Can the New York Times Turn Its Writers Into Video Stars?
“Hold on, I’m going to show you something funny,” Wesley Morris says. The New York Times critic and I are deep into a conversation about a long-simmering anxiety: that digital consumption is rapidly skewing toward increasingly video-centric platforms, potentially marginalizing any media that isn’t primarily visual. He pauses, steps away, and returns holding his copy of New York Magazine — the “Hamptons” issue with Cole Escola on the cover — which had arrived in the mail looking like a cubist fever dream. Someone had apparently taken a paper cutter to it, leaving the issue a near-triangular shape and likely unreadable. Somehow, though, the cover star remained intact. “I’ve never gotten a magazine like this before, but it sure feels like a metaphor to me,” Morris says.
We’re on a video call to discuss Morris’s new project at the Times, Cannonball, a podcast series in which the Pulitzer-winning critic brings on a parade of guests to unpack a different cultural artifact each week. The debut episode, out now, features the culture writer Niela Orr joining him to discuss his love for the unabashedly cheesy Bruno Mars and to poke at the complexities of that affection rooted in the Filipino American pop star’s cozy relationship with Blackness. After the Sean Combs verdict, he recorded an episode to work through his thoughts. Episodes featuring the author Mark Harris on Pee-Wee As Himself and literary critic Parul Sehgal on attention spans are on the horizon.
By now, Morris is an old hand at podcasting. With J Wortham, he spent years co-hosting a well-regarded culture podcast for the Times, Still Processing, which ended in 2022, and more recently, he worked on a Stevie Wonder–focused audio doc for Audible under the Higher Ground banner. Given his stature as a signature voice at the paper, another Morris show was always going to be on the cards, which suited him just fine because he was interested in hosting again. But when Cannonball finally came together, it took an unexpected turn: Midway through the project’s 16-month gestation, the show evolved into a video-centric production.
If you look at someone else’s phone on the subway, nine times out of ten, they’re looking at another human face, right?
Morris admits to initially feeling somewhat ambivalent about the shift. While he accepts the strategic need to meet audiences where they are, which today increasingly means video, he’s uneasy about what the change means. “It’s an acknowledgment of how we don’t read as much as we used to,” he says. He also feels that it alters his sense of the job. “I’ll be honest — it was not my first choice,” he says. “It means I have to be prepared to be public in slightly different ways than I’m used to.” His reaction reminded me of something another host told me when I was putting together last year’s podcast survey: “If we wanted to be in TV, we would’ve gone into broadcast journalism.”
But such are the times. Youtube now claims to be both the most dominant podcast platform and the most-watched video-content purveyor on television screens across the country. At the same time, social-media platforms recently overtook television as the top news source for Americans. “To be clear, I don’t believe text is going anywhere — it’s still the quickest way to communicate and publish information,” says Sam Dolnick, the Times’ deputy managing editor, who oversees new media initiatives. “But you have to accept that video is rising really quickly as the dominant language of the internet. If you look at someone else’s phone on the subway, nine times out of ten, they’re looking at another human face, right? It’s TikTok, it’s FaceTime.” In step with that reality, Cannonball is produced as a video series that’s distributed on the Times’ website, app, YouTube, and Spotify with vertically rendered clips optimized for TikTok and Instagram, while being released in parallel as an audio product through traditional RSS feeds.
Put another way, Cannonball is a show, its multi-platform design a reflection both of how radically media consumption is shifting and how the definition of the word “podcast” has evolved over the past year or so. In a symbolic bit of timing, Cannonball premiered the same week that Audacy announced it was shuttering Pineapple Street, the last avatar of prestige narrative podcasting; that studio helped produce Still Processing.
