For newsroom executives, wellness is an obvious path to engagement, but do readers actually want wellness content from legacy players? More than half of Gen Z consume wellness and health content from influencers, largely via shortform video apps like Instagram and TikTok, per a recent Pew Research report. And while most news consumers get their information from platforms like X and YouTube, more than 80 percent of Gen Z wellness consumers primarily rely on Instagram. This creates an opportunity—and additional hurdles—for media companies trying to reach these audiences and capture their dollars.

In a field dominated by homegrown stars, from neuroscientist Andrew Huberman to the Glucose Goddess, the most obvious wellness strategy for legacy media is also the most difficult to pull off: creator partnerships. But as it turns out, it’s not so easy to just hire the talent, either. Bari Weiss tried to bring on Peter Attia, a doctor and well-known longevity expert with more than 10 million followers across YouTube and Instagram, at CBS News, but they parted ways following a controversy over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. (In retrospect, this was a modest crisis in Weiss’s growing oeuvre.) Weiss stuck with the instinct, however. She is still working with Huberman and physician/author Mark Hyman to “widen the aperture of stories we tell,” she said in a press release.

Misinformation is rampant in the social media health space, putting a greater premium on authority and creating an opportunity for established and trusted news brands. Outlets like the Times can counter that misinformation. As Levien told us last summer, the Times views wellness and health as “important coverage,” adding that the publication can approach the subject in a “rigorous” way.

But none of that rigorous reporting matters if people aren’t reading it. This is less of a problem if you’re Levien—New York Times subscriptions are up about 25 percent over the past two years—but it constitutes a headache for everyone else. CNN, on the other hand, has struggled to launch its premium app and turn its new journalistic hires into video personalities. CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, who is working on more-exclusive content for its streaming app, is a huge talent, and he narrated much of the early Covid crisis for wealthy educated coastal elites who were marooned in their homes, consumed by anxiety. But he isn’t the type of personality that younger audiences are chasing—especially when most of the wellness content they’re consuming is free.

Clearly, the company is thinking about how to integrate more digitally native creators into their entire product. Last October, CNN International launched its CNN Creators desk, helmed by Vice’s former senior editorial producer Andrew Potter. The operation focuses on creating content for shortform platforms and brings those journalists back into the main CNN International feed with a dedicated show.

Indeed, practically every major news organization is trying to find its footing here. The Washington Post launched its Well+Being vertical in 2022 following the pandemic and increased interest in health coverage. They even brought over the founding editor of the Times’s Well blog, Tara Parker-Pope, to lead the section. She’s now gone, and Well+Being has been folded under WaPo’s WP Ventures division—otherwise known as the “third newsroom,” a killing field that was originally designed with creator partnerships in mind.

For many of these health-focused ventures, creators may be the only path to meaningful growth. This is because readers and audiences want hyper-personalized content. It’s no longer good enough to have widely appealing articles because the algorithms that serve up videos are now hyper-personalized, too. No newsroom can hope to achieve that with reporters alone.

This dynamic again highlights the importance of influencers, who bring their audiences with them. The quickest solution for newsrooms in need of health and wellness creators may turn out to be the Substack acqui-hire… even if they start as simple, low-stakes licensing deals. Authors like Katelyn Jetelina, who writes the popular, pandemic-boosted Your Local Epidemiologist, lead the science rankings with more than 400,000 subscribers. Her focus, primarily on public health and disproving misinformation, could line up very well with, say, CNN.

Legacy media isn’t going to compete with the top voices on social and shortform video platforms, but they can integrate into those channels and validate the most authoritative voices to create a health and wellness destination that audiences can trust. In an era of A.I. slop and social media misinfo, that may be the last defining difference. Unfortunately, given all the competitors in the space, there aren’t enough to go around.