This week, The New York Times announced that it would be shuttering its standalone audio app—a not-at-all-surprising, if a tree falls in a forest development since, I’d hazard to guess, you probably get your Barbaro or Ezra fix on Apple or Spotify. Also, media companies have been tidying up their SKU count since the days of HBO Go and HBO Now. Disney, many predict, will eventually be incentivized to do the same with its bewildering collection of D+, Hulu, ESPN, and eventually Fubo. Yes, the Times has a standalone cooking app, but it long ago shuttered NYT Opinion, which proved to be the final blow in the dusty Andy Rosenthal era. These decisions happen, they’re data-driven, and they’re obvious.

On closer inspection, however, the move signaled something important about the changing nature of the Times, and the news media industry writ large. For about, say, 175 years, the Times experience—on the app, the website, or, of course, the paper—has been built around text. Today, as you’ll notice from a cursory glance at the homepage, it is increasingly incorporating audio, video, and moving images into that experience. For a few years, the company has been platforming its biggest stars—Ezra, Jonathan Swan, Maggie, etcetera—as straight-to-camera talking heads, leveraging their stardom and years of green room experience to excite the erogenous zones of the paper’s liberal audience.

Yes, this also seems like a bit of a facile observation, but it’s the sign of a long-overdue format innovation that represents another minor sea change in the institution’s philosophy. As any lug who has ever wielded a pencil knows, talking is easier than writing, and it’s often more engaging—it’s certainly more compelling than the traditional inverted-pyramid news story or thumbwritten-on-the-toilet, research-free column. Reporters like to show their work and demonstrate the assiduousness of their reporting, but the end user prefers casual and authentic. I’m just sharing the insights that Evan Spiegel et al. unearthed more than a decade ago.

Anyway, the point is that it’s working for the Times—a journalism institution that has spent the last few years morphing into a modern media company more excited about winning the future than defending the past. In the Meredith Kopit Levien era, the joint really has built a cordon sanitaire of lifestyle products around the newsroom, where consumers come to its hard journalism expecting an audio or video experience. So, long story short, the decision to shutter NYT Audio wasn’t a sign of audio’s failure, but rather a recognition of its integral role in the core product. “I see this as audio graduating from Off-Broadway to Broadway,” Sam Dolnick, the paper’s deputy managing editor and Sulzberger clansman, told Adweek. “But now audio journalism has become so central to what the Times does that it belongs on the main stage.”

This gradual transition has been facilitated by a number of factors—the success of The Daily, of course, but also the widespread disrobement of the cable news infrastructure. A generation ago, the Times’s experiments with video failed partly because they seemed like cheap imitations of cable news. Now, cable seems like an unimaginably cheap version of cable, with anchors zooming in from their beach houses or Palm Beach residences, and guests appearing via Blair Witch–quality Webex. “In two years, The New York Times will be CNN,” one media executive texted me in response to the news. “They want audio—and more importantly, video—across the entire app. It’s safe to assume their future is ‘streaming news’ via video and audio. Cable over.”

Indeed, Dolnick and his colleagues on the Times masthead seem to see it the same way. “Audio used to be seen as a way to bring in new people, and kind of adjacent to our core platforms, not fully part of them. And video used to be pretty ancillary, too,” Sam told me today. “Now audio and video are both front and center. Some days, some of our biggest stories are audio or video. We couldn’t have imagined that not that long ago. And so the news app has become more of a super app, where you can watch, listen, read, play games, etcetera… rather than an app with a list of news articles.”

At the broadest level, of course, the Times’s super app ambitions are a reminder of how much digital media has leveled the playing field among once disparate media companies—or, rather, dumped them all onto the same field. At the same time that the Times is incorporating audiovisual elements that have long been core to broadcast and cable, CNN—now run by former Times C.E.O. Mark Thompson—is trying, albeit not so successfully, to create the kind of lifestyle offerings the Times used to chart its own digital reinvention, as well as the subscription business that has sustained the Times almost since its inception. To borrow Ted Sarandos’s old adage about Netflix and HBO, the Times is trying to become CNN before CNN can become the Times. (I’m sure you can tell who’s winning.)

The disruption of the news business has, in essence, arrived in three waves: First, the national newspapers got whacked; then the less frequent periodicals; and now the once-impenetrable TV players are suffering their time in the barrel. In retrospect, however, it’s clear that the first reckoning of the national papers wasn’t the final word. A mere few years ago, it seemed like nearly a dozen brands—the Times, the Journal, The Washington Post, the FT, AP, Bloomberg, etcetera—were safe. These days, though, it’s not as clear. The New York Times Company has indeed pulled away from its peers just as the NFL has separated itself from its comp set in the American sports media.

After denting its balance sheet to acquire The Athletic, the move now truly appears to have paid off. The Times has morphed into a veritable platform for left-leaning fandom, and it will likely continue to be acquisitive. And yet its future headaches may replicate those of the competitors it’s vanquishing. As it builds its audiovisual business around stars, it will need to pay them like stars, too.