Hearst may be relatively late to this party. In recent months, Bari Weiss’s Free Press has launched a new events series for subscribers that includes regional supper clubs, multiday retreats, and an excursions program that will take subscribers “from the battlefields of Gettysburg and Normandy to the Vatican in Rome.” Nick Thompson’s Atlantic has partnered with Seabourn to bring editorial programming onto the luxury cruise line, culminating in a full, 12-day Atlantic cruise from Montreal to Boston—a fortnight-long torture chamber for some, but intellectual maritime erogeny for others. And I’m reliably told that James Murdoch, who recently acquired New York and the Vox Media Podcast Network, is intent on leveraging those brands across his events portfolio, which includes Art Basel and the Tribeca Film Festival.

Yes, everyone is engaged in this business, including Puck, which puts on scores of upscale events per year—from my partner Leigh Ann Caldwell’s Power Breakfast series in D.C., where she interviewed Sen. Dave McCormick yesterday, to John Ourand’s and Marion Maneker’s ticketed tentpoles in the sports business and art market alike. (Lauren Sherman, Matt Belloni, and Bill Cohan also have their own popular convening products; Air Mail has an annual literary awards event; etcetera.) Punchbowl is deeply enmeshed in this game. Ditto Axios, whose founders created the Washington convening playbook at Politico. The Journal, Bloomberg, CNBC, and MS NOW dot the landscape. Oliver Darcy is throwing a Status Summit at the Times Center. Justin Smith, who today announced the board for his forthcoming Silicon Valley live event, has built Semafor almost entirely around live convening.

But these new initiatives from The Atlantic, The Free Press, et al. aspire to something beyond the tired and ubiquitous conference model that was popularized by Time Inc. back in the day via its Fortune tentpoles and Time 100 gala. Rather than leaving audiences yawning into their lanyards while “thought leaders” drone on from the front of a stuffy auditorium, the new models strive to redefine the very product and service that media companies are selling. For nearly a century, publishers sold information. Today, they’re selling access to a community—of executives, investors, policymakers, celebrities, or merely to other like-minded subscribers with shared interests.

The pivot to experiences is, of course, a response to the aforementioned broader transformations taking place across the industry. Search traffic is declining and may dissipate entirely in the Google Zero era, and social media is evolving from a distribution engine into a closed ecosystem. Meanwhile, even the most robust subscription-based companies eventually arrive at a point where growth slows and they’re forced to squeeze more juice out of existing subscribers. And A.I.’s power to generate answers instantly will continue to eat away at companies that simply publish information.

Access, on the other hand, remains scarce and coveted, and journalism businesses, with their own access to newsmakers and thought leaders, are the obvious conduit. Ostensibly, great journalism remains essential to this effort because it creates the trust, authority, and brand equity that make these experiences desirable in the first place. But the actual editorial product—the article, the package, the show—is increasingly becoming the beginning of the customer relationship rather than the end of it. Truthfully, many of these companies should have been developing these products for decades, even when they seemed ancillary to the bottom line.

As brands continue to compete for monetizable relationships, the winners may not actually be the companies that publish the best journalism, but the ones that build the strongest ecosystems and best services around it. Along the way, they’ll understand the real truism within the creator economy: In this new era of media, the fundamental unit has evolved from the article or episode to the talent themselves. And elite talent can transcend formats and monetizable platforms, of which live convening is merely one.

In any event, it will be interesting to see what Chris does with the Hearst portfolio. MotorTrend already runs a successful events series around Hot Rod road shows, drag races, and other “car culture” events. Lifestyle brands like Runner’s World, Bicycling, Good Housekeeping, and Food Network Magazine seem to offer similarly low-hanging fruit. Somewhat counterintuitively, the most iconic titles—Cosmo, Esquire, etcetera—may be the hardest to reimagine as events businesses, simply because their broad audiences deprive them of unique fandoms. For Hearst, as for any publisher, success in this space is likely to require some serious outside-the-box thinking. Good luck to them.