as the inventory of available content that can be leveraged by AI will shrink, while the demand for AI-generated answer engines will continue its unabated growth.

Being the brand that AI wants to cite will be the ultimate competitive advantage in content marketing – provided that most companies, predictably, decide that proprietary IP is more important than perceived authority and brand reach.

Long term, though, the implications are much more uncomfortable for content marketers. The entire profession is built on a 20-year-old business model that assumes good content inevitably leads to increased traffic.

Just like 20 years ago, when everyone assumed that home values never went down, that R Kelly was a really nice guy, and the Lions would have won a Super Bowl by now. But now we know better: AI Overviews breaks that virtuous cycle by breaking the entire logic behind links. So, what replaces this familiar but terminally ill business model?

Hell, at this point, no one knows. Not even Grok, Claude, or Clippy.

But when models shift, content marketers tend to figure it out quickly. After all, survival is the most important soft skill you can have in this business. For example…

Feeling Lucky: YouTube Isn’t A Video Platform. It’s an AI Reference Engine.

According to Adweek data published this month, YouTube has overtaken Reddit as the most frequently cited social platform in AI-generated content. The one-time P2P video sharing service now accounts for 16 percent of LLM citations during the last 6 months; Reddit, the Internet’s self-proclaimed frontpage, only accounted for around 10%. That’s a pretty big reversal from where things stood just a year ago.

So, what’s going on? Well, the result is more structural than anything to do with machine learning or consumer preferences. It’s because YouTube content is loaded with automated enhancements like transcripts, captions, timestamps, and keyword-rich descriptions.

That structure makes it easy for AI engines to parse, understand, and reference – exactly what you’d expect from a Google subsidiary that’s definitely not evil (trust them). Reddit, by contrast, tends to have content that’s messy, user-generated, community-moderated, and more reliant on context than the content itself. AI models, obviously, strongly prefer the former approach when it comes to training data, creating the emerging discipline (and impending Silicon Valley gold rush) that’s called Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO.

Because if there’s one naming convention that instantly conjures up images of quality and permanence, it’s “Geo.” This emerging discipline (and cottage industry of commoditized crap) is basically where SEO was back in the dot-com bull market. Everyone knows it’s important; no one knows how it really works, but everyone’s willing to throw money at the problem rather than risk falling behind the competition.

Recently published data suggests that content that’s deliberately optimized for AI citation is cited 43% more in AI Insight and LLM results than content that’s just optimized for traditional, boring old SEO.

So, if you’re one of those people, like me, who prefer to stay off camera and believe the power of the written word is stronger than the powers of post-production and after effects, well, it’s finally time to trade in our bylines for hyphenites.

YouTube – and video content in general – is no longer optional, or nice to have just because you’re in B2B marketing. The days of professional audiences preferring long-form content are long gone – the case for skipping a cross-platform content approach is getting harder to make every day. Your ICP may not be watching your videos; your buyers likely don’t like, subscribe to, or comment on your YouTube channel.

On the other hand, the AI models responsible for creating the summaries that now form the foundation of how knowledge workers acquire that knowledge are constantly tuned into your channel. And if you’re not tuned into that fact, you’re probably going to find yourself out of work.

Or at least, out of an audience.

Final Thoughts on Content Marketing, by a Content Marketer

That’s a ton of content about content, and almost all of it’s as uplifting and optimistic as your standard 18th century Russian novel. But here’s the bottom line: content marketing is splitting itself down the seams, dividing its workforce into two distinct camps. There are those people who can produce content on time and at scale, and those people who oversee content marketing strategy, distribution, and monetization.

The middle is no longer content marketing managers; rather, these often antagonistic (and codependent) polarities are connected by AI and algorithms; in fairness, this is one AI use case with promising early returns.

At the same time, the platforms that content marketers used to rely on to distribute content to targeted audiences and qualified decision makers are the same platforms that are losing users and search volume to black box systems that don’t care about protecting IP, enforcing objectivity or even reasonable accuracy (thanks, Grok) – and doing so without any attribution or referral revenue, as an added kick in the content marketer’s ass.

