FADE IN:

It’s been the kind of year at the box office that makes you wonder if audiences collectively decided to take a gap year. And honestly, who could blame them?

If you were one of the handful of people who actually showed up for Snow White, Tron: Ares, or Captain America, you probably walked out wondering if you could file a class action lawsuit against the Walt Disney Company for lost time and emotional distress, much like paying full price for California Adventure admissions.

Thing is, these weren’t just soft releases. They were the cinematic equivalent of those legacy enterprise platforms that keep getting “refreshed” even though no one asked for an upgrade.

Weak turnouts and even weaker grosses led many industry watchers to confidently announce that moviegoers were finally done with reboots, remakes, and sequels. It was a nice theory until reality walked in wearing a pair of mouse ears.

For most of 2025, the box-office narrative seemed to be entering some sort of death spiral. Every Friday brought another hopeful “maybe next week.” Then next week brought M3gan 2. At a certain point, you start rooting for the streamers and the spreadsheets.

This week, though, the spell finally broke. Zootopia 2 blasted out of the gate, Wicked: For Good kept defying gravity, and together they delivered the kind of combined box office studios used to treat as a baseline instead of a miracle.

If you work in film, production, media, or development, this weekend felt like a reminder that audiences will actually show up when the content hits. Turns out people still want stories built on IP they care about. Just maybe not a live-action Lilo & Stitch.

And with that bit of good news for an industry that’s been living off antacids and optimism, it’s time for Mediabistro’s Weekly Drop, your quick scan of what actually matters in the entertainment industry this week.

LEAD STORY

Zootopia 2 Hits a Record Opening and Turns the Box Office Into an Actual Party

Disney’s Zootopia 2 came in swinging with a massive opening weekend that topped industry projections and delivered one of the biggest animated debuts of the decade. Families showed up in force and kept showing up through the long weekend.

At the same time, Wicked: For Good continued its breakout run. The two films combined for a domestic haul that pushed the weekend past the strongest two-title box office total of the year and one of the best since 2019.

Why this matters:
For the first time all year, the numbers do not need asterisks or excuses. Zootopia 2 gave theaters a genuine win, Wicked brought repeat viewership, and together they moved the totals into territory that finally resembles a normal holiday corridor.

Year-to-date comparison:

• This weekend outperformed every previous 2025 frame that relied on a single tentpole to carry results.
• Combined, Zootopia 2 and Wicked outpaced the best two-movie weekends of the summer by a wide margin.
• The surge puts the 2025 domestic box office closer to the pre-Thanksgiving forecasts studios were praying to hit.

Studios will read this as a very simple message. Audiences will still show up for event films. Families still fuel holiday corridors.

Animation and musical fantasy can still mint money. And original mid-budget creatives should probably call their agents.

THE STREAMING WARS

Netflix Keeps Pushing the Boundaries While Regulators Keep Taking Notes

While theaters were celebrating, Netflix spent the week quietly making its case to lawmakers that owning a major studio is not the same as contracting one.

The company continues to explore its options around Warner Bros. Discovery, even as antitrust voices grow louder – and even as there’s fairly well-established case law prohibiting vertical integration within the industry (see: US v Paramount).

Of course, Netflix’s most recent quarterly results suggest that slowing subscriber numbers mean that the company must quickly find alternative revenue streams – meaning this marriage of convenience could effectively provide the same sort of moat now enjoyed by The Walt Disney Company and Sony.

Why It Matters:
If Netflix succeeds, it becomes a vertically integrated content machine with unparalleled leverage. If the deal stalls, the entire sector could experience a slowdown in acquisitions and hiring.

Either way, the next move reshapes the development, distribution and rights ecosystem. Let’s just hope Larry Ellison isn’t involved this time, as TikTok gears up as a pretty handy native distribution tool for Paramount properties.

Full story: Reuters

Streaming Growth Flattens in Europe

Data dump: CISAC Global Numbers Report 2025

Fresh data from the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, a global network representing 5 million creators across 228 management organizations, showed that streaming growth in several key European markets has cooled. For creators, despite seeing royalty payouts hit historic highs this year, the impact of Generative AI is expected to erode payouts to creators by over 25% in the next two years.

Platforms are shifting their focus from expansion to retention, especially on higher-margin ad tiers. And, of course, buying legacy media properties. Meanwhile, creators should start feeling the squeeze – particularly given the EU’s traditional positioning as a reliable leading indicator for compliance and consumer trends.

Career takeaway:

Jobs tied to analytics, localization, rights management, and audience modeling are trending up. Writers’ rooms and prestige development pipelines are growing slower than the operational roles that keep platforms profitable – as are the payouts for creators. AI and IP seem to be headed for a collision course, and AI’s victory seems like an inevitability that’s already influencing the media landscape.

BOX OFFICE + BUSINESS

Hollywood Notices That 2026 Still Looks Thin

Featured coverage: THR

Even with the Zootopia 2 bump, analysts have pointed out that next year’s slate remains underdeveloped. With some productions delayed and others rewritten for cost efficiency, studios could face a quieter release calendar than anyone expected.

Why it matters:
A strong holiday corridor does not hide the structural gaps. If 2026 opens with a light slate, production teams, VFX houses, and below-the-line talent will feel the turbulence first.

MEDIA CAREERS + INDUSTRY JOBS

Creators Keep Walking Away from Streamers to Find Stability

This week brought another wave of creators signing with traditional studios. The promise of stability, clearer ownership structures, and predictable development cycles remains appealing in a market where greenlights change with the algorithm.

Why the shift is real:
Creators want partners with consistent editorial judgment rather than data-driven volatility. That is changing the talent landscape faster than streamers expected.

Beyond the lens: Forbes Online

Digital Studios Cut Staff While Hiring for New Skills

More layoffs hit digital publishers and branded content units, but companies continue hiring for hybrid roles that mix analytics with creative work.

Growth areas:

• Audience intelligence
• Rights and metadata management
• Localization strategy
• Content operations and distribution

This is the new media-career toolkit. Creativity helps, but operational literacy is the trait recruiters are targeting.

Career Trends & Tips: MBO Partners Digital Nomads Trends Report

JOBS ON MEDIABISTRO THIS WEEK

Our weekly sizzle reel of the latest listings from studios, streamers, and global media brands:

Manager, Marketing Strategy – Warner Media (Culver City, CA)

Dreamworks Feature Assistant Editor – NBC Universal (Glendale, CA)

Publishing Editor – The Wall Street Journal (New York City)

Traffic Producer and Reporter – Audacity (Chicago)

Multimedia Producer – FC Dallas (Frisco, TX)

Expert Animation Engineer, Infinity Ward – Activision (Los Angeles)

Spotify, Wrapped (Featured Employer):

Spotify is hiring creatives, marketers, and engineers who want to shape how the world listens. If you’re driven by storytelling, data, and culture, Spotify’s open roles offer a front row seat to what’s next in audio.

Check out their latest openings on Mediabistro: Spotify Jobs

THE BOTTOM LINE

For the first time in a while, the week finally didn’t feel like Hollywood was in full-blown crisis mode. Distributors and theatres got a win. Streamers showed their cards. And, of course, media careers continue to evolve along with the industry.

