Content Went Barbell. Comms Hasn't.

What happens when the types of media comms optimizes for just... dies?

I’ve been having some version of the same conversation for months now with other senior comms people in my life. The job and its ultimate purpose are vastly changed but still recognizable in its aims and mechanics. But the place where any of it actually lives has gotten... strange. Reach is getting weird.¹

It was along those lines that I joked this week with a friend in the content industry that pretty soon all content will be either 10-second TikToks or three-hour podcasts. But I was only half joking.

More and more, the cultural firehose runs on clips, and the discourse layer runs in two-to-three-hour conversations. Everything in between is collapsing. The problem in comms is the part that’s collapsing fastest is exactly the part comms has spent 50 years optimizing for.

The middle is hollowing

In 2018, 54% of Americans said they turned to their preferred news organization first when something was breaking. By March 2026, Pew had that number at 36%. Eighteen points of distribution gone from the institution that used to be breaking news, in seven years.

The U.S. magazine industry is on track for $39.3 billion in 2026 revenue, down at a compound 2.2% rate since 2021. Publishers themselves are now telling Reuters Institute they’re scaling back service journalism, general news, and evergreen reporting, the entire mid-length feature-and-explainer category that magazines were built around.

Daily news access among 18-to-24-year-olds is down 15 percentage points since 2017. Their use of Facebook as a news source has collapsed from 47% in 2014 to 16% in 2025. The share who say they are very or extremely interested in news at all has fallen 25 points in twelve years.

Meanwhile both ends of the distribution are stronger than they’ve ever been. Forty-five percent of Americans listen to or watch podcasts every week, an all-time high. On Buzzsprout’s platform, one of the largest podcast hosts, 33% of episodes run over 40 minutes and 13% over an hour as of April 2026. Goalhanger, the production company behind The Rest Is Politics, now sees 40% of its YouTube views come via connected television. A longform format colonizing the living-room TV slot that used to belong to network news.

The shortform side is louder. The average TikTok user watches 92 videos a day at a 35-second-per-video rhythm; the algorithm’s sweet spot for reach is 21 to 34 seconds. Seventy-three percent of 18-to-24-year-olds get news from short video every week.

The dollars confirm the shape. U.S. podcast ad revenue grew 17.6% in 2025 to $2.86 billion, per the IAB and PwC, and is projected to grow another 9.6% in 2026 to roughly $3.1 billion. The money isn’t distributing evenly. Spotify alone paid more than $100 million to a handful of top podcasters — Rogan, Alex Cooper, Theo Von — in a single quarter of 2025. At the other end of the market, the top 10 podcast advertisers ran combined buys of $132.8 million in Q1 2026, with several deploying their budgets across more than a thousand shows in a programmatic-style reach play on the long tail. The institutional mid-tier show (think network-branded weekly, no individual creator’s name attached) captures neither the top-creator deal nor the long-tail reach buy. The capital flowing into podcasting in 2026 is already shaped like a barbell.

The data is clean: the ends are growing, the middle is collapsing, and grind-it-out daily news is the hardest-hit segment of the middle.

It isn’t really about length

Here’s the tell that the length framing is wrong: middle-length content is thriving — but only when it’s owned by an individual.

Independent newsletter writers in the mid-length range are reaching audiences institutional outlets can no longer touch. Casey Newton at Platformer. Ben Thompson at Stratechery. Lenny Rachitsky for product. Heather Cox Richardson for politics. Different platforms, different verticals, same shape. YouTube essays in the 30-to-60-minute range are a working business model. LinkedIn long-form lands ideas every day, but only the posts signed by a human readers already trust.

What’s collapsing isn’t mid-length. It’s institutional mid-length. The weekly magazine. The trade-pub feature. The Forbes profile. The WSJ business-section piece. The press release. Every format whose distribution depended on the institution’s brand carrying the byline.

The real axis is the trust contract.

Shortform works because there is no trust contract. You bail in eight seconds if you don’t like it. The cost of being wrong is zero. The platform delivers you a stranger and you spend half a minute deciding whether they’re worth a follow.

Longform works because the trust contract is already paid. You don’t listen to a three-hour Dwarkesh interview unless you’ve already decided he’s worth three hours. The contract is signed before you press play.

The middle used to be held up by institutional trust as the distribution mechanism. A New York Times feature was an 800-word article you read because the Times selected it for you. The brand was the contract. That contract has frayed for most institutions and broken for many. Without it, mid-length content has no entry mechanism: too long for the algorithmic feed, too short to earn parasocial commitment, anchored to an outlet you no longer have a trusted relationship with in the same way, if at all.