The skills that mattered most in content marketing for most of the past few decades have seen an empirical collapse in employer demand over only a couple of quarters; at the same time, regulators are now seriously scrutinizing what the implications might be for AI companies whose products are predicated entirely on aggregating other people’s work. We used to call it plagiarism, but today, it’s just the cost of doing business in the information economy.

The content marketers who will have a place in the new normal will be the ones who never approached content as a product, or publishing and distribution as “output.” They think about it as a means to an end, and see content as part of a system rather than something created in a silo and optimized for search engines.

If you know enough about analytics to be able to add quantitative evidence to that content and deliver data points instead of vibes, you’re probably going to have a very lucrative career in whatever this next iteration of content marketing is. If you can tell a story with data and know enough about AI to understand its impacts on traffic, conversions, and ultimately, revenue, then you’ll always be in demand.

If you’re more concerned about driving onsite engagement for your LinkedIn posts than understanding why LinkedIn posts are suddenly driving 60% less conversions than they did a year ago, or if you’d pick your byline over business outcomes or brand equity, well, it’s probably time for you to find some other way to put that BFA or liberal arts degree to use.

The good news: Hourly hiring demand has never been higher, so unlike content marketing managers, you should have plenty of options. Most are likely more lucrative, too.

Until next month, keep your heads up. The people who figure out what content marketing becomes next will write the playbook that everyone else copies. Might as well be you.

Matt Charney

Executive Editor, Mediabistro

There’s nothing Hollywood loves more than a good villain arc; after all, antiheroes are always the most interesting characters in pretty much every project, from Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects, to Kevin Spacey in House of Cards, to Kevin Spacey in real life (his recent penchant for impromptu lounge performances is just the perfect kind of creepy).

Let’s not forget, the industry practically runs on villains. What would the industry be without the likes of Darth Vader, Thanos, Hannibal Lecter, or Rupert Murdoch? Still stuck somewhere in Act 2, likely. But while Hollywood has a long history of creating memorable villains onscreen, inevitably, the industry runs into a real one – and they’re always infinitely more terrifying than their fictional counterparts.

From Louis B. Mayer to Robert Evans to Mike Ovitz, occasionally the entertainment ecosystem runs into someone with enough money, influence, and ambition to leave their mark – for better or worse – on the entire industry.

It’s been a few years since Scott Rudin was soft-canceled, though, so it’s been quite a while since Hollywood had a real-life super villain swoop in and turn Burbank into their own personal Arkham City. Which is why the arrival of the Ellisons seems inevitable; after all, they’re perfectly cast in the role they’ve been preparing for their entire lives.

Some backstory: Larry Ellison founded Oracle, somehow turning what began as a tech company specializing in databases and back office administration into one of the world’s biggest fortunes – and then, doing what tech billionaires do best.

He bought Lanai, one of the principal Hawaiian islands, where he can enjoy his privacy, the balmy winds of the South Seas, and a couple of hundred natives unlucky enough to serve El Jefe in an arrangement that effectively functions as a private corporate fiefdom.

Staying in Dickensian character, he also decided to invest billions of dollars into yachting, which is admittedly way more fun than spending it on philanthropic causes or even a believable set of hair plugs. Somehow, in between all those regattas and hostile takeovers, he still makes time for the occasional round of golf with his BFF, who also happens to be POTUS.

That’s more proximity to power than anyone in Hollywood has had since Joe Kennedy founded RKO. Kennedy famously bankrolled his son’s path to the presidency; with his plans for doing the same likely foiled by that guy from The Apprentice, Ellison decided he’d give his son the second most powerful office in the country: a movie producer with an essentially unlimited bankroll.

According to Forbes’ Billionaire Rankings, Larry’s net worth sits somewhere north of $190 billion dollars; for comparison, Disney’s total content spending across all of its businesses in 2025 was around $23 billion.

