New media

1.Old media with a rebrand. The podcast is a radio show, the launch video is an ad, the newsletter is a press release. The new part is calling it new.

We don't do PR. We do new media. Anyway, here's our launch video, please quote-post it.

01Origin

The phrase is old; the SF meaning crystallized in 2025 when Andreessen Horowitz formalized a New Media team, explained in a November 6, 2025 essay by Erik Torenberg, Alex Danco, Henry Williams, and Brent Liang: a turnkey media operation helping founders build owned audiences, run coordinated launch campaigns, and route entirely around journalists.

Through 2026 the label spread via the a16z New Media Fellowship, launch videos, podcasts, and the firm's relentless use of the term on X, until it detached from the org chart and became ambient vocabulary: every startup now has a new media strategy, which is to say a person who posts.

The ironic register followed immediately, as it does (see grindslop for the mechanism): calling a professionally edited founder video "a new distribution primitive" is peak new media. The sincere and sarcastic usages are, as usual in this compendium, the same sentence with different eyebrows. Practitioners of record: the Corgi girls, the ABG CMO.

02Notable sightings

atlas · @creatine_cycle · view on X
BREAKING: after just 4 hours at Anthropic @karpathy will be stepping away to join the A16Z new media team. "I think the next few years at the frontier of attention and growth hacking will be especially formative"

a16z · @a16z · view on X
Travis Kalanick says new media is why he's back after eight years of silence: "The media landscape 10 years ago, 90% of what was said was very negative. Business had become politics, and we didn't know it... If it bleeds, it leads, right?" "Now the media landscape is like, 'yeah, you don't have to talk to those guys.' You can go and talk to a David Senra. You can go and talk to Joe Rogan or name your guy, and you can say what you need to say." "Elon buying Twitter is the beginning of us being able to speak our minds and for disagreeing to not be illegal. That's a big deal. We should all thank Elon for that." "I want to build. I want to not think about what The New York Times is writing when I make decisions about what I build. I had to emulate what it's like being a capitalist in Russia... and that's what I did for eight years." @travisk

More sightings on X →

03Spread the ism

Every entry ships as a card. Download it, post it, cite your sources.

New media

01Origin

02Notable sightings

03Spread the ism

04See also