In mid-July, just days before Fox Sports revealed its new licensing deal with Dave Portnoy and Barstool Sports—a long-overdue response to ESPN’s partnership with Pat McAfee—Fox News announced its own licensing agreement with the podcast Ruthless, a proudly smug, own-the-libs banter show hosted by former G.O.P. operatives and strategists. Financial terms were not disclosed, but it’s all upside for the four co-hosts since, like Portnoy and McAfee, they are really just being asked to keep yapping on camera in exchange for more money and more exposure.

The contours of the deal are simple and mutually beneficial: Fox handles the ad sales, promotes the hosts, and distributes the show on its digital platforms for further commercial exploitation; the Ruthless crew retains control of their business and I.P. while continuing to gab about whatever they want and reaching a new audience. Indeed, in all these deals, the networks’ greatest expectation is that the talent will continue to be themselves, unburdened by the tropes and formats of legacy media. In the great devolution of broadcast television from a primary medium to one downstream of YouTube, everyone gets what they want in this sort of exchange: Fox gets some cheap inventory, and the Ruthless guys have themselves an extra fee.

Obviously, these are the end days of the era when a team of dozens of producers, researchers, and camera operators prepared feverishly all day—writing and rewriting scripts, drafting interview questions, booking guests, working around a talent’s biological inadequacies—for an hour of disposable live television. This sort of network foreplay, which exists only in a few pockets, seems silly in the modern media landscape. “We hit the record switch, and what you see is what you get. … At some level, we all do this show every day for our friends back home,” Ruthless co-host John Ashbrook, a campaign strategist and partner at the public affairs firm Cavalry, told me on a recent episode of The Grill Room. “You’re looking at four dudes who put a USB mic in the side of a computer four years ago, and we’re now in this spot that I don’t think any of us anticipated,” said his partner Josh Holmes, another Cavalry founder, who once served as Mitch McConnell’s chief of staff.

Talent licensing is hardly novel—Howard Stern struck his nine-figure deal with Sirius more than two decades ago—but it has become especially fashionable at this moment in media, as legacy outlets seek to keep pace with the rise of independent creators on YouTube, Spotify, Twitch, TikTok, et al. Weeks after the Fox deals, The New York Times announced two podcast licensing deals that will add former ESPN journalist and commentator Pablo Torre and The Sports Gossip Show’s Madeline Hill and Charlotte Wilder to its Athletic shingle, without actually making them Times properties. The Washington Post this week hired former Axios editor-in-chief Sara Kehaulani Goo to oversee a new “creator network” that hopes to build “personality-driven content and franchises” outside the newsroom. I am told that The Wall Street Journal’s Opinion section is similarly looking at bringing in new contributors who would operate as separate verticals with their own individual subscriptions.

On one level, these deals seem like somewhat panicky, FOMO-inspired, penny antes from old-school professionals who merely want to test the waters of the still lo-fi video and podcast world that, let’s be honest, feels a lot like public access TV. The most pessimistic rendering of this vision is that it’s a supercharged and more desperate execution of the sorts of contributor networks that once thrived at The Huffington Post and Forbes before undercutting their credibility. (The HuffPo is now deep into its descent curve, while Forbes has made a proper business of itself in Asia through clever non-media revenue lines.) Atlantic C.E.O. Nick Thompson tried his own version of a lightly incentivized newsletter network a few years ago, but that faded out too.

The appeal of these models, however, is profoundly simple and yet quite significant. Superficially, these partnerships offer growth without fixed costs—the model innovation that allowed social media, with its user-generated content, to eclipse its legacy forebears with astonishing speed and scale. On a deeper level, however, the adoption of this paradigm also hints at a few other lingering realities: These days, the innovation in media is decidedly occurring outside the halls of some of its biggest institutions. Instead of catching up via debt raises or issuing their own Innovation Report–style manifestos, they’re partnering with the insurgents.

We’re living through an era when homegrown superstars like Andrew Ross Sorkin, Rachel Maddow, and Stephen A. Smith are either anachronistic or on their last contract or both. Maddow makes great money, sure—too much, actually—but she’ll never earn Bill Simmons’s windfall from Spotify or Portnoy’s cashout from Penn or whatever the hell Bari Weiss makes in this potential David Ellison deal. Ben Shapiro will make hundreds of millions, and the Ruthless guys may follow in the footsteps of the Crooked Media founders, who received a landmark investment three years ago from Soros Fund Management.

In this evolving milieu—a true bridge period between industrial ages in the media space—it makes increasing economic sense for media stars to forge their own paths, make it on their own, and then form licensing deals with cost-conscious behemoths that have already built out their sales and marketing infrastructure. Yes, we’re talking about only a handful of recent deals, but they’re unquestionably leading indicators of an accelerating pipeline. If Fox News has Ruthless, why wouldn’t MSNBC pursue a deal with the likes of Pod Save America or The Bulwark? Punchbowl, the congressional news startup, is launching a weekly podcast show that would conceivably fit nicely with almost any politically focused linear or digital news network. And, as with McAfee on ESPN, it’s not hard to imagine these made-for-YouTube broadcasts one day being simulcast on legacy linear and streaming networks, as well. And why the hell shouldn’t WaPo essentially curate Substack and Medium for its audience? Kehaulani Goo’s third newsroom is simply following the same arc as television—from a primary platform to being downstream from the creator economy.

The Times deals and Post project, while small in size, seem to reflect the evolution of traditional media companies toward a more flexible future where they no longer demand control of the talent and the I.P. Instead, they find constructive ways to work with outside partners—who, in many cases, have built their own profitable and self-sustaining businesses, and no longer need the legacy outlets to survive, nor do they view a Times byline or a traditional anchor assignment as life’s highest calling.

Like most evolutions in the media business, of course, this one is obvious and much delayed—likely the result of risk-averse executives, incessant tut-tutting, and intellectual sophistry. It’s notable that Fox News is alone among the cable news networks in pushing into this space, as its erstwhile rivals at MSNBC and CNN seem to be dragging their feet while being spun out into the Versant-Discovery cable wilderness. Maybe that’s the point.

See you Friday,

Dylan