On Tuesday, Bari Weiss, the embattled and overexposed CBS News chief, made a formal plea to her staff to ignore the mishegas surrounding her early missteps, embrace change, and get on board with making the network “fit for purpose in the twenty-first century.” Pursuing that mission would first require admitting that CBS News had failed to adapt to consumer demand. “We have to start by looking honestly at ourselves,” she said in a network-wide town hall. “We are not producing a product that enough people want.”

Bari’s cold but clear-eyed assessment echoed a diagnosis that Will Lewis had memorably conveyed to Washington Post staff in 2024 upon becoming the paper’s publisher and chief executive. “People are not reading your stuff,” he told them, citing audience churn and severe financial losses. “I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.” Months before that, CNN C.E.O. Mark Thompson had sought to impart a similar, if more delicately put, message to his staff when he said that “CNN’s linear services and even its website can sometimes have an old-fashioned and unadventurous feel, as if the world has changed and they haven’t.”

These diagnoses may have stung, but they were also unassailable, long overdue, and delivered a necessary shock to legacy media’s calcified neural wiring. The existential rub was what came next: determining the right course of intervention and executing a successful rehabilitation—which, as Hippocrates warned, is where the shit often hits the wood chipper.

In the years since Will implored his charges to come to terms with economic reality, he has compounded the Post’s problems through strategic incoherence and managerial incompetence: a “third newsroom” that never materialized, a misguided A.I. initiative, an editorial pivot that inspired hundreds of journalists and hundreds of thousands of subscribers to auto-defenestrate. Now, as I’ve reported, the Post is preparing a deep round of layoffs—as many as 300, I’m told—and could shutter entire sections of the paper.

Will intends to frame these cuts as part of an effort to reorient the Post around core coverage areas like politics and national security, which would seemingly make it less differentiated from Politico, Axios, and its myriad other competitors. But, in the spirit of not sugarcoating it, what the layoffs really signal is that, after 800 days on the job, Will almost certainly isn’t hitting his numbers, and he wants to save his own hide.

At CNN, Mark has presided over a quieter deterioration of the business. His prescription for the network’s “old-fashioned and unadventurous” linear and digital product has been therapeutic nonintervention. Today’s CNN broadcast division is an anemic derivative of the network that Jeff Zucker revived more than a decade ago, populated by soporific incarnations of all the usual suspects who now command an even smaller audience. The digital product is a sprawl of poorly curated headlines and banner ads that evokes the Netscape era. A subscription product has launched, but without a coherent value proposition or any evidence of significant adoption (in his own town hall this week, Mark said CNN had exceeded its subscription goals for 2025, but gave no numbers). Meanwhile, the network’s annual profits have shrunk by hundreds of millions. The problem, as is now clear, is that Thompson couldn’t replicate the Times plan without the Times itself.

Will Bari’s journey be different? Her stated strategy for CBS News included much of the familiar pablum about meeting audiences where they are, the need to be multifaceted and multiplatform—a plea to stop treating shows as fiefdoms and instead focus on the story and its distribution across multiple channels. “Our strategy has been to cling to broadcast,” she said. “If we stick to that strategy, we’re toast.”

This is all directionally right, of course. But it does make you wonder why she spent her first 100 days meddling with 60 Minutes—a product millions of people actually do want—and quixotically trying to turn Tony Dokoupil into a sexier second coming of Cronkite.

None of this is easy—and in a decade, we may even conclude that it was completely impossible. The challenge before Bari and everyone else in this unenviable position is to manage a steadily declining core asset while simultaneously incubating new, supposedly lucrative ones faster or at least as fast as they are populating on other platforms. But for all the emphasis on that brave new world—“the vast universe of podcasts and YouTube and Twitch and newsletters,” as Bari put it—the economic models are not even remotely the same. YouTube advertising is not a panacea, podcast brand deals are episodic and fickle, and Instagram and TikTok pay squat. One reason for the atrophy across the industry is that even a shitty TV news business is still much better than most digital ones.

In her remarks, Bari called CBS News “the best-capitalized media startup in the world,” but of course that is facile, misleading, and unhelpful. Psychologically, it remains a century-old, TV-first institution staffed by people with acute nostalgia and entrenched muscle memory—millionaires with agents and town cars and second homes and Oliver Darcy’s cellphone number. Furthermore, startups often trade on future revenue and expectations while public companies are tied to EBITDA and fixed cost structures. And that’s before even contemplating the byzantine bureaucracy. The admonitions from Bari and Will and Mark barely veil an impatience with employees who don’t seem to understand that media is a business, economic models change, stasis equals death—and, frankly, that they need to work a little harder. But most staffers would argue that they’re not nearly so intractable, and they just reject mediocre leaders. Many don’t have much incentive to change, and the contempt doesn’t persuade them any further.

In any event, the leaders who try to embark on this journey amid internal strife almost always run aground, overwhelmed by insubordination that manifests in leaks. Some leaders bitch about it, which tends to compound the problem. Others ignore it. A few choose to recognize that being a leader requires leadership—which, in part, means finessing the organization into alignment. This entails cultivating the loyalty of additive personnel, consciously uncoupling people who aren’t on board, and then incentivizing everyone to trust and respect your authority—a blend of art (pumping egos) and science (exiting underperformers while tucking in culture carriers) that can only be achieved over time, in one-on-one relationships, and almost never in memos and town halls. Bari seems to have at least achieved this with Gayle King, who, amid contract negotiations, has suddenly become a passionate Bari advocate. Another lesson of the business: Everyone has a price.

More than anything, however, success in this business requires, well, success. Around the time Will and Mark were taking the helm of their respective organizations, newly installed Wall Street Journal editor Emma Tucker was watching restive staffers protest her restructuring efforts by enumerating their discontent via Post-It notes on her office window. The revolt, which had been inspired by strategic and targeted layoffs, was quickly subsumed by a broader appreciation for the fact that Emma was making the paper better and more relevant—especially in the sections where the layoffs had taken place.

In his early years, Zucker also had detractors, who pushed the narrative that he was an ill-suited savior for the network. The narrative soon ran into the reality of record-high ratings and revenues and the celebrification of network talent. When Zucker was abruptly ousted, in 2022, the stars he’d made publicly protested that decision, and grieved for weeks. The lesson is clear: It’s easier to change the culture after you’ve started to do the job.

Mark and Will have probably already written their legacies at their respective organizations, and it’s fair to assume neither man’s departure will inspire Zucker levels of grieving. Indeed, in light of the impending layoffs, one imagines Will’s departure would elicit Licht- or Godwin-level Liberation Day energy, while Mark’s might inspire the same collective shrug that CNNers feel about his leadership today. Bari is just getting started, albeit from a deficit brought on by her 60 Minutes CECOT tampering, a misguided Erika Kirk townhall, and the rushed Dokoupil rollout. She has put a big premium on winning: not just by growing ratings, but by “making things that people can’t live without.” Obviously, it’ll be hard to get there from a product that not enough people want, with employees who still aren’t sure they want her. Good luck to all.