CBS News laid off its last remaining climate reporter this year. The Washington Post cut 74% of its climate reporting staff in February. NPR folded its climate desk into its national desk after layoffs in June. By Grist’s estimate, climate coverage worldwide has fallen 38% since its 2021 peak, not because readers stopped caring, but because newsrooms simply couldn’t afford to keep covering it, even as the summer of 2026 delivered record-breaking heat across much of the world.
That contraction tells one version of where media is heading. A small group of companies building something different tells another, and their common thread isn’t technology for its own sake. It’s a refusal to be everything to everyone. Semafor turned a profit after three years, pulling in $40 million in revenue, half of it from live events rather than subscriptions or ads. Puck built its subscriber base by paying writers almost like equity holders, compensated based on the audience and deals they personally drive. 404 Media, founded by former Vice journalists, runs as a worker-owned outlet funded primarily through membership. None of them are chasing scale for its own sake. Each picked a narrow audience and a specific format and built something sustainable around it.
Robin Thurston, founder and CEO of Outside Inc., is running the same instinct at a much larger scale. He acquired Outside Magazine in 2021, then built out a portfolio that now includes six media brands over 50 years old, including Ski, Backpacker, Yoga Journal, Velo, and Pinkbike, most of them bought out of financial distress. Thurston is blunt about why he didn’t just try to coast on their history. “One of my favorite things is that nostalgia is not a strategy,” he says. “If I just relied on the nostalgia of the brands, they would all be out of business now.”
The more striking shift is in how Outside actually makes money now. When Thurston made most of his acquisitions in 2021, advertising accounted for 75% of revenue, with 70% of that concentrated in a single category: outdoor gear. That concentration nearly became a liability when the outdoor retail industry cratered, gear demand spiked during the pandemic, retailers oversupplied inventory expecting the boom to continue, and then interest rates, inflation, and tariffs hit simultaneously. Bike manufacturers, Thurston notes, got hit with tariffs twice, once on raw materials like steel and aluminum, and again on the finished product. “When the consumer wallet gets tight, it’s not the same as groceries,” he says. “You can wait an extra year for a new tent, a new bike, a new pair of running shoes.” Advertising budgets across the outdoor category shrank right along with it.
Outside avoided the worst of that squeeze because it had already diversified away from advertising entirely. Today, Thurston says 60% of the company’s revenue is recurring, stable income from SaaS or consumer subscriptions, with the remaining 40% in advertising that’s now spread across non-endemic advertisers rather than concentrated in outdoor gear. “If we had the same reliance on those dollars as we did six years ago, we would be in real trouble,” he says. That recurring revenue came from building genuine software businesses alongside the media brands, including a mapping and trail-data tool called Gaia GPS, which Thurston points to as something AI can’t easily replace. “If you need to go outside and find a hiking trail and then record that hiking trail, AI isn’t going to do that for you,” he says.
Thurston has also moved away from the metrics most media companies obsess over. “The most important metric at Outside is not page impressions, not membership. It’s daily active users who are doing something outdoors,” he says, pointing to a recent push into audio content built specifically so people can listen while running or hiking instead of staring at a screen. That same logic drives Outside Days, the company’s four-day outdoor festival in Colorado, sponsored by REI, Brooks, Jeep, and The North Face, which drew 40,000 people this year. Thurston modeled it on the consumer energy of South by Southwest, something he says the outdoor industry’s existing event circuit never had. “There’s a lot of B2B events, a bunch of outdoor vendors talking to each other, but there’s no consumers there, literally zero,” he says of the older model.
Chip Giller is running a very different experiment on the format side of media rather than the revenue side. He founded Grist, one of the first digital-only newsrooms, in the late 1990s, and has since watched journalism move through social media, podcasting, and video streaming. His current bet, an immersive media fund called Agog, grew out of something he noticed watching people’s reactions firsthand. “When I first started spending time with immersive media and gauging how people responded to stories told with these tools, what struck me was how differently people talked about what they’d encountered,” he says. “They described experiencing something they had lived through, not just something they had watched or read.”
Giller is careful to draw a boundary around what that means. “I don’t see immersive media as a replacement for journalism. We will always need great reporting and strong local news organizations,” he says. “Immersive media is a new tool, a new form of communication used to help people engage more deeply on issues that might otherwise feel distant or abstract.” Agog has committed $6.5 million in grants so far, and its most recent open call for climate-focused projects drew more than 700 applications, over 40% from teams with no prior XR experience. Three Agog-supported projects, “Solwata,” “Out of the Ashes,” and “Empire at Sea,” were selected for this year’s Venice International Film Festival immersive competition. “Solwata,” produced with Human Rights Watch and narrated by Mark Ruffalo, follows communities in the Solomon Islands losing their homes to rising seas.
Neither Thurston nor Giller pretends the underlying money problem in media is solved. Asked directly whether anyone has figured out how to make journalism pay for itself again, Giller doesn’t dress it up. “I can’t say that anyone has fully solved that puzzle yet, and the truth is that media is constantly evolving,” he says. “Advertising alone isn’t enough for most organizations. Attention is fragmented, and trust is harder to earn.” What he sees actually working is newsrooms paired with membership models, and organizations that combine reporting with events, education, and community engagement, essentially the same instinct behind Semafor’s events revenue and 404 Media’s membership base, just applied through a different medium.
James Crane, director of business development at Sugar23, sees a broader cultural pattern underneath all of this. “I don’t think we’re moving away from technology. Technology will continue to advance faster than ever. I just think we’re moving towards balance,” he says. Media spent the last 25 years swinging from one extreme, all analog print and magazines, to the other, primarily digital. What Crane and the businesses actually pulling off a turnaround seem to agree on is that the next era isn’t going to be defined by the next platform. It’s going to be defined by whichever revenue mix, some combination of events, software, advertising, and physical products, lets a media company survive the platforms it doesn’t control.