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The Wellness Wars

CNN is chasing The New York Times to tap into the wellness-obsessed world of peptides and GLP-1s as its next great subscription engine. Can legacy media compete with an army of TikTok doctors? And, perhaps more to the point, should they?

Mark Thompson
Mark Thompson in Washington D.C., February 2025. Photo: Shannon Finney/Getty Images for Semafor
Julia Alexander
June 12, 2026

Last summer, during a long conversation about her business, New York Times Co. C.E.O. Meredith Kopit Levien told Dylan and me that the paper was more than happy to keep investing in the sort of soft wellness coverage their readers were devouring alongside more serious health news: sleep hacks, personal essays about GLP-1s, investigations into various Chinese peptides. “Being strong in those lifestyle spaces helps us bring more people into the mix, helps us attract people we might not otherwise have a way to get to,” she said candidly.