When I was at my very first job at Focus Features, the producer I was assisting once offered me a piece of advice that I clearly didn’t follow: “If you go the business route, no one will ever hire you on the creative side again.” Good advice, back when Netflix shipped physical copies of DVDs and Warner Bros. was the crown jewel of the AOL empire. Today?

There’s no choice for media professionals. If you want to make it, you’ve got to be able to handle both business and creativity. Today, there’s no such thing as “above the line” and “below the line.” There’s just the bottom line.

Matt Charney

Executive Editor, Mediabistro

THE MEDIABISTRO WEEKLY DROP: CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH EDITION

December 17, 2025

I’ll be real with you; because this dumpster fire of a year just isn’t done with us quite yet, the headlines on Sunday hit me harder than I expected. The Rob Reiner reporting was a news story so tragic and out of the blue that my first thought was that it had to be a mistake, or a sick joke.

But sure enough, Rob Reiner and his wife were found dead in their home in what authorities are investigating as a homicide.

The tributes poured in; so too did the tears. And while the industry, inevitably, stopped just long enough to acknowledge his contribution, business as usual feels like anything but, really. The absence of one of the most influential and ubiquitous hyphenates in history feels conspicuous, to put it mildly.

Reiner was one of the last of his kind – a guy whose work not only filled seats (at least for a good couple of decades) but also actually shaped how a lot of us understand storytelling, character development, and comedic timing.

Reiner’s films feel like a relic – they assume that the audience is as smart as the characters on the screen, and every bit as invested (without a lot of heavy-handed exposition or pandering voiceovers). His works trusted the power of tone, and believed that the characters and the worlds they inhabit matter more than some studio algorithm.

I remember watching The Princess Bride on a grainy VHS tape so much that the tracking went fuzzy (yeah, I’m old) – and realizing for the first time that not everything has to follow a familiar formula or a genre, or rely on traditional casting conventions (I’d love to have been at a table read featuring André the Giant, Wallace Shawn and Mandy Patinkin), or narrative arc (ditto Peter Falk and Fred Savage).

Reiner taught us that accessibility and sensibility weren’t enemies, and that the best written characters in film offer the kind of insight and understanding into human nature (and the state of the world) that no other medium can replicate.

I know that was a depressing opening to a friggin’ newsletter, but Reiner’s work is worth thinking about this week, if only because one quick glance at the media business headlines this week seem to be trending in the exact opposite direction.

You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth. Because the truth is, these stories from the last week suggest that the entertainment industry is moving in a direction that’s got a lot to do with industry, and precious little to do with entertainment.

Full slop.

As You Wish: “Slop” is Merriam-Webster Word of the Year, Because of Course

In a move that feels less like a decision and more like a resignation letter, Merriam-Webster named “slop” the 2025 Word of the Year.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that the term’s use exploded as shorthand for low-effort, algorithm-fed content designed to be consumed, forgotten, and immediately replaced by more slop.

Kind of like a Substack newsletter.

The timing is impeccable. At the exact moment executives are arguing that scale and efficiency will save the industry, the dictionary is essentially saying, yes, but at what cost to taste.

“Slop” isn’t subtle. It’s not aspirational. It’s the linguistic equivalent of infomercials (and because we live in a world where the Sham-Wow guy is making a GOP congressional bid).

Normally, this “word of the year” exercise makes us anti-semantic, but for anyone whose streams are suddenly taken over by Kirk and Candace Cameron-Bure, the Jonas and Lawrence Brothers, or Medea holiday-themed movies, we’ve got to say, the dictionary people nailed it.

Side note: If lexicographers still have jobs at dictionary companies, there’s hope for us yet.

Read more: The Hollywood Reporter

Netflix and Warner Bros.: Misery’s Return

The bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery has officially crossed the line from “strategic interest” into the War Room from Dr. Strangelove, but with more focus on posturing and less on policy.

According to Reuters, The New York Times, and anyone who’s taken a basic business class, this isn’t a normal acquisition. It’s more or less a referendum on what the next version of Hollywood even is. It’s likely, however, that the sequel is going to disappoint, as they do.

Reports circulating this week make the subtext clearer than a Bollywood dance number. This really isn’t about whether Netflix can afford Warner Bros., or whether David Ellison can talk daddy into buying him a new toy via hostile takeover. It’s about what happens when creation, distribution, discovery, and monetization stop pretending they’re separate businesses.

Decisions accelerate. Layers collapse. Creative debates get filtered through dashboards that smile politely while quietly deprioritizing your passion project. On Monday, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos insisted a WBD deal would be “good for the entertainment industry,” and doesn’t mean “the end of Hollywood.”

It does, however, mean the end of the entertainment industry as we know it. For better or worse (although Wall Street has already weighed in pretty firmly on the side of the latter, with media stocks plunging in the past several days).

If this deal happens, Warner Bros stops being an institution and becomes a very prestigious tab within a product roadmap. That doesn’t automatically mean the future of work in the industry is going away anytime soon.

But it’s going to be different, harder to find, and likely, freed from guild minimums, union scales, or per diems. Unless, of course, you happen to land a gig as a Netflix exec, in which case, you’ve pretty much got it made.

Read more: Variety

No Green Light: Regulatory Concerns Go to 11

Regulators are circling this deal because it breaks the old rules in ways that make policy people nervous. Historically, antitrust meant studios buying studios. Networks buying networks.

This is, after all, vertical consolidation on oligarchy mode.

A Netflix-owned Warner Bros wouldn’t just make content. It would control how that content is surfaced, recommended, prioritized, monetized, and measured.

In plain terms, they’d own the movie, the theater, the marquee, and the whisper in your ear telling you this is exactly what you’re in the mood for right now.

As Reuters has reported, the concern isn’t abstract. It’s leverage.

Who gets visibility. Who gets buried. Who sets the terms for talent. Who decides what “success” looks like when the same company defines distribution and performance.

There’s also a quieter anxiety that doesn’t show up neatly in filings.

Studios like Warner Bros used to function as buffers. Institutions that played a tastemaker role for the general public. Or at least, cultural arbiters.

Places where creative, innovative projects could survive a few down weeks at the box office. Studios used to convince us they put art and magic before profit and stock performance, mainly because they were vanity subsidiaries within bigger multinational conglomerates. Gulf and Western, GE, or MCA.

Or, contemporaneously, Sony Pictures Entertainment, whose relative financial autonomy proves the wisdom of this ownership model.

Instead, get ready for viewership minutes to replace box office as the key financial indicator for the industry- and if we don’t keep consuming more slop, then the future looks even more dire for the entire media landscape.

Read more: New York Times

Stand By Me: Animation Cels Out to AI,

According to reporting by Variety this week, generative AI is moving from experimentation to infrastructure across film and animation workflows.

Studios and platforms are accelerating adoption in storyboarding, pre-visualization, animation passes, and localization.

Executives tell Variety that AI-assisted tools are already reducing early-stage production timelines by 30 to 50 percent in some animation and VFX pipelines, a shift that’s already impacting workforce planning.

Variety reports that studio executives increasingly anticipate double-digit reductions in entry-level and first-pass production roles over the next two years. Not through mass layoffs, but through attrition, role consolidation, and slower rehiring as AI absorbs repetitive and mechanical tasks.

As one animation executive put it, “We’re not firing departments. We’re just not refilling them.”

