Marina Hyde Walks Away From The Guardian to Build Her Own Media Empire, While Quartz Lets AI Run the Newsroom
Marina Hyde is done writing for someone else's masthead. Two weeks after ending her long-running Guardian column, the columnist is launching her own media brand, Always On, complete with a Substack-style newsletter and a new video show. She already co-hosts the podcast and video series The Rest Is Entertainment with Richard Osman for the production company Goalhanger, and now she is extending that partnership into a full personal brand built outside the paper that made her famous.
The timing stings for The Guardian. The paper is currently pouring resources into creator-style video content of its own, trying to build exactly the kind of personality-driven audience Hyde is about to take with her. Losing one of its most recognisable bylines while chasing that same strategy is an awkward look.
Hyde isn't breaking new ground by going independent. She joins her former close friend Piers Morgan and former Today presenter Amol Rajan on the growing list of UK journalism names betting they can earn more as standalone brands than as employees of legacy outlets.
The part most coverage will miss
The real story is in the money, and it rarely makes the headline. Goalhanger is believed to offer creators a 50/50 revenue split on podcast and video projects, a figure legacy publishers struggle to match. Substack, meanwhile, lets creators keep at least 85% of revenue once its 10% commission and processing fees are taken out. Both platforms also give journalists a level of creative control that is hard to come by inside a traditional newsroom. That combination, not just ego or ambition, is what's pulling talent like Hyde away from staff jobs.
At the other end of the quality spectrum sits Quartz, a site once admired and widely copied for its journalism, now apparently running on autopilot. An investigation triggered by a tip-off found that one person, Cris Tolomia, appears responsible for the vast majority of Quartz's website output, something in the region of 50 articles a day. Tolomia appears to be a digital marketing specialist based in the Philippines, leaning heavily on AI to produce rapid rewrites of other outlets' original reporting. Some output goes further still: at least one piece referenced by MIT Media Lab appears to have been an entire AI-generated feature. The investigation used Made by Humans, an AI-detection tool built for newsrooms by Flip-Pay. Quartz has been asked for comment and has not yet responded.
Analysis (opinion)
Our media analyst, the one on this site who keeps digging for the angle everyone else skips past, reads these two stories as opposite ends of the same collapse. Legacy publishers can no longer compete for the people who built their value, and they are papering over the resulting gaps with whatever is cheapest to produce. Hyde's departure and Quartz's AI-driven content mill are not unrelated oddities in the same newsletter roundup. They're the same economic pressure showing up at two different income levels: the stars leave because better deals exist elsewhere, and the hollowed-out middle gets filled with the fastest, cheapest material available. Nobody signed off on this as a strategy. It happened because nothing stopped it.
To be fair, Quartz still appears to invest genuine journalistic effort into its newsletters and podcasts, so the site hasn't collapsed entirely into an AI rewrite shop, even if its public-facing website increasingly looks that way. And The Guardian's own creator-content push suggests it isn't blind to the shift Hyde is capitalising on. It's simply losing the race to build that future with its own people still inside the building.
The question worth sitting with is not whether Marina Hyde made the right call, she almost certainly did. It's what happens to everyone who isn't famous enough to walk into a 50/50 deal, when the newsroom they're left in is increasingly run by an algorithm and one overworked freelancer on the other side of the world.
Source: Substack
Earlier in this series: Google's $382,000 Job Posting Shows Discover Is About to Change
