Of course, every news company is exposed to traffic sensitivity and feeling some degree of pressure from the tech platforms’ changes. But B.I.’s exposure on his front was also the result of a meandering strategy and brand creep. The B.I. that Axel acquired from Henry Blodget, in 2015, was a scrappy, irreverent, and occasionally provocative site that, in the Gawker era of the internet, managed to capture audience by joyously rebelling against the stuffy sophistication of its legacy forebearers. After Blodget passed oversight of the newsroom to his protégé Nich Carlson two years later (while staying on as C.E.O.), the lack of sophistication became a glaring vulnerability—less impressive writers; less intriguing copy; and a grating, chip-on-the-shoulder posture, often manifested in cancel-culture hit pieces blatantly seeking scalps. Meanwhile, the rest of the industry caught up with its tactics. Most disastrously, in 2021, B.I. made the decision to rebrand as “Insider” and broaden its focus to general-interest news and lifestyle content. In the process, it became a bloated clickbait factory overdependent on third-party distribution and revenue—a fact that the Trump 1.0 traffic surge and Covid’s disruption only temporarily concealed. By the time Google started tweaking its algorithms and the industry began reckoning with the real implications of A.I., it was clear to everyone in Berlin and New York that B.I. needed a full-scale rehabilitation—and maturation—stat. And yet, in so many ways, these issues were present from birth. Unlike Politico, which was founded on a cornerstone of journalistic credibility, Business Insider’s editorial conceit always seemed like a ruse—it was founded, after all, by definitional outsiders. And while Web 2.0 investors like Kenny Lerer used to tour the circuit discussing how Millennial consumers were going to trade in the likes of the Times for BuzzFeed, the precise opposite happened. Over the years, B.I.’s top talent would depart, often for more august sinecures—Joe Weisenthal to Bloomberg; Peter Kafka to Kara Swisher’s Recode (though he eventually returned); Natasha Bertrand to Politico and then CNN, etcetera.

In 2023, Axel re-rebranded the site as Business Insider, restored its focus on business and tech news, and promoted the well-liked and acerbic Peng to C.E.O. Blodget was kicked upstairs and would eventually exit for the pastures of Substack. In the process, Axel articulated a new vision for the site as a sophisticated business publication for high-value audiences—in essence, a lower-tier version of the Journal or FT, the latter of which Mathias had long wanted to acquire. The next year, they hired Jamie Heller, the Journal’s business editor, and appointed her editor-in-chief. All smart moves, at least on paper. In an ideal world, Mathias would like B.I. to be as formidable in the business community as Politico has long been in politics—which would fuel his larger ambition of establishing Axel Springer as the leading news organization for the transatlantic democratic world. The reality, however, is that not only may it be too late, but few newsroom leaders are up to that challenge in an age defined by insurgents, attacker brands, individualism, and authenticity. Blodget and Carlson may have been flawed journalists and limited visionaries, but they at least loved and forged the joint. Heller’s imprint is undetectable, sans the shrinking of the organization. Her tenure seems likely to mirror Matt Murray’s at The Washington Post—a probably-not-first-choice yet undeniably able custodian of someone else’s problems. I’m sure she’ll give it her best college try, but the solution for both businesses is almost certainly continued cost-cutting followed by complementary acquisitions. Whatever the case, the economic pressures and the renewed focus suddenly rendered a lot of B.I. staff inessential—reporters on non-core beats, an entire e-commerce team that no longer drew traffic, etcetera. In recent years, B.I. has laid off 8 to 10 percent of staff annually. This time around, it decided to get aggressive and rip off the Band-Aid. And despite all the pain, there is a logic to it—necessary savings, volatility tolerance, more money to invest in new business initiatives and more essential reporting, etcetera. But the real anxiety here isn’t just the layoffs. It’s the fact that the success of B.I.’s new strategy is by no means guaranteed. And, in that regard, it finds itself in ample and august company. Without sounding hysterical, this industry is obviously passing through a stage in which most brands are shrinking or right-sizing not only to become more efficient, but also to become better—to excise the garbage content, clickbait, and fatuous schlock they were hooked on. The parallel calamity of Vanity Fair is a useful juxtaposition. A half-generation ago, the brand made hundreds of millions of dollars by publishing a couple dozen largely beloved pieces per month. And then the compounding anxieties of scale and mobile forced it to loosen its identity and go whole hog on TMZ fare, like the poop cruise and the missing Malaysian airliner. Can its brand power be revived in the post-post-Graydon era? You know that answer as well as I do. At the heart of this transformation, perhaps, is the reality that news media at scale may have been a collective fiction. In the platform age, consumers create their own content mixes, usually based on trusted or affinity-aligned sources. The very notion of a newsroom—a one-stop, always-on bodega of information spanning politics to sports, manned by hundreds of people throwing pencils in the ceiling—now seems as anachronistic as a landline. The Times has wended its way through this jittery reality by trying to hire trusted opinion voices and highlighting its top reporting stars with vertical video montages. CNN has professed a similar-ish plan, albeit with stagnated execution. Once upon a time, The Washington Post did the same—before it collapsed under the weight of its own cannibalizing self-hatred. And so the task for Business Insider seems all the more daunting. Years of fire-hose content production has left it devoid of stars and an identity worth reviving. Its brand credibility isn’t on par with the Journal or Bloomberg or CNBC—or even Axel’s own Morning Brew. And yet because of the knock, not in spite of them, Peng has a chance to create the most inspiring turnaround playbook of her generation.