For my last conference of the year, I’ve made the short trip up to the Sunshine Coast to attend the AANZCA 2025 conference. I’ll present some work later today, but we start with a keynote by the great Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, who begins by introducing the idea of boutique media, as a new form of small-scale news organisations that responds to the decline of mainstream news media.
Boutique media represent a form of post-industrial journalism: as existing news organisations lose revenue and market share, the industry itself is changing substantially; this creative destruction leads to a restructuring of every organisational aspect of news production, while taking advantage of new working methods and processes. New types of actors have emerged in the news ecosystem as a result: these have been described variously as pioneer media, news startups, and news entrepreneurs, highlighting different aspects of their approaches and activities.
Such new news organisations also employ new forms of communication, especially through social media; this involves personal branding, as well as the creation of boutique media organisations: these tend to be smaller, more specialised, driven by the vision, charisma, and persona of individual creators, and premised on an affective bond with their audiences.
This approach has several implications for trust in journalism. Traditionally, trust has depended on epistemic authority: journalists’ professional knowledge and skills, and the prestige of mainstream news organisation. Now, however, boutique media trade on their affective authority: trust is based on the journalists’ personas, audience perceptions of authenticity, and emotional connection with audiences, and performances of ordinariness and authenticity.
Examples of such boutique media include news influencers, podcasts, newsletters, and local news entrepreneurs. News influencers are individuals who have gained substantial followings on social media and produce news-related content; some 40% of US adults under 30 now get news from these individuals, and so these influencers now occupy some of the spaces vacated by journalists working for mainstream news organisations. These people are diverse in their backgrounds: they may be established journalists, celebrities, politicians, and popular culture content creators.
Such news influencers variously engage in commentary (where they are mostly male, partisan, and entertainment-oriented); investigation (using new skills but lacking the large-scale resources of news organisations); explanation (especially for younger audiences); and specialism (e.g. focussing on sports, Internet culture, literature, and other topics). The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism recently published a report on these news influencers.
Some of this overlaps with the category of podcasts, which has become a significant growth area in news and journalism, too: in 2024, there were more than 500 million podcast listeners globally. These are a more intimate form of broadcasting, with human and emotional reporting styles; this also represents a more celebrified form of journalism, focussed on the personal brand of the host. Such podcasts often engage in a very deliberate construction of community, and some of them are connected to more mainstream media outlets.
There has also been a resurgence in newsletters over the past decade or so; these provide an alternative way for established as well as boutique media organisations and content producers to connect with audiences as well as generate revenue. Substack is one vehicle for this; it now has some 5 million paid subscriptions (out of 35 million memberships), across a wide range of genres including news and journalism. This phenomenon remains understudied in scholarship, although it has received considerable attention from the trade press. Substack enables writers to harness their personal brands and build a subscriber community; it enables reciprocal exchanges between writers and readers, and supports both functional models building on epistemic authority and relational models that establish a close relationship with their audiences.
Finally, local news entrepreneurs may also be seen as a new form of boutique media producers. Their rise has been enabled by the crisis in journalism, especially at the local level: the decline of local news organisations opened up a space for local news entrepreneurs. There are now more than 400 such producers in the UK alone, and most were established since 2010; they are local and hyperlocal, but collectively reach a substantial audience (of 14.9 million people in the UK, for instance). Their situation remains financially precarious and often driven by just a single entrepreneur, however.
Karin engaged in a series of in-depth interviews with the editors of such outlets; she found that they relied on the knowledge of the local context (epistemic authority) as well as co-presence and intimacy with local communities (affective authority); they had strong affective attachment to material spaces, and the relationships and networks built within them. This reflects a strong sense of place, and commitment to the local area and community – a kind of sustained reciprocity between the local news entrepreneur and their audience.
Local news entrepreneurs have several strategies for making themselves visible and building authority and accountability in their communities, such as having a presence at local markets. They have shifted away from thinking of media as large news organisations, and instead are more personal, intimate, and audience-centred; they emphasise affective authority and require significant emotional labour on part of their journalists. Their small scale enables greater agility, innovation, and fluidity, but also comes with significant challenges in terms of financial sustainability, precarity, and professionalism.
There is a substantial need to further investigate these developments. This includes greater focus on neglected genres and platforms, including newsletters and news blogs; more work on news micro-influencers; and further research into para-journalistic and journalism-adjacent forms of content. The ways these boutique media craft their emotional appeals, shape their business models, deal with the challenges of precarity, and address ethical issues related to fact-checking, professional standards, the use of AI, and the declaration of sponsored content also require greater attention.