One can view the Times’ podcast strategy as a kind of indirect history of podcasting itself. The paper launched The Daily, its flagship daily news podcast, back in 2017, during the heyday of the audio-first podcast boom; it was also packaged as a half-hour program to be picked up by public radio stations around the country. This era also saw the Times acquire Serial Productions, formalize a relationship with This American Life, and invest heavily in limited-run narrative audio like Rabbit Hole, Day X, a “1619 Project” spinoff, and the now-discredited Caliphate. Today, The Daily tapes and releases video segments where it can, and in line with the broader industry’s swing back toward personality-driven talk shows à la Theo Von, Andrew Schulz, and the Smartless crew, the Times’ “Opinion” section is becoming a central pillar of its podcast strategy. (As my colleague Charlotte Klein recently reported, it’s now something of a powerful newsroom within the newsroom.) Audio-first projects are still part of the mix, but the reality is that personalities simply make for better camera fodder. As a result, “Opinion” shows like Ezra Klein’s ever-ubiquitous program and the newly launched Ross Douthat podcast, are now molded for the eye. (I’m sure you’ve heard of Klein’s glow-up by now.)
At the core of this is a clear bet on star production, arguably the clearest defensive hedge a media company can make against the threat of AI.
The strategy increasingly looks like a game of franchise-building: Take prominent characters within and beyond the organization, assemble a show — a brand! — around them, and pump them out through as many platforms as possible. Notably, and at risk of sounding like an in-house ad, it’s more or less what Kara Swisher worked to carve out at Vox Media (our parent company), then at the Times, and now back here at Vox again through New York. This is the quintessential playbook for power in the modern new-media landscape: to be everywhere, or in as many forms and places as possible. The tech-focused Hard Fork, hosted by Casey Newton and Kevin Roose — which coincidentally was the show that took over Swisher’s old podcast feed at the Times — just held a sold-out live taping in San Francisco. They also helped put together a recent issue of The New York Times Magazine about artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, who together host Popcast, the music show that also happens to be the Times’ longest-running podcast, have long chased a version of this model; they were pitching merch and listener meetups well before this moment. Now they’re enjoying a bit of a surge, booking bigger guests who both feed and benefit from the video-first approach. You can also find Caramanica recording weekly Instagram videos from his car, driving around New York and talking about new releases.
Whether the Times’ expansion into video will be successful at the same scale as its audio-only efforts remains to be seen. Cross-format comparisons are tricky. Podcast downloads are notoriously opaque, social-media views are wildly variable, and the metrics aren’t directly comparable. In 2021, the organization told Axios that 20 million people listen to its podcast content each month; by 2020, The Daily was already averaging more than 2 million audio downloads per episode. On YouTube, Daily episodes currently tend to pull five-digit views, while TikTok clips generally travel further but with erratic view counts. Across the Times’ broader YouTube offerings, some patterns emerge: Celebrity bookings do well (The Interview’s sit-down with Miley Cyrus broke a million views), roundtable and chatcast performances are somewhat underwhelming, and both Klein and Douthat’s videos hit six-digit views more regularly. The business model remains a question, but it’s not hard to imagine how the expanding video presence is supposed to feed back into the Times’ broader subscription strategy: digital ubiquity as infinite top of the funnel. Theoretically, at least.
At the core of this push is a clear bet on star production, arguably the clearest defensive hedge a media company can make against the threats posed by AI. If ChatGPT and “Google Zero” are eroding the web’s infrastructure and redirecting audiences away from news publications by default, and if AI slop threatens to render most text-based journalism suspect, what better check is there than orienting the business around a sense of humanity … or celebrity?
Morris fits seamlessly into this approach. He’s already a brand name, a star writer who wants to keep writing. He’s also charismatic and photogenic with a presence that makes you want to lean in when he’s saying something. Naturally, he’s philosophical about what it means to host in this way. “There’s a new ethics baked into this in terms of how you have these conversations and what asks you’re making of guests,” he says. “Setting aside how I feel in my comfort being in front of a camera, there are people who I really want to talk to who won’t share that comfort for any number of reasons — for privacy concerns; because they don’t like people looking at them.”
There’s still plenty to sort out. Morris and the team around him — which also includes producers Janelle Anderson and Elyssa Dudley, plus overlapping members of the video department — are navigating questions like lighting, posture, shot composition, and how far they want to lean into this whole video thing: Should they film segments in the field? “I’m not a big social-media person; I don’t do things for the camera,” he tells me. “But I understand that in order to keep growing the number of people who experience the work we all do, we’re going to have to find new ways to convey, deploy, explain, perform things … and it’s a wild thing to consider.”
He pauses, then shrugs: “But it’s also not that deep, you know? This has always been a concern since TV came into our lives.”
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