Greetings from Las Vegas. In tonight’s email, some high-level thoughts on the long-awaited strategy innovations at CNN, The Washington Post, et al. Despite the bluster, it’s starting to feel like the grand plan is no plan at all.

But first, a few notes from my colleagues John Ourand and Lauren Sherman…

• 🏀 The NBA’s big meeting: On Wednesday night, NBA general counsel Rick Buchanan convened the league’s media committee in an attempt to put a little structure around the bids they are considering for their new rights packages. Yes, the league has reached handshake agreements with Disney for the “A package” and Amazon for the “C” deal, and NBCU is in the driver’s seat for a “B package” worth at least $2.5 billion a year. But Warner Bros. Discovery has signaled that it will invoke its matching rights to try to keep the NBA on TNT. (C.E.O. David Zaslav has also been showing his support by sitting front row at a couple recent Knicks playoff games.) Anyway, WBD can’t match a handshake deal bid. Buchanan knows that they need something formal to respond to.

  WBD’s matching rights carry a lot of questions. Can Zaz possibly match an NBCU deal that includes two primetime broadcast windows? Can he deploy matching rights on Amazon’s proposed package? If WBD has the opportunity to match NBCU or Amazon, could it also try to match Disney? A lot of commercial lawyers will be paid handsomely to figure out the answers to these questions. And while I don’t expect any deal to be announced within the next week, my sources have consistently signaled that NBC’s bid will be papered, leaving the proverbial ball in Zaz’s court. —John Ourand

• 👠 Vogue’s Met Gala bump: For the past 15 years, the Met Gala has been a reliable source of internet traffic for publishers that still depend on impressions generated by slideshows (remember those?). I heard from some publishers that Met-related website traffic was, if not record-breaking, at least like “the old internet” last week. At Vogue.com, which posted 570 stories globally, there were 64 million livestream views, up 20 percent overall. Total video views across platforms hit more than 1 billion, up 71 percent from last year.

  This Met bump is notable because traffic has been down pretty much across the board for traditional media sites: People don’t want to read about Trump anymore; Facebook News referrals are going away and screwing everyone, etcetera. According to one editor, the peak of Met Gala might have been the 2018 and 2019 seasons, when the themes were Catholicism and Camp, respectively—a “one-two punch,” as this person put it.

  Whatever the case, the Gala remains an easy thing to package and sell to advertisers—something that soon-to-be-departed chief revenue officer Pam Drucker Mann was very good at doing. “Pam is the only reason we have made money on the Met, Vogue World, etcetera,” one person inside posited. Good luck to everyone next year. —Lauren Sherman

On Wednesday, for the first time, Thompson publicly conveyed a plan centered on verticals—an editorial structure dating back at least as far as 1851, when the Times launched its business section. “We don’t believe news is just politics,” Thompson explained to the audience. “Business and tech are news. Climate and weather are news. Health, wellness, and living longer are news. So expect to see us build new branded verticals in all these areas on TV, on our apps, and across our other platforms.”

You could forgive the faithful for being slightly underwhelmed by this grand strategy. Is there any news site or channel that is not organized around a similar principle? A quick visit to CNN.com suggests it’s already hip to the concept as well.

Okay, I’m being a little facetious, and it’s a bit more sophisticated than that: As I reported last week, Thompson wants to create franchises around specific superstar talents—a health vertical centered on Sanjay Gupta, say, or a climate vertical built around Bill Weir—and, most importantly, he wants to introduce a subscription layer for the most dedicated digital consumers. But even that grand plan is a revised copy, albeit a less expensive version, of the plan that former CNN chief Jeff Zucker articulated seven years earlier, in The Wall Street Journal. Back then, Zucker’s plan was replete with “digital verticals,” “distinct web brands,” and “the launch of tiered subscription offerings” to “give subscribers access to special content on topic-specific verticals … built around network personalities,” as he put it at the time.