So it was no great hardship when he staked his son David the cash to launch Skydance Media all the way back in 2006 – or at least most of it, with the balance supplemented by outside investors, including Tencent, because, you know, super villains gonna super villain.

At first, this looked like the standard nepo-baby vanity project in a town full of them. It’s almost like a rite of passage: wealthy heirs show up on Sunset, splash their cash around to finance a few forgettable films, and then realize that movies are a pretty hard way to spend all that leisure time, and ultimately move to safer hobbies, like venture capital.

To David’s credit, SkyDance is the exception to the norm, transforming itself into a reliable hit maker behind some of the biggest blockbuster franchises of the past two decades.

Think Top Gun: Maverick, Mission: Impossible, or the Star Trek reboot. Of course, when you have that sort of cash, you can splurge on the rights to reliable, lucrative IP and the sort of production budget that makes Ridley Scott films look like cinema verite.

Over time, SkyDance evolved from a well-financed vanity project with deep-pocketed foreign backers into something that looks suspiciously like a media conglomerate.

Then, the Ellison multiverse decided to turn what was a pretty compelling origin story into a quest for world domination, playing Loki to his dad’s method-acting approach to Thanos cosplay.

And it looks like no one can stop them and their plans.

Media executives love to pretend Hollywood runs on creativity. It runs on intellectual property and balance sheets. Everything else is window dressing.

Which brings us to what might be the most ambitious corporate land grab the entertainment industry has seen since someone decided owning both cable channels and the pipes delivering them was a totally reasonable idea.

Welcome to the Ellison Cinematic Universe.

If this whole saga feels less like business strategy and more like a supervillain origin story, that is because it kind of is.

The Ellison Cinematic Universe

Gotta Catch ‘Em All: Intellectual Property, Assemble

After weeks of headlines, backroom negotiations, and corporate brinkmanship, Paramount Skydance finally won its long war of attrition against Netflix, acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal reportedly valued at around $111 billion, including debt.

According to reporting from Reuters, the merger would combine a staggering list of media properties under one corporate roof: CBS, CNN, HBO, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, and enough reality television to permanently destroy several million brain cells.

This isn’t your standard industry consolidation. This is the entertainment equivalent of collecting every Infinity Stone and basically wiping out half of the competition in the process.

If regulators ultimately approve the deal, and history suggests they probably will, given Larry’s well-documented rapport and high-level access to Donald Trump, then the Ellison-backed conglomerate will end up controlling a significant portion of the global media and entertainment ecosystem.

From film schools to newsrooms, streaming services to consumer products, the merger also gives Paramount Skydance a litany of franchises that have been printing money for decades, from the DC Universe to SpongeBob (or the majority of the apparel section at Walmart).

This consolidation, by the way, doesn’t include the X factor in this aggressive bid for world domination: Larry Ellison’s highly scrutinized (yet successful) bid to acquire TikTok from Bytedance.

Not to mention, they now own the film rights to Monopoly, which seems like something of a self-own – and a pretty good look into their long term corporate strategy.

What this means for your career

If you work in entertainment, journalism, production or media marketing, expect the job market to increasingly look like a revival of the long dismantled studio system – an industry where the power is consolidated into the hands of a few companies that essentially control how the industry hires, what projects get greenlit and their respective budgets, and what the industry’s creative pipeline really looks like.

The good news here is that the larger the conglomerate, the greater the demand (and relative competition) for writers, producers, directors, marketers, and technologists; each studio will need a veritable army of talent to remain competitive and viable. The bad news? Those employers now have unprecedented leverage over pay, contracts, and working conditions – not to mention any guild signatory agreements.

Fewer owners with more power tends to lead to less independence throughout their businesses, from newsrooms to production companies to development teams. That means going forward, viable entertainment careers are going to look a lot less creative and entrepreneurial, and a whole lot more corporate.