Turns out, Tweety Bird might be the canary in the coal mine.

A Few Good Men (And a Lot of AI): Career Spotlight

What’s being automated isn’t creativity. It’s the process. The roles most exposed are the ones built around first drafts, initial passes, and mechanical execution. Practically, this means fewer first passes, more snap judgements, and much quicker production time.

There are a lot of jobs out there, from production assistants to art directors, which are already feeling the first line of AI displacement; these, and myriad other below-the-line roles, likely aren’t coming back.

But that doesn’t mean jobs aren’t being created; according to Variety, studios are aggressively prioritizing employees or new hires capable of supervising complex projects, generating and refining AI-assisted output, and effectively making both creative and technical decisions. Seen another way, it’s essentially auteurship, with a touch of automation.

This means that judgment, taste, learning agility, and contextual decision-making are the skills most in demand. The introduction of AI essentially levels the production playing field in terms of speed and volume, which is why “slop” is the word of the year.

Creativity, clarity, and vision are what will differentiate the most successful media pros – just like they have since the codification of the industry. Practically, that suggests a few adjustments for anyone working in film, animation, or adjacent media roles:

• Early Career (0-5 years): Learn the tools, the techniques, and the theory. Prompt engineering is table stakes, but knowing how to iterate and improve means also knowing why something works, or what doesn’t. Approach projects with the intention of getting better, not just getting it done, and you’ll find your place in the industry.

• Mid Career (5-15 years): For those of us in the middle of our careers, focus must shift from execution to orchestration. AI is infrastructure, and knowing how to deal with the kind of agents that don’t take 10% is key. Managing multiple projects and influencing outcomes is where the real value lies; LLMs have commoditized raw material, so assembling that material has emerged as one of the most critical career competencies in creative work today.

• Executive Leadership (15+ years): If you’re in leadership, know that your scope will broaden significantly, while your headcount and budget will continue to shrink. Managing to produce high quality creative content with significant resource limitations is the new power play.

With the traditional army of specialists in the studio being replaced by a handful of hybrid workers, expect faster feedback loops and far less tolerance for leaders who only manage process, rather than people and productions.

The uncomfortable truth is that AI doesn’t reduce expectations. It raises them. When output becomes easier and quantity increases, quality becomes the ultimate currency, with algorithms and analytics removing the subjectivity and painstaking processes that once defined production.

The people whose careers will continue to thrive in the future – at any level – will have the confidence to know what’s working, what’s not, what should never be released, how to make a product worth watching, and knowing what viewers will respond to before any LLM does.

At least development hell will soon be a thing of the past. Just don’t turn around.

Quick Hits:

• Reese Witherspoon Doesn’t Think “Career Would Be Possible” With AI (Fortune)
• As Netflix and Paramount Circle Warner Bros. Discovery, Hollywood Unions Voice Alarm (LA Times)
• Boise based Great Mountain Partners Opens $600M Media Fund (Digital Music News)
• Disney Exec on Media Mergers, Jimmy Kimmel and What Makes Good TV (Blooomberg)
• AI In Entertainment: The Real Revolution is Operational (NCS News)

As You Wish: This Week’s Hottest Media and Entertainment Jobs

Even after the layoffs, the restructurings, and the “so what exactly do I do now” existential crises, companies are still hiring. Every week, thousands of new jobs are posted on Mediabistro for some of the industry’s coolest roles and hottest companies.

From social media management to book publishing, from digital design to theatrical distribution, if you’re looking for your next big thing, then make sure to check out all the open roles right now, only at Mediabistro. Here are just a few of the interesting job posts on Mediabistro this week:

• Senior Editor – Flamingo Magazine (Ponte Vedra Beach, FL)
• Supervising Editor, Science & Health Desk – NPR (Washington)
• Account Supervisor, Tourism and Arts – Schaefer Advertising (TX)

Closing Credits: No Such Thing As The Sure Thing

It’s a scary time for everyone – personally and professionally. But looking back at the often hilarious, always moving directorial career of Rob Reiner can offer us all some hope about what happens when we trust audiences, value craft, and have a story worth telling, and telling with intention.

There’s always been a lot of slop out there (think the Poverty Row studios or Jerry Bruckheimer productions), but the projects we remember – and reason we chose this crazy, unpredictable and completely impractical line of work in the first place is because we value work that has a point of view, that’s made by a human hand, that tells us something new about ourselves or our world.

That’s not nostalgic or sentimental. That’s pattern recognition.

No matter how the tools change or how much the industry continues to consolidate, the appetite for engaging, authentic, memorable, and thoughtful content doesn’t disappear. It just becomes easier to spot in all that slop.

And that’s a good thing.

Matt Charney
Executive Editor, Mediabistro

FADE OUT.

Matt Damon has earned the right to tell it like it is. He isn’t just an actor. He is an Oscar-winning screenwriter who has spent decades inside the machinery of Hollywood.

That kind of track record means that he’s not afraid to publicly criticize the entertainment industry and its major players, something he’s done on innumerable red carpets and on the record.

Few actors are so entrenched in the Hollywood firmament that their offhand remarks can reveal something real about the state of media and its future, which is why Damon’s recent sit-down with Ben Affleck on the Joe Rogan Experience landed the way it did.

The Retention Rewrite

Let’s just say it’s about as depressing as Damon’s work in the seminal classics The Great Wall or The Legend of Bagger Vance. As reported by Variety:

“Damon pointed out that because viewers give a “very different level of attention” to a movie at home versus in a theater, Netflix wants to push the action set pieces towards the front of the runtime. He also says that there are behind-the-scenes discussions about reiterating “the plot three or four times in the dialogue” to account for people being on their phones.”

He later insinuated that this is Netflix’s house style, closely enforced for its original productions and more driven by algorithm than auteurship. Obviously, this phenomenon isn’t new. Viewers aren’t always, you know, viewing. Unlike theatrical audiences, they’re not captive, and most of the time, they’re multitasking.

There’s a five-million-dollar car chase sequence with a licensed Hank Williams song and two Oscar winners shooting Uzis playing on a seventy-two-inch plasma screen, and yet audiences are too busy scrolling and texting to be fully invested.

Damon’s comments, while framed as an explanation, landed like a confession. Or a warning.

Because what Damon was really describing has nothing to do with creative preference, production values, or studio rewrites. It is a constraint. A resigned acceptance that the audience is not listening most of the time, and that full attention can no longer be taken for granted.

Content has to survive that reality. Creativity becomes optional. Complexity is blacklisted.

Based on Netflix’s growing hegemony and our rapidly shrinking attention spans, there’s really no use in fighting this trend, arguing its relative merits, or even trying to pretend that content serves any greater purpose these days than background noise.

We’re becoming distracted from our distractions, and the only option that anyone who wants to remain competitive, or at least, relevant, is to follow Damon’s lead and learn to adapt. The Streaming Wars might still be going on, but the battle for our attention span seems to have ended in a pyrrhic victory, at best.

Enter The Rip, the project Damon was promoting (and mildly trash-talking) on the Joe Rogan junket. You probably saw it last weekend. It was Netflix’s #1 original release of all time, garnering almost 42 million viewer hours in its first three days alone.