Creators in the middle bring an individual trust contract that travels with them. Institutions in the middle had a brand contract that is collapsing in real time. A third of U.S. consumers now report a stronger personal connection to social media creators than to TV personalities or actors, per Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends. The barbell distribution is what it looks like when the institutional middle disappears and only the creator-shaped survivors remain.

Culture and discourse split

The other thing my tossed-off joke gets right: the two ends play different roles.

Shortform dominates culture. Memes, references, vibes, the shared atmospheric layer of what the people in your life are aware of. If a CEO gets dragged on TikTok this week, your aunt will know about it on Sunday. Shortform shapes the topic.

Longform shapes discourse. The Rogan-Dwarkesh-Lex axis (whatever you think of any of them) is where ideas get tested at length among the people whose opinions move other opinions. A senator listens to All-In on the treadmill. A founder hears a frame on Acquired and repeats it in their board meeting. Three hours of careful conversation moves the frame; thirty seconds of that same conversation move the meme.

The middle used to do both, though. A great Atlantic feature shaped discourse on a topic and generated cocktail-party references for six months. Magazine longreads were the format that bridged the two functions. That function has split. Shortform owns the cocktail party. Longform owns the boardroom. The middle owns neither.

Barbell markets in everything

The content barbell isn’t an outlier. It’s the same pattern playing out in market after American market.

Retail bifurcated into luxury and dollar-store, and the middle — Macy’s, JCPenney, Sears, Bed Bath & Beyond — is a graveyard. Hollywood mostly stopped making the $15-to-$65-million mid-budget film: that range fell from 36% of all theatrical releases in the late 1990s to roughly 5% by the late 2010s. Investment management has consolidated into mega-passive index funds at one end and alternatives at the other; from 2016 through 2025, passive funds pulled in $6.4 trillion of net new money while actively managed funds bled $2.4 trillion. Mid-tier banking had its 2023 — Silicon Valley Bank, Signature, First Republic — while the megabanks and the neobanks grew on either side around it.

MIT economist David Autor has been documenting the same hollowing in the American labor market for two decades: high-skill and low-skill work both expanding while middle-skill routine jobs shrink.

The pattern is recognizable enough now that you should expect it before you observe it: when the mechanics of distribution change in a market, the institutional middle is the first thing to vanish. Content is just the latest entry on a list that’s been getting longer.

How comms must adapt

Walk me into any senior comms team’s quarterly board deck right now and you’ll see placements that look exactly like what we celebrated as wins a decade ago. The placements look the same. The denominator has moved.

The dying asset class in comms is institutional middle-length placement. The trade-pub byline. The press release picked up in three industry outlets, the Forbes contributor post, the 800-word regional op-ed, the mid-tier magazine profile.

These are the formats every comms team is still measuring, optimizing for, and reporting on because the agency tools that exist were built when these placements were the whole game. Cision and Muck Rack still count them. The Earned Media Value calculator still spits out numbers. Your agency’s monthly report still leads with them.

The dashboards are flattering you. The reach in those outlets has already left. The trust has already left. The number in your earned-media-value column is being measured against a denominator nobody is paying attention to anymore.

The barbell strategy for comms is to give up the middle, or only play in it as far as it enhances the other ends of the barbell.

Compete for cultural attention at the short end. Thirty-second clips designed to travel as native content, not as repurposed press footage. Your CEO into the formats and rhythms of TikTok and Reels and Shorts, or creators with their own audiences who can carry your story there. The metric is not impressions; it’s whether your client’s customers’ kids reference it at dinner.

Compete for discourse at the long end. Your principals into the long podcasts and the trusted newsletters where the discourse-shaping cohort actually pays attention. Not the trade-pub roundtable. The Stratechery interview. The Dwarkesh sit-down, if the principal can survive it.

Each of these requires giving up something the comms industry has institutionalized. The short end requires letting go of message control. Clips travel because creators add their own framing, and most companies can’t tolerate that. The long end requires putting an executive in a chair for two hours of unfiltered conversation, which terrifies general counsels and corporate communicators trained on talking points.

The middle was where comms could control the message while maximizing trust. The barbell ends require letting go.

1. I wrote about this last year in the context of the job of comms being to assemble the right audience and how much harder that’s become in a fractured media landscape.