In other words, the next few decades should look a lot more like Hollywood under the studio system; all we can do is hope that the blacklist doesn’t come back, too. Based on the Ellisons’ history, though, all signs point to a future defined more by corporate gatekeeping than creative independence.

The Silicon Valley Death Star

While many media pundits seem to be dissecting this unprecedented deal based on the historical precedents set by the entertainment industry (from Gulf Western to Vivendi to General Electric), the more prescient playbook comes not from Sunset, but instead, straight from Sand Hill Road. The Ellison Strategy, in short, seems torn directly from the pages of the standard Silicon Valley playbook.

Broken down into four basic steps, here’s the tech inspired gameplan that the Ellisons seem to already be deploying:

Step One: Identify and aggressively pursue undervalued legacy assets.

Step Two: Combine smaller acquisitions into a consolidated, centralized platform

Step Three: Control distribution through partnerships, IP protections, and license agreements

Step Four: Collect user data, figure out alternative revenue streams based on this data, and scale

This is the same precedent set by Amazon, which transformed a relatively straightforward e-commerce business into a global cloud computing giant and lucrative streaming platform. Apple, similarly, used the app store, a significant retail segment, and innovative hardware like iPhones and iPads to scale into what’s quickly becoming more of a financial services company than a technology manufacturer.

Research from the Harvard Business School investigating platform strategy shows that the key to capturing a disproportionate share of industry profits – in any industry – lies in simultaneously controlling both content and distribution.

This, in effect, is exactly what this merger creates. From film studios to broadcast networks, from streaming services to cable channels, Skydance Paramount and WBD, existing within a single corporate structure, come as close to vertical integration within the entertainment industry as we’ve seen since Paramount v. United States forced the major studios to sell their theatrical holdings all the way back in 1948. Of course, those consent decrees were formally terminated in 2020, making this level of consolidation not just possible but entirely predictable. So much for case law.

In Hollywood terms, the moment has arrived when the villain finally reveals that giant super laser they’ve been quietly building to destroy the world as we know it.

The fact that Oracle has such lucrative contracts with the Pentagon and private military contractors like Lockheed (providing the cloud computing infrastructure that powers the Pentagon and its partners as they develop next-gen AI systems) only makes this supervillain analogy a little too on-the-nose for comfort. We’re holding out for a hero… and instead, we got a nepobaby.

What this means for your career

The collision of the media and technology industries also means an increasing overlap between media and tech jobs. Roles like data science, product management, platform strategy, and algorithmic distribution now matter as much to the conglomerates as having a stable of top screenwriters, directors, or producers with first-look deals.

The entertainment workforce of the future will likely have a paucity of purely “creative” roles, instead favoring more holistic, hybrid professionals with equal fluency in both software engineering and storytelling.

If your skill set doesn’t span the divide, or your skills at content creation aren’t reinforced with fluency in data, distribution, or digital platforms, you’re likely competing for a shrinking slice of the industry that’s already facing a mass extinction event. This merger might very well be the comet that kills off these proverbial dinosaurs for good.

The Streaming Wars End in A Pyrrhic Victory

Turns Out, Cable TV Was Right.

One of the first public post-merger announcements by Paramount Skydance involved the impending merger of erstwhile streamers Paramount+ and HBO Max into a single platform. Industry reporting suggests that this new combined entity could reach roughly 200 million global subscribers, an economy of scale that neither independent entity looked capable of achieving just a few short months ago.

If you’re a fan of irony, let’s take a moment to reflect.

Just a few short years ago, every media company insisted that launching its own streaming service was the key to unlocking the digital future while providing new revenue streams and audiences for its existing IP and back catalogs; the hope was that consumers were going to happily subscribe to a dozen separate platforms, happily paying the equivalent of a second mortgage to enjoy the same variety of TV content that used to be available with a basic cable bundle (how mundane).

