The internet broke the chronology model for media publishing.

For decades, publishing was organized by time. We had the daily paper, the evening broadcast, the weekly issue. We had the option to binge, but on a set schedule. And discourse consisted of coffee shop talk, meeting in real life. Had to give real effort. That effort structured how we related to media, until distribution moved online, when that logic collapsed.

When distribution moved online, that logic collapsed. Publishers tried to recreate it literally, through mechanical loops like navigation bars, homepages, and right rails, assuming readers still wanted to move through content linearly. But we realized pretty early on that web users don’t consume that way.

Once content became infinite, time stopped being the organizing layer for distribution. It still matters for discourse, being able to have collective conversations that form around an event, a release, a breaking story. But that’s way different from using time as a tool to capture and retain audience attention. Conversations can happen in pockets, through various means like text, email, twitter, whatever. The internet world is huge. What matters now isn’t when something was published, but whether it’s relevant at the moment of discovery.

My buddy Garrett made the point that we haven’t nailed the time and place within this new world. We went from rigid schedules to total on demand freedom, and obvious changes happened in between. Appointment television and print deadlines created moments of shared anticipation where people showed up together. Infinite availability, meanwhile, removed friction but also dissolved the rhythm that gave media its social gravity. There’s likely a middle ground in a system that preserves accessibility yet reintroduces shared time, context, or ritual. We sort of live in that in our own pockets of interest today through platforms and group chats. 

This shift from chronological to conversational also redefined recurrence. People don’t return to articles but rather return to systems that help them orient around someone they’re comfortable with. Knowing that, a modern day publication’s value isn’t in its archive, but in its ability to maintain context with the readers over time. That’s why modern subscriptions behave like feeds, not libraries. You subscribe to a worldview or a tone, something that updates as fast as your attention does alongside people like you.

So what’s the business opportunity for media brands to maintain its edge? Understanding why people return is key. And weirdly it’s been ignored and paved over by emerging media companies, platforms and individuals. To oversimplify, we can say audiences subscribe to media for three reasons: to inform, to identify, and to invest. People pay for information that gives them clarity, edge, or confidence like professional utility, intellectual curiosity, or FOMO avoidance. Examples include The Information for industry insight, Punchbowl for The Hill, Axios Pro for deal flow, etc. Others return to media to identify, to belong, signal cultural taste, or align with a community. Barstool Sports and niche Substacks show how publications build tribal affiliation through humor, values, and language. Finally, readers invest in media that represents a mission or worldview they want to support, from The Free Press independent journalism to Puck’s reclamation of media power, or creators on Patreon. Understanding these drivers is the foundation for building interfaces, and businesses, that matter.

The problem is that the feed itself has already been captured. Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok became the default interfaces for news, commentary, and culture. Spotify did the same for audio and YouTube for video and Reddit for discourse. Each built environments that organize content by behavior and state, not by chronology. They allow you to seek and then leverage that to recommend more. They turned consumption into a continuous loop which has now become extremely personalized, real time, and self reinforcing.

Media, meanwhile, remains stuck in capture mode. It creates content, pushes it into someone else’s system, and monetizes the residual attention through ads, subscriptions, or sponsorships. The architecture is super static as well, picking scraps on a CMS or newsletter tool. There’s no differentiated interface layer and  no native environment that builds participation or identity. As long as that remains true, publishers will continue to react, producing for platforms they don’t own and audiences they can’t retain.

The next step isn’t more content or smarter targeting, it’s integration of the value hooks mentioned above within its interface – the means by which they communicate with their people. Media must build around conversation, not chronology, where users can engage, annotate, and reframe information together. This means creating threaded discussions, personalized orientation feeds, live datasets, and community aligned pathways that entertain, spark conversation, and reinforce identity. The opportunity is to design systems that function less like distribution channels and more like operating systems for discourse. Like Google did to advertising, the iPhone did to mobile and apps, and OpenAI is to conversational UI, traditional media is in response mode. Deciding whether you will be wholesale or retail will depend on the ability to shift the interface by which you engage readers, and the experiences you offer to them.