Like most top Netflix originals, it’s anything but prestige. And it’s not trying to be. It is designed as a second-screen companion. It allows the audience to multitask, miss a few beats, and still follow the narrative closely enough to retain the plot and later form strong opinions about it.

They’re probably positive – the repetition seems to act as positive reinforcement, since the incessant recaps politely assume you weren’t paying attention the first time, don’t judge you for it, and wouldn’t punish you by making you press rewind.

It’s the opposite of the golden years at HBO, where if you missed one scene in The Wire or a throwaway line in The Sopranos, the entire episode was pretty much ruined.

Damon’s comments landed like a minor scandal, mostly because they confirmed what everyone already knew but preferred not to say out loud. Netflix isn’t writing for rapt attention. It’s writing for partial attention.

Then, Netflix head honcho Ted Sarandos went a step further, naming Instagram as Netflix’s real competition. Not Disney+. Not Max. Not Peacock.

Nope. A content feed optimized for mobile devices and designed to tell stories entirely in fragments, not arcs, produced by amateurs and monetized by Facebook. “Instagram is coming,” Sarandos said. “TV is not what we grew up on. TV is now just about everything.”

The Rip, however, quietly demonstrates the truth that neither side can escape.

This is what “dual device” entertainment looks like when it works. And whether or not creatives like it, it’s what’s reshaping media jobs, skill sets, and career paths in real time.

Because once storytelling is designed for distraction, the work around it fundamentally changes, too.

Repetition Is Resilience In Disguise.

Netflix repeating plot points isn’t creative rot, as tempting as it is to be dismissive of the systemic dumbing down of content. It’s adaptive design, the film industry moving from the New York Times to USA Today (the latter having a daily circulation that’s multiples more than the Gray Lady, for the record).

Stories now have to survive interruption; messaging has to be delivered independent of deeper context. Character arcs are stunted by the need for continual reintroduction or repetition of expository details or backstories, but when you’re writing for an audience that’s simultaneously scrolling through their FYP, those are the accommodations you’ve got to make.

That design-thinking mentality is omnipresent once you really start looking for it. Headlines that restate the obvious.

AI summaries for every search query. Explainers at the top of news articles that distill everything down to a few bullet points, just in case you don’t have time to make it through an inverted lead. Push notifications that boil down complex stories or breaking news into one or two lines of characters.

This shift isn’t subtle. And the current job market within the media industry rewards resilience and adaptability more than vision or innovation.

If you want creative control, start a YouTube channel. Or better yet, step up your IG game.

Because no one’s going to read that screenplay you’ve been slaving away at since film school.

In plain English, attention doesn’t sit still anymore. It leaks.

And wherever attention leaks, work follows.

Media Jobs, Minus The Media

Dual-device consumption has created work that legacy media still treats as secondary. That’s a mistake bordering on malpractice.

Social producers today operate less like schedulers and more like live operators. They coordinate clips in real time, track sentiment shifts minute by minute, and adjust tone while a broadcast is still happening. That’s not junior work. That’s control-room work.

Audience development roles now sit somewhere between editorial, product, and analytics. Understanding how a segment performs on TikTok during minute twelve of a show can matter more than overnight ratings. Distribution literacy now shapes editorial power, whether newsrooms like it or not.

Editorial roles are shifting, too. Writers and producers who understand fragmentation, repetition, and reinforcement aren’t compromising craft. They’re adapting to it.

Advertising hasn’t escaped either. Dual-device behavior has revived synchronized ads, live overlays, and shoppable formats. But only if someone knows how to orchestrate them across platforms. That’s not classic media buying. It’s systems thinking with a creative spine.

None of this fits neatly into legacy job titles, which is why so many restructures feel chaotic yet completely predictable.

The roles below reflect this shift. They reward people who can operate across platforms, survive fragmented attention, and tie editorial decisions to measurable outcomes.

Mediabistro Jobs of the Week

That’s where the theory stops, and the job postings start.

Because once advertising turns into orchestration instead of placement, and storytelling becomes something that has to survive multiple screens at once, the roles that matter don’t look like the ones most people trained for. They look messier. Broader. Harder to label. And very real.

Which is why this week’s Featured Jobs are on point with what’s new and what’s next in this business. These aren’t legacy media roles with new buzzwords taped on. They’re jobs built for the way content, attention and revenue actually move now.

Let’s take a look:

• Executive Editor: Association for Computing Machinery, New York City, NY
• Outliner/Editor: Muonic Press Inc, Remote
• Executive Editor: GovExec, Tallahassee, FL
• Circulation Director: Milk Street, Remote
• Publication Designer: Editorial Series Launch for Havenford, Remote

Keep in touch with what’s trending in our revived hot job roundups, or just create job alerts like everyone else.

More Media Career Signals, Decoded

Journalism job cuts aren’t slowing down. They’re settling in.
Tracking of newsroom layoffs shows journalism job cuts rolling steadily through 2025, with hundreds of roles eliminated across UK and US publishers and no real rebound in sight.

This isn’t a bad quarter or a temporary correction. It’s the industry finding a smaller, leaner shape and sticking with it. Newsrooms are flattening; beats are disappearing; specialist roles are getting absorbed.

What’s left favors journalists who can report, package, distribute, and defend their work across platforms, often at the same time. The message isn’t particularly sexy, but it’s crystal clear: journalism might not be dead (yet), but the days of stable newsroom staffing, single-channel output, clear career paths, and chasing the story before profits are long gone.

Read more: More Than 3000 Journalism Job Cuts Tracked in the US and UK (The Press Gazette)

Streaming engagement continues to dominate entertainment consumption.
Recent streaming usage data highlights that nearly every American household pays for at least one streaming subscription, with a shocking 99 % reporting actively streaming content, with a whopping 10% subscribing to more than 5 streaming services.

Americans have an average of 2.9 paid streaming subscriptions per person, and Netflix remains the most popular platform, used by 55% of respondents. Streaming has become the baseline behavior and default medium for modern audiences.

For media jobs, that reinforces the reality that creating content that plays well across platforms, formats, and attention spans matters more than channel loyalty.

Read more: Top Streaming Membership Services and Stats, 2026 (Forbes)

Advertising economics are evolving, not collapsing

Recent data suggest that the business of monetizing attention – formerly the sole domain of blue chip brands and consumer goods – is expanding well beyond traditional advertisers, with major AI firms and non-traditional media channels rapidly increasing both ad offerings and prices.

This underscores a broader shift in how ad dollars flow and where media companies find revenue; what once looked like a stable ecosystem of brand buys, paid placements, and agency planning now includes ride-share apps, tech platforms, and algorithmic attention markets.

This is forcing publishers and media operators to rethink standard ad strategies and measurement frameworks, rather than relying on old playbooks.

This isn’t a short-term trend – and it’s creating long-term career demand for hybrid roles that bridge creative, analytics, and platform expertise with revenue and business outcomes. In other words, Don Draper is being displaced by Logan Roy.

Read more: Media Trend Economics Report (Axios)

Entertainment job cuts aren’t just high in California. They’re baked in.

California once again led the nation in job cuts in 2025, and if you work in entertainment, that probably didn’t surprise you. Film, TV, and streaming accounted for a meaningful share of the damage as studios pulled back on production, delayed greenlights, and quietly restructured teams that were built for a volume era that never really paid off.