Instead, this only fueled the frenzy of competition between competing apps, while the industry spent billions of dollars fighting for market share – only to slowly revert back to the sort of bundles that suspiciously resemble the same sort of standard offerings that have long been a cornerstone of basic cable.

Somewhere, John Malone and Ted Turner are forlornly sipping single malt, wondering how they managed to nail the business model yet completely missed the streaming zeitgeist.

What this means for your career

The gold rush created by streaming, and the unprecedented demand for original content that came with it, ushered in what’s been widely referred to as the “Golden Age of TV” (apologies to Desilu and NBC Blue). But that era may be over. The next phase won’t be about creating quantity, but about driving efficiency.

Media companies of all sizes will be forced to prioritize fewer, larger platforms over dozens of niche services and standalone streamers. This means that fewer projects will get greenlit, less content will be produced, and execs will focus far more on franchise content and IP that reliably drives subscriptions instead of the prestige fare that so often delineated earlier streamers’ offerings.

The Deloitte Digital Media Trends survey consistently showed that audiences prefer fewer subscriptions, gravitating toward those offering major brands and franchises rather than content depth and breadth. Studios, in turn, are paying attention.

If your career is focused on original content, from writing to producing to packaging and distribution, unless you’ve got established IP, the odds of ever seeing your vision onscreen just became a whole lot worse.

That’s bad news for media and entertainment careers – and even worse news for creativity and originality. Get ready for another batch of Star Wars movies no one asked for, or some DC movies around superheroes that no one outside of a few ComicCon die-hards even knows exist.

Of course, this turned out pretty well for Deadpool.

In the meantime, the industry does actually keep hiring content and creative folks, which brings us to this week’s featured jobs on Mediabistro:

• Digital News Staff Editor and an Editorial Assistant, Recognition Programs @Inc. in NYC
• Direct Response Copywriter @ Lead Surge, Remote
• Media Marketing Manager and a Publicist @W. W. Norton & Company, Remote
• Media Relations Coordinator @Collin College, McKinney, TX
• Multimedia & Interactive Technology Faculty @Skagit Valley College, Mount Vernon, WA
• Paid Social & Digital Advertising Manager @How To Academy, Remote
• Public Affairs Research & Media Analyst @Earthjustice, Washington, DC

The Villain Never Wins.

Here’s the thing about villain origin stories.

They focus on the empire builders, the billionaires, the executives assembling giant corporate machines.

But the entertainment industry, however, ultimately runs on something much simpler.

It really comes down to stories. These are the fundamental building blocks for all creative content – and no amount of consolidation is likely to change that. At the end of the day, movies still need writers. Shows still need editors. And studios, even the corporate conglomerates, still need producers, marketers, designers, engineers, and journalists.

And no matter how advanced technology becomes, or how much tech and media careers continue to collide, take comfort in one fact: even the largest entertainment empire ever assembled can’t automate creativity.

Sure, the Ellisons are likely trying – and their controlling stake in Hollywood might even increase as the consolidation wars continue.

But the actual work of media, the part where someone makes something worth watching, still belongs to the people creating it.

That means that media and entertainment professionals are still in the picture – and still an integral part of how content gets made, distributed, consumed, and monetized.

It’s just that we’re all pretty much working for the villain now. Which should be nothing new for anyone who’s ever worked a desk at any agency in Hollywood.

What remote work actually did to media, entertainment, and publishing careers — and why the office isn’t the answer you think it is

This week, a potential ad partner asked me a pretty simple question (and given they sell job ads, one that makes a ton of sense): “What impact has work from home and remote work had on the entertainment industry, exactly?”

I didn’t know the answer, so I did what anyone who’s pitching does when asked for more details – I made something up, and I think it sounded credible enough to keep the conversation going. But given the disparate amount of attention commonly paid to the remote workforce by the very same employers paying for job posts on this site, I figured it was one that I should probably investigate further. So, that’s exactly what I did.

