The coming year will reveal the final phase in the long unbundling of the news industry.

The industry will have to confront the growing class of podcasters, influencers, and Substackers, combined with the waning reach on social media, that has separated those that build knowledge through reporting from the voices that help make sense of the news and the spaces where people discuss the news.

The coming stage of news’ unbundling will require navigating new types of relationships if an investigation or accountability story is to make it into the public dialogue. It’s a new era and one primed for nonprofit news, with its longstanding values of collaboration and free distribution of content.

News was once a great behemoth of a physical thing, in some places containing minimal reporting but with lots of advertising, stock quotes, coupons, weather reports, classified listings, and recipes as well analysis of and opinions about the stories covered by the newsroom.

Over time, every item that could be stripped out because it contained enough value to stand on its own was, sometimes by the very news organizations themselves. Cars.com, Careerbuilder, and other real estate and classified sites were all originally created by news organizations before being sold off.

Then pieces of the profession itself got unbundled. The INN Network was formed originally as the Investigative News Network from the many nonprofit startups that were founded when investigative news teams were eliminated by legacy newspaper chains.

A new phase of this unbundling is happening now, perhaps best signaled by the access provided to non-journalists by the presidential campaigns.

A new class of influencers, podcasters, and YouTubers have risen in power in shaping the public’s understanding of the news despite doing very little direct reporting. Research by Pew now suggests they are the dominant force in how news is consumed on social media, to the near-complete exclusion of institutional voices on some platforms like TikTok.

This is an unbundling the news industry failed to fully prepare for. The institutions creating knowledge through reporting are now increasingly separate from the voices helping people understand what that knowledge explains about their lives and communities.

This unbundling may be the most serious threat yet to news institutions vying for public support to survive. Research from the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, and others has repeatedly indicated that the value of news to an individual comes primarily from its ability to cultivate understanding and connection with others more than solitary contemplation on a new bit of knowledge.

The social platforms, which have increasingly locked out publishers, have created ideal conditions to strip away the understanding and connection people can find through the news. On social media, people can see which accounts their friends follow, which posts their friends liked. In a world that provides access to endless information, it feels more important than ever to know what other people are actually reading and talking about.

The front page of the newspaper once helped news meet these needs, but the news has struggled in the digital era to not only define what’s most important to understand but also convey what information is common knowledge. All while social media makes it public knowledge that an event like Donald Trump’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast was viewed 53 million times on YouTube.

Podcasters aren’t tied to the norms of a journalistic institution and are able to fully lean into the parasocial relationships audio is able to cultivate, too. They can speak about the news in relatable ways that make people feel like they’re talking about the news as they might with friends.

The current economics of Substack, YouTube, and other platforms have created financial incentives for journalists that are good at that sense-making work to leave institutions for greener fields, such as Oliver Darcy and Chris Cillizza’s departures from CNN or Taylor Lorenz’s from The Washington Post. News institutions are increasingly stripped of the talent needed to combat this trend.

This new unbundling of news cuts to something foundational about what journalism can do in society. Over the next year, news organizations will have to think much more creatively about collaboration and how to distribute and start conversations about their stories, areas where nonprofit news organizations are leading. They will also need to think much more deeply about not just the value they provide to society, but what value they provide to individuals beyond knowledge and how they can maintain a meaningful role in building understanding and connection.