2 - The Evolution of Legacy Media

How Institutions Built For Scarcity Could Survive An Age Of Abundance...

To Matter in the Future…

The older media institutions - broadcast giants, national newspapers, and heritage newswires - have always aspired to be central, trusted, and formative in the public imagination. Their desire remains: to define the narrative, to shape public discourse, and to serve as cultural infrastructure.

But this ambition is dismantled by a new reality. Today, audiences expect access, participation, and immediacy. The barrier to creation has dissolved. Legacy media no longer monopolise the means of production or distribution. They now confront a harder question: how can we still matter when we no longer control the pipeline?

To ground this enquiry, I’ll use a recurring illustration throughout this series: A Tale of Two Documentaries. One is made by a traditional broadcaster - complete with crew, compliance, and conventional production schedules. The other is made by a tiny team working from a bedroom/boat/van, aided by AI, mobile rigs, and direct-to-platform publishing. The stories from both teams make the same argument - but their processes, pace, and values differ profoundly. The contrast will help us track the transformation across each article in the series.

The Industrial Model Meets a Networked World

Legacy media were built for scarcity. The workflows, teams, and editorial structures assumed that cameras, bandwidth, and distribution were expensive and exclusive. Today, the inverse is true: abundance is the problem - not scarcity.

In our Tale of Two Documentaries, the legacy team fields a crew of fifteen, a post-production schedule lasting months, and a distribution deal that assumes fixed attention spans and appointment viewing. Meanwhile, a tiny team - even a single creator - operates from a van/boat/bedroom with cheaper cameras, AI-assisted storyfinding, creative development, editing, and direct audience dialogue via Substack and YouTube.

The legacy doc is polished, institutionally validated - but bureaucratic to make. The creator-led version is intimate, iterative, and evolving in plain sight - guided not just by intuition, but real-time feedback and narrative responsiveness. One structure is struggling to adapt; the other was born into the new conditions.

The Industry Reacts from Within

The 2024 Devoncroft report confirms this tension. The most invested-in trends are not about making better content - but about making content differently:

• AI/GenAI ranks #2 in both strategic importance and budget allocation.

• IP-based workflows dominate production priorities.

• Automation and decentralised collaboration are on the rise.

These aren’t superficial tweaks - they’re structural adaptations. The industry is quietly shifting from industrial production to modular, platform-ready ecosystems. Yet many of these shifts remain skin-deep - pilot projects rather than emergent cultures.

From Broadcaster to Platform

The organisations that are engaging intelligently with the conflict are doing something bold: ceding control in favour of coherence. They are starting to act less like pipelines, more like platforms:

• The BBC experiments with third-party content integration.

• The New York Times expands into multiple verticals - news, games, cooking, sport - offering an editorially coherent ecosystem.

• CNN, under new leadership, is restructuring to function across formats, with modular content designed for web, stream, and feed.

These institutions aren’t abandoning content - they are reframing their role in its creation and circulation.

A New Role…

Legacy media are not vanishing. But they are becoming something else:

• A place where creators can be amplified and verified.

• A structure that curates coherence from the chaos.

• A scaffolding for trust in a distributed narrative landscape.

Those that don’t evolve risk becoming monuments to a broadcast past - admired but irrelevant.

In the Tale of Two Documentaries, the legacy crew may find its future not in making all the content - but in recognising, platforming, and contextualising the best of what’s being made.

Takeaways

• The legacy model’s power was built on scarcity. Its relevance now depends on curation, collaboration, and credibility.

• Trust isn’t inherited - it’s earned through adaptability and openness.

• Institutions that transition from control to coherence will remain essential - not as broadcasters, but as storytellers with infrastructure.

• Audiences are no longer waiting to be told - they are choosing whom to trust. Institutions that treat them as participants, not recipients, will matter most.

This is the first step in a larger journey. What follows is not just a shift in media economics, but in media identity. And the sooner institutions grasp this, the more useful - and powerful - they can become in the age of the creator.

Coming Next: 3 - The Emancipation of Creators

Read the previous parts:

1 - Broadcast Media, Wither or Whither?

This is part of Media Unmade - a series about how media breaks, reforms, and adapts in the age of AI and creator autonomy.

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