I placed a call to an old friend who’s still gainfully employed as a corporate attorney at one of the major studios, and he forwarded me a memo that recently made the rounds in Hollywood. Actually, it was one of several examples he sent me – because when it comes to the mundane corporate stuff, there are always multiple memos).

This particular genre of memo, though, seems to have a pretty consistent, recurring throughline that can be reduced as, simply, “creativity requires proximity.” Turns out, production companies, studios, publishers and even mid-tier talent agencies all seem to cling to this idea that all creative work can only happen in real life, when everyone is in the same physical location (or, “rowing in the same direction,” to quote one of the more cliched yet representative of the dictums I reviewed).

According to one A&R exec’s memo, “interactions are the inspiration for innovation”; similarly, the intranet at a major studio maintained, “conversations create creativity,” and these aren’t even the most cringeworthy examples of asinine alliteration in these RTO mandates.

The subtext, of course, is the same as the justification for why major conglomerates get away with paying many employees salaries that scrape the poverty line, or why the concept of work-life balance is a foreign concept in an industry where it’s understood that work is life: if you don’t like it, there’s always someone else willing to take your place.

And naturally, they can always find someone who won’t mind spending half their paycheck on dry cleaning and insane gas prices just to get verbally abused for a dozen hours a day, since apparently, the road to creativity starts with rush hour in the 101.

I’ve worked (in person) at a bunch of the offices they’re now demanding everyone return to, and had plenty of these conversations and interactions.

I can’t remember a single time any of them sparked any actual innovation or creativity; mostly, they centered on the LA traffic (crap) or the LA weather (beautiful). Or, you know, complaining about work – which is way easier to do in person, much like table reads, ‘doing lunch’ or verbally abusing junior staff members. Turns out, healthy fear is way harder to cultivate over Slack.

This week, we’re taking a look at what the rise of remote work actually looks like in entertainment, media and publishing; whose careers it’s helped, and whose it’s ruined; what’s changed and what’s next (and why the current wave of RTO mandates is being driven by optics and cost cutting, not culture or creativity).

Because the data tells a way different story than the memos ever do- and likely, a far more accurate one, too.

If you work in media, publishing, production, journalism, or content, these are the stories you need to read this week. As usual, we’ve also got the hottest open roles on Mediabistro — including some that, yes, you can do in your pajamas.

Stories Shaping Remote Work in Media This Week

1. The Real State of Remote Work in Entertainment

Feature: The numbers tell a different story than the executive memos. Shocking, we know.

Here’s something nobody in a corner office wants you to notice. While the loudest names in media have been very publicly demanding everyone return to the building, the underlying data has been trending in the opposite direction.

According to a recent analysis of global LinkedIn job postings, technology, information, and media leads all sectors worldwide, with 41.2% of listings offering remote or hybrid options. Not tech or finance – media. You know, the very same industry whose leadership keeps insisting that creativity requires proximity is, in practice, posting more flexible roles than any other field on the planet’s largest professional network.

And a Q1 2026 remote work index found that remote job postings jumped 20% quarter over quarter, with marketing and communications categories expanding by 30% or more. California’s just a state of mind, as they say.

A Q4 2025 analysis of over 423,000 US job postings found that marketing and creative is the most remote-friendly professional category tracked: 56% on-site, 30% hybrid, 14% fully remote. That 44% flexibility rate beats legal, finance, HR, and most other fields.

So the next time someone tells you the office is non-negotiable in a creative business, maybe show them the data. Or don’t, if they’re a guild member. Now here’s where it gets complicated, particularly for anyone who works in prediction.

The remote work story in entertainment splits along a fault line that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. The knowledge-work side – stuff like editorial, audience development, digital marketing, content strategy – seems to actually be moving toward distributed workforce models, whether the studio execs and industry suits like it or not. The production side, though, is a completely different story.

A recent deep dive into Bureau of Labor Statistics data found that Los Angeles County has lost 41,000 film and TV jobs in just three years, a full quarter of its entire entertainment workforce. A 2025 report on the creative economy puts overall entertainment employment a whopping 25% below its 2022 peak.