This isn’t a pause between booms. It’s the industry settling into a leaner, less forgiving shape. Fewer shows. Smaller crews. More contract work. And a growing expectation that roles stretch across production, digital distribution, and audience engagement, rather than living safely within a single job title. The work isn’t disappearing. The version of the job people are trained for is.

Read more: California Led Nation in Job Cuts Last Year (LA Times)

Dual Devices, One Career: What This Means for Media Professionals

Dual-device entertainment rewards people who work across mediums, have extreme adaptability, can produce attention-grabbing, short-form content, and have an understanding of the digital media ecosystem – and more importantly, how to monetize it.

That means linear career paths are largely giving way to more latticed growth that emphasizes skills and results, not tenure or pedigree. Specialists who can optimize or create only for a single workflow, or whose expertise is limited to a single discipline or niche, will soon find themselves replaced by generalists with sharp edges and a quick learning curve.

The winners of the changing job market will be those who not only have a deep understanding of such disparate disciplines as narrative development, platform distribution, data analysis, and behavioral psychology, but also the ability to intentionally design for human distraction – and consistently win at least a few fleeting seconds.

This is already clear in hiring data. Mediabistro job postings show an increased demand for blended skill sets; stuff like: editorial plus analytics, production plus social, creative plus growth.

If you can’t explain how your work survives when the audience looks down, someone else probably already can. And the bad news is, they’re probably way closer to the budget than you are.

This Content is Repetitive, For A Reason. Get It?

The Rip didn’t succeed in spite of distraction; it succeeded because it leveraged distraction as a production assumption and designed around it.

Netflix repeating plot points isn’t a creative failure; it’s an honest response to how people actually consume media now. We live in a world of fragmented attention, with multiple screens demanding stories built to withstand interruption and even direct competition – and still land.

That reality isn’t the end of creativity; it’s simply a new constraint. And constraints are nothing new to any creative or production professional; in fact, like low budgets, limited equipment, or last-minute reshoots, they often elevate the work and the end product.

The media jobs that are growing right now don’t require chasing every platform, going all in on digital or AI, or hacking the algorithm to grab eyeballs and engagement.

They’re about understanding how attention actually works and using this framework to build stories, systems, and careers that meet audiences where they are. Even if that involves being in multiple places at once.

Dual-device entertainment didn’t kill storytelling. It just added a second stage where relevance is decided.

The media jobs growing right now understand attention as fragmented, participatory, and aggressively measurable. The ones fading are built around the fantasy that audiences still sit still and behave.

They don’t. They won’t. And the job market has already moved on.

See you next week. Same mess. New screens.

Matt Charney

Executive Editor, Mediabistro

The Editorial Control Edition

There was a time, not so long ago, when being an editor was more than a job – it was a career, one with a familiar ladder and a proven path to work your way up, which you could, with a little passion and a ton of sweat equity.

You started out as a junior editor, if you were lucky enough to land one of the handful of highly competitive openings at a publishing company.

You spent a lot of time learning the house style, suffered through the traditional mix of petty errands and ritualistic hazing from people who dutifully double-spaced sentences, and got shown the ropes by dubious “mentors” who reeked of correction fluid and cheap gin, even first thing in the morning.

If you somehow survived your coworkers, deadlines and office politics, and managed not to unintentionally piss off the wrong person (no easy task in publishing), then you slowly gained authority, stability, and maybe, if you were a glutton for punishment, then you’d get a door with your name on it – or a perfunctory thanks in the “acknowledgments” page from an author whose work you guided from ideation to ISBN number.

That career ladder, and any semblance of stability in publishing, is as long gone as galley proofs and broadsides.

Today, software has replaced slush piles; getting your foot in the door requires more industry connections than your average acquisitions editor, and that familiar career ladder is a perpetual WIP that never gets to galleys.

Here’s the publishing paradox: editorial work has never been more important, and editorial jobs have never been more disposable.

Trust is ephemeral, attention is fragmented, and AI has become a ubiquitous and omniscient beta reader for pretty much every publication.

Faced with the most disruption the industry has seen since Gutenberg printed his first Bible, publishers and imprints responded by cutting those experienced editors en masse.

Gone are the professional arbiters of judgment, coherence, and taste, replaced by freelance beta readers and DIY self-publishing shops, ready to turn any middling manuscript and a pile of money into an “Amazon bestseller.”

The few remnants of the publishing industry, meanwhile, are slowly but surely splitting at the seams. On one side, you’ve got the big, legacy imprints that are still trying to cost-cut their way back to profitability while trying desperately (if futilely) to return to relevance, and regain some modicum of the prestige that’s long ago left traditional publishing.

On the other hand, you’ve got smaller, niche, and nonprofit outlets breaking rules and conventions to offset the decline in book sales, using mechanisms like memberships, monetized newsletters, podcasts, and community-driven models that more closely hew to how the masses consume mass media today.

Editors can feel caught in the middle of this growing divide, staring down endemic, but profound, professional and existential crises.

The past is history; the future is unclear. And if you’re in this business, you’re probably worried about how to beat the odds and stick around. It’s a perilous existence.

Let’s be honest: the data is clear, and it’s not encouraging. Since the late 1990s, when the Internet was still in its infancy, employment in the American publishing industry has dropped by a staggering 40%, from an estimated 91,000 jobs to around 55,000 today, according to a recent Publishers Weekly analysis.

At the same time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that editor roles will grow at an average annual rate of 1% over the next decade. That’s a rounding error away from what’s effectively an industry-wide hiring freeze.

For those few publishing professionals left, it can feel like every day requires running faster and pushing harder simply to stay in the same place. That’s more or less true.

But the good news is that for those of us who have managed to carve editorial careers, even in the face of steep cutbacks and shrinking headcounts, this is a working draft that’s hurdling through predictable plot points, working its way to a resolution that hasn’t been written yet.

And until the ending is finally written, there will always be room for experienced editors to push the narrative arc to a satisfying, if improbable, payoff.

Better get to those galleys.

But in the meantime, here’s your weekly look at the top news and trends in media careers, along with some…

Hot Jobs of the Week on Mediabistro

This week’s featured job listings prove the point: employers want media leaders who can bridge editorial instinct with revenue strategy.

• Executive Editor – Association for Computing Machinery
• Executive Editor, News Service Florida – GovExec
• Business & HR Manager – Hearst Television
• Head of Audience and Growth – 70 Faces Media
• Publisher – Piedmont Journalism Foundation
• Circulation Director – Milk Street
• Communications Associate – 340B Report
• Editorial Intern – Mansueto Ventures
• Creative Director, Political Advertising – Brainstorm Creative Resources Inc.
• Campaign Marketing Coordinator – Arizona State University

Washington Post Layoffs: Tenure Dies in Darkness

While Amazon’s leaked memo confirming 16,000 job cuts dominated the headlines documenting the ongoing war between Jeff Bezos and the proletariat, the staff at the Washington Post is similarly bracing for significant newsroom layoffs.

Reporting suggests that WaPo plans on cutting around 100 news jobs, or around 10% of its staff; the paper already announced it was axing its coverage of the upcoming Winter Olympics and World Cup in what’s widely anticipated to be a complete shutdown of its sports desk; other coverage areas, particularly metro beats and foreign bureaus, are also expected to see steep cuts.