Sure, all progress is circular and success can come down to execution as much as strategy. But Zucker, of course, was similarly inspired by what the Times had done a decade earlier, when it built DealBook around Andrew Ross Sorkin, or how Politico built its Playbook business around Mike Allen. Bill Simmons had turned Grantland into a revelation for cerebral sports fans at ESPN. Indeed, leveraging star talent to front a content business is, itself, as old as time—harkening back, at least in more recent years, to the Martha Stewart Omnimedia business and Oprah magazine, a joint-venture with Hearst.

Thompson’s plan may work, but the lack of originality is poignant. One quirk of this precarious moment for American media is that so many news organizations seem to be waiting on newly appointed leaders—a number of them British—to swoop in and save them with supposedly revolutionary plans to restore their ratings and revenue and, yes, swagger. And a star-led vertical strategy doesn’t quite seem like a revelatory antidote for the current malaise.

Lewis has also kept his plans for the Post close to the vest, but they’re almost certain to be a variation on the paper’s strategy under Fred Ryan: Go deep on politics, policy, and investigations, and try to do so in a way that distinguishes the Post from the myriad B2B Beltway competitors that have proliferated over the last decade. And they’ll presumably incorporate a dash of Thompson’s strategy, too—utilizing the Post’s most recognizable talent in one way or another. In a recent memo, Lewis previewed the creation of a new team to help produce talent-centric projects from within the newsroom. “We have identified that our journalists and personalities are one of our best assets,” he wrote.

This newfound emphasis on talent may seem pat and obvious, but it dawned sufficiently late on newsrooms, which tend to pay poorly and manage inexpertly and view the world through the lens of an institution. But the notion has been supercharged, of late, as publishers and mediacos come to terms with the reality that generative A.I. will be able to replicate their most mundane content sooner than they realize. (A brief perusal of the internet suggests just how much human-created work is susceptible to software disruption.) Axios C.E.O. Jim VandeHei has been talking up the importance of pivoting to talent-centric verticals built around Allen and Dan Primack and Sara Fischer largely because he anticipates A.I. will destroy commodified journalism. “If you’re a commodity, you’re fucked,” he told me the other week.

But the truth is that VandeHei has been articulating some version of this thesis since 2007, when he co-founded Politico—a company that thrived early in part because of VandeHei and John Harris’s vision for a new kind of political journalism, but also because it had Mike Allen and Maggie Haberman and Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin and… you get the idea.

The Post and CNN and The Daily Beast may be very different businesses with different monetization strategies operating at different scales, but their success is all predicated on the same idea. Any one of them could become a go-to destination for campaign coverage if they lured Maggie and Jonathan Swan away from the Times. The Post can own Capitol Hill tomorrow if it hires Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan via a Punchbowl acquisition—or, more inexpensively, comes up with its own ballast copycat product. And so on and so on. Indeed, one of the central challenges for Ben and Joanna at the Beast will be trying to force their way onto people’s radars through sheer cheek and whimsicality if they aren’t actually able to attract the necessary talent—and attract talent that align with categories of endemic advertising.

Of course, not everyone can be a star, and you can’t build a news organization at CNN or even Times-level scale without a stable of relatively low-cost employees who sustain the product 24/7. But, increasingly, there is no middle class: The major talent are supported by shoulder content, or technology. The Times itself is rightly credited for leveraging games and recipes and product recommendations—occasionally software-generated, often human-lite content offerings, of course—to support its newsroom and build a loyal audience of 10 million-plus paying subscribers for its best-in-class news operation.

The challenge for Thompson, in particular, will be selecting stars that are most valuable in this new era and commercializing them across a number of lines of business. He needs to keep a few Tappers and Andersons at current cost, but then build CNN around other journalists who don’t cost him nearly as much as their predecessors did. And perhaps the truly radical move, but one CNN might be too afraid to contemplate, would be to center the business around digital talent, like Maggie (herself already a contributor), rather than being the place that aggregates their work for other people to read off teleprompters. But the truth is that success may be predicated on these boring tactics rather than anything more sexy or revolutionary.