Hollywood Reporter senior editor Alex Weprin argues that the media industry's renewed embrace of video is, this time, a sound strategy rather than a repeat of the disastrous "pivot to video" of the 2010s. The catalyst for the piece is New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn, who on Peter Kafka's Channels podcast described the paper's video push as a "race against time" and a shift as significant as the move from print to digital. Weprin contends that legacy outlets that suffered in the earlier pivot were not wrong in principle, merely early and overly dependent on tech platforms, and that ignoring video now would be a dereliction of duty.

The earlier pivot, beginning around 2015, saw publishers such as Vice, BuzzFeed, The Washington Post and Vanity Fair cut text staff to chase video after Facebook prioritised it in its newsfeed, only for the promised audiences to evaporate when algorithms shifted again. Weprin's central claim is that the landscape changed in autumn 2017, when YouTube launched its first dedicated TV app, eventually making all video "TV" and breaking traditional television's platform lock — a zero-sum contest in which streaming Megyn Kelly, Bon Appétit, Ms Rachel or MrBeast comes at the expense of Fox News, Food Network, Nickelodeon or ABC. He cites deals such as MS NOW carrying Crooked Media shows and Netflix picking up short-form content from People Inc. and The Hollywood Reporter, alongside an Atlantic cover story, "The End of Reading Is Here," as evidence that audiences are shifting from text and audio towards video.