Reporting in The Guardian on Washington Post staffers fearing major cuts paints what should be a familiar picture to most publishing professionals: widespread anxiety, confusion, and existential angst amongst staffers, while leadership refuses to comment, beyond the obligatory objections that the problems are structural, not editorial, right before decimating wide swaths of their editorial teams.

Additional reporting captures the internal mood more thoroughly. The widespread sentiment seems to be that strong reporting and impeccable journalism can’t overcome weak business results or a lack of clarity.

No amount of Pulitzer or George Polk wins can ever beat a spreadsheet when the owner is trying to cut costs. And unfortunately, even with the world’s richest man writing the checks, mastheads matter less than margins.

It’s a story so familiar these days that it’s almost a cliché. Just like Jeff Bezos’s ongoing method performance as a Bond villain.

Career Reality Check:

If your relative job security depends on a single legacy brand with a billionaire owner and a vague “digital vision” in lieu of a solid plan for a successful pivot into the future, assume that volatility is about the only thing that’s guaranteed.

When news jobs have approximately the same shelf life as a news cycle, it’s imperative to continually build new skills, enhanced visibility, and a professional portfolio that transcends a single role or position.

There is no ladder left to climb; instead, it’s about doing everything to avoid falling off entirely. It’s a long drop, and the masthead is anything but a safety net, even for the most venerable and prestigious of publications – or publishing professionals.

Editor Vs Machine: The Ultimate Showdown

In publishing, like in so much else these days, the conversation about AI has moved from think pieces and abstract theory to professional reality, and, increasingly, core editorial competency. The question is no longer whether or not AI should be a core component of editorial workflows. Rather, it’s about practical concerns such as who controls the LLMs, who audits the output, and who’s ultimately responsible (and accountable) when the algorithms fail or fall apart.

This shift was recently documented in an eye-opening report from Publishers Weekly, which noted that roughly 63% of publishing companies surveyed currently use AI in some editorial capacity, a number projected to grow significantly in 2026 (and beyond).

Most professional editors, of course, remain a bit unsettled by the rise of the machines, and justifiably so; after all, hallucinations are hard to fact-check, and reporting that happens behind a black box is the antithesis of journalistic standards. But the trend line is clear – the utilization curve has already bent in the direction of inevitability.

The future implications of AI adoption in publishing and editing seem to be following a familiar playbook, with plenty of precedents from other industries and job functions. As Publishers Weekly reports, AI isn’t replacing human editors, at least not entirely.

Instead, it’s fundamentally being used as a force multiplier to reshape and optimize workflows, redistributing tasks and redefining jobs for maximum efficiency and productivity. AI is also pushing media professionals into roles that look less like traditional editorial gigs. Instead of supervising the ideation and output of the work, AI is transforming editorial oversight into a combination of a system designer, a quality-control coordinator, and an algorithmic ombudsman.

Career Reality Check:

Editors who refuse to engage with or adopt AI risk following print journalism down the same road of impending obsolescence as moveable type or carbon copies.

Editors who understand how to deploy and optimize AI, how to design processes that maximize its output while constraining its impact, and who can balance its limitations with its potential, will remain not only relevant, but in demand – the operational core of future newsrooms and publishing models.

This isn’t about prompt engineering. It’s about editorial quality, and most importantly, editorial accountability. Ultimately, even in the age of algorithmic overload, editorial oversight and outcomes are still the ultimate responsibility of professional editors – and AI will never replace human intuition where it matters the most.

The Future of Publishing is Local

While national media properties and newsrooms continue to consolidate, contract, or close down entirely, local and niche outlets have been more successful in reinventing themselves and pivoting towards profitability, or at least, sustainability.

Editor & Publisher recently highlighted how local news has experimented with several models that are quietly working: public media collaborations, university partnerships, community-funded newsrooms, membership-driven revenue models, and other initiatives that prioritize trust over scale and reputation over circulation.

None of this looks like the Big 4 (broadcast) or Big 5 (publishing) prestige pipeline, but it does look like local and niche media outlets have instead become the proving grounds for the future of the entire industry, and the training grounds for the next generation of editorial and business leaders actively shaping it.

All news is local. But in this case, the implications are pretty much universal.

Career Reality Check:

Local and niche publishers lack the kind of resources or reach that national imprints or prestige publishers have long enjoyed, which may ultimately prove to be a competitive advantage in an era of austerity and belt-tightening.

The role of an editor in these environments is far more entrepreneurial and less segmented; local news requires staff to straddle a wide breadth of responsibilities, ranging from reporting to revenue, and from ad sales to audience engagement – and everything in between.

It’s that type of hybrid experience that the broader industry is quickly adopting: larger institutions and legacy publications increasingly demand this sort of agility and adaptability from their editorial staff, but limited training and traditional hierarchies keep staff within large institutions from gaining the broad exposure and experience that come with it.

This reinforces the idea that not only is the industry being disrupted, but the core tools and skills required for a successful, relatively stable media career are being disrupted as well.

And for an industry where getting your foot in the door has always proven notoriously difficult, and climbing the ladder even harder, this represents an unprecedented opportunity for the next generation of media professionals to emerge today – and lead the industry tomorrow, too.

The Jobs That Disappeared Are Not Coming Back

Long-term employment data doesn’t put a positive spin on the state of the publishing industry, and as much as editors embrace a good comeback story, in this business, it’s looking increasingly unlikely.

That’s what makes the numbers so uncomfortable; 40% of jobs eliminated isn’t a shift in consumer preferences, or a circulation problem, or even an example of increased audience fragmentation – all oft-cited villains in the publishing industry narrative.

None, however, is the true culprit for the decline in news and editorial jobs – the truth is far less glamorous. What we’re experiencing is a reallocation of labor that both precedes and transcends the rise of AI and the decline of print and prestige publishing.

As the industry consolidated, so too did the number of positions, with many deemed redundant or unnecessary, particularly as automation compressed workflows and the shift to digital required far less labor than its print predecessors.

Cost pressures and corporate buyouts pushed many jobs from salaried staff to an ad hoc, freelancer model and project-based or contract roles that are ubiquitous at most publishers, of course, don’t show up in employment numbers, further exacerbating what’s already a somewhat grim and extremely depressing jobs picture within publishing.

Data from Revelio Labs on editors and publishers confirms this stasis. Pay has increased, reinforcing the appearance of the status quo even as it’s been entirely disrupted. Growth is much more managed, driven more by business than editorial needs; job openings, when they do occur, happen because someone retires, burns out, or leaves the industry entirely.

Net new jobs, or newly created roles, are largely a thing of the past. Few, if any, editors are staffing up or expanding coverage or capabilities – in fact, the data is trending solidly in the opposite direction.

But here’s the interesting part. Revelio data also shows a fairly dramatic increase in tenure within the news and publishing industries, as experienced professionals realize that there’s no real incentive to jump – and likely, nowhere obvious to go if they were to make a move.

When headcount growth and mobility slow down, pressure increases. Work piles up, expectations and responsibilities expand, cost and budget pressures mount, and, eventually, something has to give. That’s why the shakeup the industry is experiencing feels so inevitable.

Publishing today isn’t a growth industry; fewer people are tasked with doing more work, revenues have replaced reporting as a primary area of focus, margins are tightening, and accountability (and risk) is more concentrated.

