TR.BIZ: 5.21.2026

From John Travolta's beret to a pivot for Millennial media, this is your late-mid-week check-in 💫

Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re exploring zombified Millennial media properties, Chanel’s winning strategy, gourmet groceries trending, and a very silly beret.

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📝 Media Matters: The post-Millennial non-metric state

Two weeks ago, there was chatter that New York Magazine was going to be bought — and it actually happened: the liberal Murdoch, James Murdoch, has officially bought Vox’s key properties, including New York and its sub-properties (The Cut, Vulture, etc.) along with Vox.com and associated podcasts. “I’ve had the chance to get to know James and his wife,” New York editor-in-chief, David Haskell, wrote in an email to subscribers. “They have invested more than $50 million through their foundation Quadrivium in support of better journalism, including founding SciLine, a service that connects journalists to scientific expertise, and the American Journalism Project, which supports local journalism with better business models.” Sounds promising! Note that this deal doesn’t include all the other Vox properties like Eater, Popsugar, SB Nation, The Dodo, and The Verge, companies that have been struggling — which has led to mumblings that billionaire and media mogul Jay Penske may snatch up these properties (which he already had a stake in). This is what it is but it fits into a tapestry of Millennial media brands recently getting brought back to life to exist in a zombie state, a la: Vice returning, sponsored by Adobe, and Buzzfeed saved from death by billionaire Byron Allen, the same guy who bought Stephen Colbert’s CBS late night slot. Clearly a very 2010s media moment has ended, saved by billionaires and brands who will undoubtedly use these platforms to push agendas, playing into the tradition of mogul media manipulation. What’s different here in many ways — and ironic to anyone who worked for a 2010s Millennial media entity — is that these platforms are increasingly becoming divorced from things like KPIs and ROIs. As traditional media gets dog walked by 2020s media, these zombified Millennial brands fall into a pattern that The New Republic reported on this week: metrics and or popularity no longer matters when it comes to the success of a media brand. “Audience metrics aren’t part of how the operators are measuring success,” Parker Molloy wrote, alluding to Bezos’ burning down Washington Post and CBS being hijacked by Bari Weiss. “That premise depends on a marketplace where ideas compete on their merits. Bezos and Weiss have both said, on the record, that the verdict of the marketplace doesn’t matter to them.” Add the news that Google Search is being stripped for parts and we’re wandering into a dark time where all space is haunted by outlets that were once great and that exist simply to push ideas without being able to understand if the stories are real or not, if they’re successful or not. This further highlights how those who aren’t involved in the current media infrastructures (independent journalists, Substack writers, creators-as-outlets, etc.) are going to be having increasingly different conversations and interests than their once credible counterparts. The feed really will become fake, but the question is if normies will notice or if the gulf between the media literate and the casual information consumer will grow. I’d guess it very likely will.

👠 Aesthetically Pleasing: Chanel won the luxury war