When Jaime Spencer took the stage at TVNewsCheck’s Programming Everywhere conference at NAB Show last week, he opened with a data point that reframes the competitive map for every broadcaster, publisher, and podcaster in the room: the average American now consumes more than 13 hours of media per day.
That figure, drawn from multiple behavioral measurement sources, is not a growth indicator. It is, in Spencer’s framing, a hard ceiling – and understanding what it means strategically may be among the most pressing assignments facing media executives in 2026.
“There’s not really much room to grow the amount of time the consumer spends with media,” said Spencer, COO of Magid, the research and consulting firm. “We are trading within that group. In order for us to grow, in order to find an audience, there’s not a ‘hey, we can add this new piece on.'”
The session, titled “The Omni-Media Landscape: Mapping Reach, Affinity and the Future of Media Monetization,” drew on an original pilot study Magid conducted across more than 150 media brands – from network broadcast flagships and NPR affiliates to Substackers, YouTube personalities, and politically charged cable programs. The research applied the same emotional and attitudinal framework Magid has used for over a decade in entertainment media, now calibrated for the information and news sector. The result is one of the more granular diagnoses of the current media landscape to emerge from this year’s NAB Show.
The Context Era
Spencer’s central argument is that the media industry has entered what he calls the context era – a structural shift away from the breaking news identity that defined broadcast strategy for a generation.
“Being a breaking news brand today is like a grocery store’s brand being food,” Spencer said. “We’ve got breaking news. Of course. The idea that you can compete and make your definition around the idea that you will have news before any of the other 50,000 brands out there just doesn’t hold water.”
Magid’s research asked consumers to evaluate brands against 44 discrete emotional attributes. The top predictors of perceived quality were contextual, insightful, thoughtful, reassuring, timely, calming, and innovative. Notably absent from the upper tier: balanced, trustworthy, reliable, accurate, and substantive. Those attributes scored high in stated importance but showed statistically weak correlation with how consumers actually evaluated a brand’s quality or chose to engage with it.
The implications for journalism run deep. “Trustworthy was the 39th most selected attribute,” Spencer noted, adding that “trust has left the chat.” That does not mean consumers are consciously seeking misinformation. It means the traditional equation – that journalistic credibility drives audience loyalty – no longer functions the way it once did. Consumers, Spencer argued, now define trust primarily as confirmation of their existing worldview combined with content that helps them feel calmer and more confident about the world around them.
“How do we use this desire for context to create something that is more trustworthy, that is more balanced, that can help you understand the world around you by challenging you a little bit without making you feel so uncomfortable that you’re going to turn and look away?” Spencer asked.
Who’s Winning And Who Isn’t
Magid’s brand-level findings generated pointed takeaways. Public media emerged as a significant winner. Spencer singled out local NPR stations as particular standouts, describing them as a “sleeping giant” that competitors in local broadcast markets would be unwise to overlook. Local NPR stations scored a 100 out of 100 on Magid’s intentionality index – meaning 84% of their consumption is active and purposeful rather than incidental.
“They are awakening to that opportunity. They have tons of upside. They don’t have to generate a profit,” Spencer said. “If you’re competing in local markets, I would go back and say we have to look at public media in our market and understand them as a competitor right now.”
People-as-brands also outperformed institutional brands across nearly every metric. Polarizing political voices including Dan Bongino, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity drove high intentionality scores. Spencer cited solo YouTube creator Brian Tyler Cohen – who commands more than 5.5 million subscribers and generates up to $5 million annually from a minimal production setup – as emblematic of what he called “overhead-zero entities” that are earning quality evaluations competitive with traditional broadcasters at a fraction of the cost.
Digital pure plays fared poorly. BuzzFeed, HuffPost, and similar properties clustered at the bottom of the intentionality index, with only about 20% of their consumption considered active. Variety and news-light programs such as Today, The View, and Good Morning America also underperformed within a news competitive set, though Spencer was careful to note they score substantially better when benchmarked against entertainment programming.
The Attention-To-Revenue Gap
Spencer’s third analytical pillar, efficiency, is where the business stakes come into sharpest relief. Television’s revenue per attention hour runs between 85 cents and 95 cents. TikTok’s is 8-12 cents per hour. That differential represents a structural advantage that broadcast has been slow to monetize – partly, Spencer argued, because the industry has not yet built the first-party data infrastructure that would allow it to prove that advantage to advertisers in a language they act on.
“TV is still the 800-pound gorilla, and it’s something that really needs to be leveraged,” Spencer said.
The audio sector presents a different kind of gap. Radio and podcast consumption drives exceptionally high intentionality scores, yet monetization has not kept pace. Spencer described it as a “real story challenge and opportunity” for the audio industry to articulate its attentive audience value more forcefully.
On AI, Spencer was direct about where the industry stands and what that means for the attention economy. Already, 51% of news consumers visit platforms such as ChatGPT or Claude on a weekly basis for news and information. Seventeen percent now first learn about news through AI platforms – a figure that exceeds the reach of push alerts and email newsletters.
“AI has already beaten both of those means when it comes to notifying people first about news and information,” Spencer said.
The Operating Model Imperative
Spencer closed with a challenge to reconfigure, not optimize. Simply layering AI tools onto legacy workflows, he argued, will not generate the returns the industry needs.
“You have to look at the workflow differently,” he said. “We’re going to have orders of magnitude more information that we can pull into our organization in really tightly organized ways. We can create content in seconds. So how do we have the right editing, vetting, branding, marketing solutions wrapped around those technology solutions?”
The strategic shift he outlined is from a tonnage model – where success is measured by total audience scale – to what he described as an average revenue per user (ARPU) model, where extracting more value from each consumer relationship becomes the organizing principle.
“Getting more out of a consumer is going to be a more important part of your strategy than getting more consumers,” Spencer said. “Attention is going to be more important than consumption.”