Any future headcount growth won’t look like a hiring boom – just like another redistribution of labor throughout an industry that’s experienced this phenomenon countless times. Somehow, against all odds, this industry has managed to survive – and thrive – countless revolutions.

And if this business survived the rise of radio, television, cable news, the Internet, social media, and Amazon, it can survive the rise of AI.

TL;DR

If you’re still here, still editing, still publishing, still trying to make sense of this industry in 2026, you’re not doing it wrong. Your timing just sucks, since we’re in the middle of an unprecedented reset across our industry.

The editor of the future isn’t just a guardian of grammar rules or arbiter of the written word. They’re also a systems thinker who knows what both leadership and readers want, can negotiate working with both humans and algorithms simultaneously, and understands that credibility isn’t pretense in publishing – it’s the ultimate career asset.

So, if you’re reading this while updating your resume, forcing yourself to post some trite nonsense on LinkedIn, are juggling a bunch of freelance balls, are learning new tools or skills, or maybe just quietly freaking out, here’s the bottom line:

If you’re updating your resume this week, lead with AI workflow experience. It’s what hiring managers are scanning for.

While all this is exhausting (and a little depressing), and even though the industry sometimes makes it hard to believe in itself and its future, at the end of the day, editing still matters.

Speaking of, apologies for all the typos,

Matt Charney

These days, I’m lucky enough to hear from dozens of entertainment and media professionals every month – one of the perks of this gig – and among the deluge of disparate, career-related questions that I’m asked (ranging from the esoteric to the mundane), one, in particular, seems to be appearing with greater frequency. It’s a good one, though it’s also pretty limiting:

“Where should I move if I want to develop my media career?”

For some reason, I think they’re expecting – or at least hoping – that I reinforce their availability heuristic and point them towards one of the usual suspects: Los Angeles, New York, or maybe, if they’re feeling progressive, Atlanta, Austin, or Albuquerque (aka “Tamalewood,” which is great branding, if nothing else). If they’re looking for production capabilities and creative opportunities, New Orleans and Chicago generally find themselves on the shortlist, too.

This mindset is not as outdated as shooting on film, publishing with newsprint, or logging onto Facebook. It’s empirically – and strategically – wrong.

Just as Hollywood shifted from a Los Angeles neighborhood to an eponym for the entertainment industry, how Madison Avenue became shorthand for the top advertising agencies, and how Nashville became a shibboleth for the country music industry, the correlation between location and entertainment opportunities is becoming increasingly tenuous.

As media expands its audience from regional to global and the global monoculture becomes increasingly homogenized, it’s important to recognize that careers have followed a similar trajectory. The industry has gone global, not because it’s fashionable, but because of the seismic shifts we’re seeing in both workforce economics and labor markets.

It’s a Small World, After All

In the media industry, most jobs have already been expatriated. According to UNESCO data, employment within the creative economy has grown exponentially faster than within the United States (where it’s been slowly contracting for years, now) since 2020, particularly in the Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and a handful of European markets – all regions where creative job growth has exceeded 25% over the past five years.

While production has slowed to a crawl in markets like LA, New York, or even Vancouver (the 818 of the Great White North), the UK screen sector alone has added tens of thousands of jobs in the years after the pandemic. This has been driven by production demand that consistently outstrips the supply of local talent, the growth of regionalized streamers, and existing production infrastructure.

Similarly, India’s media and entertainment workforce is projected to exceed 4.5 million full time jobs by 2027, fueled by streaming, gaming and the expansion of regional, highly niche microindustries (beyond Bollywood, the increased production demands and growing audiences for Tollywood, Kollywood, Sandalwood, Mollywood and Bengali-language cinema led to the release of around 2,500 feature length films last year, compared to 500-600 releases in the US and Canada).

Their reach, of course, is no longer limited to specific regions but is increasingly embraced by global audiences as well.

At the same time, the mature US entertainment market is consolidating and cutting costs, freezing hiring, and decimating its production pipeline to a handful of tentpole productions or franchise-driven IP. The BLS projects that US film, video, and publishing employment will remain flat over the next few years, after five consecutive years of net job losses. So, that’s the good news, I guess.

This structural reset hasn’t made Hollywood or the US media market irrelevant; it’s just no longer the dominant player in an increasingly decentralized, global industry. Content financing is moving across borders, with productions driven more by financial incentives than by talent density or the availability of skilled workers. Entertainment and media are effectively becoming localized at scale; streamers are location-agnostic, and so too are the audiences for these platforms.

Global entertainment growth isn’t limited to above-the-line talent like writers or directors. Data show exponential increases in demand for niche specializations, including production technologists, localization and audience strategists, formatting developers, VFX and media designers, and production operations roles, outside the US, particularly in South Asia and Latin America.

These fast-growing, highly in-demand roles sit at the intersection of the most critical factors driving media job growth today: creativity and technology at scale. The talent pools aren’t limited to the traditional media hubs.

That’s why this week’s stories matter; for this edition of the Mediabistro Weekly Drop, we’re looking around the world, past celebrity gossip, clickbait or algorithmic induced panic and looking at where investment is flowing; how talent pipelines are being relocated and rebuilt; and, most importantly, which markets matter most for career growth and job stability over the next decade in the entertainment industry.

But first, here are the headlines that mattered most for media professionals this week.

The Five Stories Shaping Global Entertainment Careers This Week

1. The Mouse House and the End of an Era

The Walt Disney Company this week announced that the chief of their parks and experiences group, Josh D’Amaro, will succeed Bob Iger as the CEO of the world’s largest entertainment conglomerate. There seems to be general optimism about this announcement, despite the fact that the last time a Parks chief was tapped by Iger for a top job, Tom Staggs (my former boss while TWDC CFO) was an unmitigated (albeit brief) disaster for shareholders and “Cast Members” alike.

Iger’s decision to step aside and spend some quality time with Willow Bay and to cosplay as an angel investor was reportedly long in the works, and D’Amaro’s selection reinforces Disney’s doubling down on experiences, IP licensing, and global brand monetization at the expense of streaming. In other words, Disney is staking its future – and its shareholder value – outside of its traditional bailiwicks of TV and film.

Read More: Disney Taps Parks Head Josh D’Amaro as CEO To Lead in Post Iger Era (Reuters)

Career Implications:

The new regime on the top floor of the Team Disney Building matters more for careers than any single content slate. It reinforces that experiential media, operational leadership, immersive design, and global execution roles are more important to major conglomerates than traditional entertainment experiences. Coincidentally, a significant percentage of these roles exist outside of the United States.

If your skill set in entertainment is limited to traditional content production or legacy mediums, career options are quickly closing – and unlikely to return. If you want to climb the new corporate ladder, particularly at the majors, focus on building expertise in experiential entertainment, global business, and operational efficiency (or, optimally, some combination thereof).

If not, you’d be better served trying to sell scripts on spec; the odds of success today are about the same. Which is to say, not so great.

2. National Heritage: The UK Turns Entertainment Into Infrastructure

The United Kingdom has renewed its push to provide governmental funding for film and television talent, with the supply of available talent lagging behind the demand created by a significant uptick in British productions. This public-private push is also being underwritten by both trade associations and studios, a tacit admission that the country’s past reliance on apprenticeships or subsidized job schemes is broken.

