Axios CEO Jim VandeHei declared last month that we’re living in a “post-news” era, a world shaped by personalized content that allows people to create their own realities. “America’s information ecosystem is badly broken, deeply polluted and increasingly dangerous,” he wrote.
Yet despite that sobering conclusion, and following a year in which many news outlets, including Axios, cut jobs, VandeHei told TheWrap he felt confident about the future. “I actually go into next year probably the most bullish I’ve been for high-end media in five years,” he said.
The numbers would suggest otherwise. Sweeping layoffs throughout the broader media industry reached new heights in 2025, according to the executive staffing firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. The media industry — measured by television, news, film and streaming — announced 17,163 job cuts this year as of November, up 18% from the same period last year and ahead of the total 15,039 in 2024.
It has felt like no one is immune. Throughout 2025, TheWrap chronicled cuts at legacy newspapers (Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune), magazines (People Inc., Penske Media, Condé Nast), digital media companies (Vox Media, Business Insider) and TV networks (CNN, CBS News, NBC News).
This slashing of jobs reflects a yearslong crisis gripping the media industry, in particular news, as it faces challenges stemming from shifting consumption habits toward creator-led programs, the threat of generative AI platforms siphoning away traffic from news websites, a retreat of ad spending and industry consolidation. It’s forced some journalists to figure out which options remain in a beleaguered industry and how best to serve audiences as attention spans have splintered.
There are some bright spots: News-specific cuts were actually down last month (2,254) compared to the same period last year (4,537), according to Challenger, Gray and Christmas, and successful startups, like the Congress-focused Punchbowl News and center-right Bulwark, are growing. MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) staffed up in 2025 as it split from NBC News, while the California Post, a West Coast extension of the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, is building a newsroom for its 2026 launch.
Still, given the grave challenges facing the industry as a whole entering the new year, TheWrap spoke with leaders of growing media organizations about what they see that’s working.
“I feel very confident that if you are a media company that produces distinct content, either because of your expertise or because of the personalities that you have on payroll, that business is getting better and better,” VandeHei said.
Where growth resides
As many of the nation’s top newsrooms retreat, a collection of outlets found ways to expand.
Politico founder Robert Allbritton gave $20 million to his nonprofit, the Allbritton Journalism Institute, in 2023 to create a nonprofit newsroom, NOTUS (News of the United States). Its mission was to produce “empathetic and brutally honest” reporting on Congress and Washington by pairing a group of 10 fellows, or reporters in training, with a staff of seasoned reporters for two years.
NOTUS has since drawn from the ranks of Politico, Axios, the Daily Beast and NPR, and has reported exclusively on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s presidential ambitions and on fake citations in a report published by the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-led Health and Human Services Department. The site has rotated through the White House’s “New Media” seat during its press briefings, with one NOTUS reporter getting on Donald Trump’s radar in May.
In addition, its first class of 10 fellows “graduated” from the program earlier this year, with some landing jobs at Bloomberg, Politico, the Miami Herald and other top outlets.
“Everyone who wanted a journalism job has gotten a journalism job, and a good journalism job,” NOTUS editor-in-chief Tim Grieve, a former top editor at Politico and National Journal, told TheWrap.
Grieve said the newsroom now operates as a for-profit entity, though all profits are sent back to Allbritton’s institute. Some of those NOTUS’ donors support the website, he said, due to its new “Washington Bureau Initiative,” which assigns NOTUS fellows to report on state congressional delegations in 12 states, including New York, California, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Grieve called the decline in local reporting “a real crisis for journalism and for democracy.”
“Most local newspapers, the ones that used to have Washington bureaus, mostly don’t anymore, and so there’s really no one out there keeping tabs on the specific members of a state delegation for the readers back home,” Grieve said.
Axios, meanwhile, has consistently expanded its Axios Local initiative, which has created 34 news arms since its launch in 2020 in cities such as Miami, Atlanta, Portland and Boston. VandeHei, Axios’ CEO, plans to expand the program to areas including Colorado and Ohio next year, bringing the total to 41 by early next year.
VandeHei told TheWrap the current collision of technology and reporting has allowed news outlets to break into local markets more efficiently than they could five years ago, and he wanted to “perfect” the local model by the end of 2026.
“If we could fix local, which I think is the hardest problem to fix, and we could do that at scale, I think that would be a great gift to society,” VandeHei said. “I think local news is really important, and I think it’s a really hard business, and if we can crack that code, I would feel really good about life.”
Axios, which was bought by Cox Enterprises in 2022, has also expanded into video once again through the first season of “The Axios Show,” a one-on-one conversation series between Axios journalists and newsmakers that highlights their perspectives. Its first season guests included Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and VandeHei said “it looks like” there would be a second one. Axios is also testing a video component to its “Behind the Curtain” column, authored by VandeHei and co-founder Mike Allen.
“We’re pretty great at convening and getting really interesting people on camera doing good interviews,” VandeHei said. “So that’s a good business.”
Welcome to 2026
VandeHei, who had to cut 19 staffers last year at Axios, acknowledged the “painful and awful” reality of those layoffs. But he said that media companies needed to adapt quickly if they wanted “to be able to last forever.”
“It’s going to be the hard part for all companies and all employees in basically every industry,” VandeHei said. “Going forward, you’re just going to have to be more agile and just realize that reality is what reality is. Things are just shifting faster than at any point in humanity, and you just have to find ways as a business and as an individual to keep up and to evolve, and that makes people nervous.”
Grieve, the NOTUS editor, said the company has experimented with AI to support some of its backend models, but it wasn’t considering following other news outlets’ lead in licensing its content to companies like OpenAI or Amazon or using the technology as a substitute for reporting.
“AI cannot tell you what is in the head of a politician working on Capitol Hill or what his next move is going to be,” Grieve said. “But great reporters can do that, and as someone who’s hired a ton of journalists over the years, I know how hard it is to find people who can truly break news and deliver information that people don’t have.”
Axios struck a content licensing deal with OpenAI in January 2025, joining a collection of other media outlets, but it does not use ChatGPT to produce stories. VandeHei said outlets that’ve experimented with AI to generate stories were engaging in a “stupid strategy” that wasn’t distinctive enough to stand out from human-generated work.
The future for outlets that seek to rise above the threats posed by technological advancements and shifting consumer habits, VandeHei said, is to report out “distinct, unique, human, verified” journalism that can stand apart from those that try to appeal to a generic audience.
He singled out Punchbowl News and The Information, both of which cater to insider audiences, as well as giants like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal that have managed to convert a specific audience into devoted, paying subscribers.
“I would tell anybody in any industry, buckle up,” VandeHei said. “The hypervolatility is here, and it will only intensify.”