Grip operators and sound mixers can’t Slack their way through a shoot. They’re losing ground to Toronto, the UK, and Vancouver on tax incentives. The sound stages and facilities are still in LA; it’s the productions themselves that have moved somewhere else entirely. That’s honestly its own kind of remote work, if you think about it.

The productions have just moved somewhere else entirely, which is its own kind of remote work, honestly.

Read more: Fade to Black: Hollywood’s AI Era Job Collapse Is Starting (Ankler)

2. “Challenging Economic Realities” Hit Salaries Before Shareholders

To say that March was a rough month for media jobs would be something of an understatement. Starz cut about 7% of its employees in late March, following a positive earnings report, which was somewhat surprising, considering that apparently Starz not only still exists, but has enough employees to require a WARN notice – and is making enough money to make this decision somewhat questionable.

On March 20, Bari Weiss and CBS News president Tom Cibrowski sent the memo nobody wanted to receive. CBS News announced it was cutting around 6% of its staff and shutting down CBS News Radio entirely, effective May 22. The shutdown ends nearly a century of operation, going back to 1927, when William S. Paley first put journalists on the air.

Ninety-nine years. Edward R. Murrow reported from London on CBS News Radio. The network broadcast McCarthy’s censure. It covered Kennedy, Vietnam, Watergate. And it’s ending because of, quote, “a shift in radio station programming strategies, coupled with challenging economic realities.”

“Challenging economic realities.” That’s PR speak for, “we can’t make this work anymore.”

CBS News is a Paramount property. Paramount, you’ll recall, demanded five days a week back in the building starting January 5, so the people who just lost their jobs were commuting to shut down a 99-year-old radio service. It’s about as depressing as it sounds.

Elsewhere, in the past month alone, Spotify cut 3% of its workforce, Axios reduced its newsroom staff by 11%, Lionsgate announced a restructuring that eliminated a handful of roles, as did Universal Music Group. March was, in short, nothing short of an industry wide existential crisis – one that looks to continue for the foreseeable future.

Here’s the irony of these moves; most of these cuts are happening in the very same companies that recently demanded everyone come back to the building. The message seems to be that no job is safe, not even for those workers fully complying with relentless RTO mandates.

On the bright side, at least they don’t have to worry about those crappy commutes anymore.

Read More: List of Hollywood & Media Layoffs in 2026 (Deadline)

Career Implications:

If you’re at a major media conglomerate, chances are you’re already spending five days a week in the office. If not, it’s likely imminent. Unlike many industries, compliance isn’t really a choice – the choice for workers is whether the company that’s making the demand is really one where you’re going to stay at long enough for it to matter.

The job market probably won’t be this tight forever, and companies mandating RTO right now might very well be mortgaging long term potential for short term profits – and the top talent that manages to survive long enough to see the market recover likely won’t stick around these employers for very long, either.

If you’re a mid-level creative, work in production or have specialized, industry specific skills, no matter what your employment situation might be, the best time to start looking for your next move is right now, while you still have a paycheck (and a little leverage).

You never know when the next opportunity might come your way – just like you never know if there’s a pink slip waiting for you at the end of that morning commute. Speaking of…

3. WME Takes a Different Kind of 10% Cut

On March 18 (the day after St. Patrick’s Day, because nothing makes bad news go down better than a hangover), agency powerhouse WME made its first group cuts since the early months of the pandemic, eliminating around 30 employees across the firm.

That might not sound like a lot, but the layoff announcement was both efficient, and scary. It used almost exactly the same language – verbatim, in some parts – as Amazon did when announcing its most recent round of RIFs in January.

“Reducing layers,” “increasing responsibilities and removing bureaucracy,” and “creating efficiencies” sound much more ominous when you consider the fact that a talent agency whose entire business model is predicated on human relationships is using the same talking points as Jeff Bezos’ HR department. Let that one sink in for a second.