According to the Guardian, studios and UK production companies are struggling to find below-the-line and support staff fast enough to keep pace with slated projects – particularly in post production, VFX, and technical operations roles.

This isn’t a job creation scheme, nor is it being funded as a social program. It’s a restructuring of entertainment and media talent that looks a lot like workforce triage.

The UK understands that without domestic talent, its ability to attract international projects and financing – an unquestionable success story – could quickly stall, with long-term implications for both the industry and the domestic economy. For now, though, UK production recorded its highest year to date, generating a staggering $9.2B, suggesting that the center of the entertainment universe may well be shifting across the pond.

Read more: Film and TV Chiefs Back Youth Scheme to Reduce Skills Gap (The Sun)

Career Implications:

The UK government’s push to formalize training pathways across film, TV, and media isn’t a social subsidy or a political initiative. It’s a decidedly practical response to a growth industry that lacks the talent supply needed for traditional media business models.

The new governmental scheme fundamentally alters the career landscape – and the outlook for the UK media industry. Paid apprenticeships, accredited training programs, and public-private partnerships, largely funded by studios and broadcasters, provide clear entry points and predictable career paths, along with regular, reliable income.

The larger implication is a bit more muddled. The UK is implicitly acknowledging that making creatives work for free isn’t a sustainable strategy for long-term industry growth – or even short-term demand. By essentially professionalizing media jobs and standardizing career paths, the British are approaching media careers less as an outlier and more as a labor market and an economically essential industry.

This facilitates creativity by making media careers possible without professionals essentially mortgaging their financial future in pursuit of passion – a trend every US film school grad really wishes would make it across the Pond sooner rather than later.

3. Media Consolidation and the Changing Geography of Media Jobs

We’ve extensively covered the ongoing consolidation of media jobs across studios, streamers, publishers, and production companies, a trend that shows no sign of slowing down any time soon – nor do the job cuts that inevitably follow every closed transaction or M&A deal. The jobs that remain, however, tend to be much more complex and business-focused; the industry is becoming dominated by MBAs, not BFAs, for better or worse.

As Variety reports, the most in-demand skills major media companies are prioritizing hiring for include cross-platform efficiency, projects and properties built to scale globally, and having the operational acumen to transform creative chaos into sustainable revenue growth. Much of this is driven by the influx of foreign financing that’s transforming the industry’s fundamentals, with the domestic media industry increasingly beholden to sovereign wealth funds rather than studio execs.

Read more: Hollywood & Media Job Cuts in 2026 (Deadline)

Career Implications:

Pedigree or professional experience matter less today than business acumen and agility. The traditional power structure has shifted, with a focus on properties that can succeed across markets and platforms, with creative vision being a minor consideration compared to commercial success.

Media professionals need to realize that the fabled thirty-mile zone has shifted from the West Side to worldwide. Globalization has finally reached an industry that has long resisted it, and media professionals must broaden their perspectives and connections beyond borders.

From LA to London, from New York to New Delhi, the geography of media jobs is rapidly changing, which doesn’t look like a great long-term trend for US workers or for an industry that’s quickly contracting.

4. The Global Economy Now Driven by the Creative Economy

The World Government Summit just released its annual Creative Futures report this week, and the takeaway isn’t exactly subtle: the creator economy is no longer a side gig or driven by a handful of “influencers.” It’s emerging as a core engine for global economic growth, and it’s already profoundly, but quietly, impacting the US media industry.

Globally, the creator economy now accounts for an eye-opening 3.1% of total GDP and 6% of global employment. Surprisingly, the US is a frontrunner in this shift, with the creator economy generating around 4.3% of GDP in 2025. This is no longer a niche industry, but one that’s now almost as large an economic driver as manufacturing – only with fewer smokestacks and more MacBooks.

Read more: Creative Futures: The Springboard for Sustained Economic Growth (WGS)

Career Implications:

The WGS benchmark report makes it clear that the creator economy isn’t just focused on creative or media roles; it includes design, digital content, gaming, and technical operations, and while it’s hard to get a clear view of the bigger picture, the relatively invisible creator economy is now embedded across every modern industry and market.

For media and entertainment professionals, the implications are uncomfortable, but straightforward. First, creative jobs are becoming project-based, freelance-heavy, and far more volatile in terms of income and monetization potential. Traditional employment structures, compensation and benefits, and job opportunities are still firmly entrenched in what’s becoming an outdated, obsolete legacy model.

Creative skills are no longer optional in the global economy, with demand now extending beyond traditional industries such as media, publishing, and entertainment. Employers across sectors and functions want problem-solving, storytelling, design thinking, and originality in every role – reinforced, of course, by a high degree of technical competence and business acumen.

Degrees and professional experience no longer matter as much as portfolios, proof of work, and adaptability when building a sustainable, stable career in entertainment and beyond.

While the US remains the world leader in the creative economy and will continue to produce talent, without a systemic shift in education, IP protections, and real support for freelancers and gig workers, industry churn will only accelerate. Creative careers will continue to grow; stability will not. It’s going to take policymakers and employers to stop treating creators like a hobby and realize that, increasingly, the creator economy is actually infrastructure.

Mediabistro Weekly Job Spotlight

For all the noise about contraction, consolidation, and whatever euphemism we’re using this quarter, the thing is, the entertainment and media industries are still hiring. Sure, it’s a little uneven, and the jobs look pretty different from what they used to be, even a couple of years ago. “Storyteller” job openings, for example, have actually doubled. But there are opportunities out there, particularly for people who understand that the meaning of “media careers” is undergoing a seismic shift.

That’s why we’re highlighting some of the newest openings and hottest job postings on Mediabistro this week. Check out these roles, and thousands more, available right now, only on Mediabistro.

• Director, External and Performance Marketing — Hadassah New York City, NY · Full Time · $110,000–$130,000
• Senior Engagement Editor, Quanta Magazine — Simons Foundation New York, NY · Full Time
• Product Marketing Manager — TS IMAGINE Montreal, QC · Full Time · Hybrid
• Digital Media Campaign Strategist — Schaefer Advertising Fort Worth, TX · Full Time
• Editorial Assistant, UC Press (Hybrid) — University of California Oakland, CA · Full Time
• Marketing Campaign Specialist — Guilford Publications New York, NY · Full Time · $50,000–$55,000

The Bottom Line

The global entertainment and media industries are no longer American by default, with a smattering of international offices to provide regional support. It’s now global by default – both structurally and economically – whether or not legacy power players and their leadership are ready to admit it.

Careers in this industry are now forming wherever talent, incentives, infrastructure, and audiences intersect, which means that prestige, logos, and proximity no longer matter as much as content and capability. This trend towards globalization expands the competitive playing field and the opportunities available. The question is no longer “will it play in Peoria,” but instead, “will it play in Pune or Pretoria?”

These changes don’t mean the death of media or entertainment careers. It just means the map is being redrawn, and careers are no longer centered on a physical location but on an interconnected digital audience. And while that might sound scary, the truth is, the upsides are endless.

As Tony Montana reminded us, the world is yours. Just don’t blow it.

So from all of us here at Mediabistro, adios, auf wiedersehen, zàijiàn, and namaste – until next week.

Matt Charney
Executive Editor, Mediabistro

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.