WME framed the cuts as recognition that “our industry is undergoing profound change – from consolidation and shifting economics to new technology and evolving client needs,” while somehow simultaneously insisting new platforms are creating “more opportunities than ever for talent and creators.”

Pro tip: the phrase “more opportunities than ever” should never appear in the same memo as “we’re eliminating your job.” We’re assuming these layoffs included their head of crisis communications.

Read More: WME Cuts 30 Staffers in Restructuring Move (The Hollywood Reporter)

Career Implications:

WME is not a remote company and was never going to be. Their business relies on proximity and access, and yet here it is, restructuring anyway. The thing is, the economic forces hollowing out media jobs don’t actually care whether you’re in a Culver City conference room or on your couch in Columbus.

If you work in talent representation, rights, licensing, or any role that depends on being the connective tissue between talent and opportunity, the ground is genuinely shifting.

More than an industry contraction, this represents a structural question about whether the traditional agency-as-gatekeeper model can survive the rise of the creator economy and the alternative distribution platforms like YouTube or TikTok represent.

Increasingly, the roles that’ll hold value are those that add intelligence and strategy, not just access. Being in the room still matters. Being the only person who can get someone into that room, however, will no longer keep you there.

4. The Data Says Remote Works. The Memos Say Otherwise.

While Hollywood was busy writing severance checks, a May 2025 report from the General Accounting Office assembled the most comprehensive neutral-party analysis of remote work to date. The GAO found that when implemented, remote work delivers enhanced talent attraction and retention, measurable cost savings, and increased productivity; the challenges around culture and oversight are largely solvable with existing guidance.

One case study in the report found that a technology firm cut quit rates by one third just by offering two days of remote work per week.

The entertainment and publishing industries, in particular, seem exposed by this shift. McKinsey research found that companies offering remote roles saw a 21% increase in applications from underrepresented groups, with remote-first hiring removing geographic and financial barriers that have historically made those industries inaccessible.

Publishing, in particular, has spent decades making diversity commitments while doing nothing about the structural economics that require workers to either live affordably in Manhattan or not work there at all.

Remote hiring was one of the only interventions that actually moved that particular needle – but of course, for an industry struggling to survive, that’s likely no longer a huge priority for anyone working in the publishing industry right now.

Read More: Federal Report Shows Remote Work Trumps RTO (Federal News Network)

Career Implications:

The data is on your side. It mostly always was. The problem is that data doesn’t write the memos. If you’re a job seeker in media or publishing and flexibility matters to you ( and it should, both for quality of life and as an indicator of organizational health) – filter hard for hybrid roles and remote-first companies.

Remote and hybrid job listings make up just 20% of what’s posted on LinkedIn but attract 60% of all applications. The supply-demand gap is enormous. Might as well take advantage of it.

The Bottom Line

The same studios, networks, and production companies insisting you need to be back in the office or on lot to “protect creativity” are also the ones trimming development slates, shelving projects, and preparing their next round of layoffs.

Apparently, “creativity” and “innovation” require proximity – until they start impacting margins and stock prices..

The idea that being physically in a writers room, editing bay, or studio lot automatically produces better work has always been more Hollywood mythology than anything grounded in evidence.

Research shows that productivity gains tied to in person work are (at best) inconsistent. What companies are really optimizing for is oversight, which feels like progress, particularly when business models and monetization strategies are undergoing such seismic shifts.

Meanwhile, the talent getting staffed, greenlit, and rehired are the ones who can write, shoot, edit, and deliver from anywhere, across time zones, without needing a studio badge to prove they belong there.

So here’s some basic advice: update your reel (or your resume). Gain whatever relevant skills you might need, and keep honing the ones you already have.

Most importantly, stay close to the people who actually control budgets, greenlights and headcount, because relationships are still the fundamental currency for career success. For real, if not IRL.

Until next week,

Matt Charney
Executive Editor, Mediabistro