For most of the 20th century, a star writer's power ran entirely through the newspaper that hosted them. The paper's brand was what got the eyeballs; the columnist's brilliance was, in effect, rented out to readers who'd already trusted the masthead. If you were a brilliant journalist, you needed the paper more than the paper needed you — until, quietly, that stopped being true. Rory Sutherland traces the moment: rock-star journalists began to notice they didn't actually need the intervening newspaper brand if they could just be a columnist brand in their own right.1
Sutherland is careful not to overstate this — the newspaper and the columnist still need each other, but the balance of power between them has genuinely moved.2 The newspaper used to hold nearly all the leverage: it had the distribution, the printing press, the subscriber base. Once a single writer could build and reach an audience directly — first through personal reputation, later through digital platforms — some of that leverage transferred to the individual, permanently, even though the institution didn't vanish.
This isn't only a journalism story. Sutherland extends it to any relationship where an institution used to be the necessary intermediary between a talented individual and an audience — and where digital tools now let the individual carry some of that trust-conveying function personally.3 The mechanism generalizes: wherever an institution's core value-add was "I vouch for this person to you," and the individual can now vouch for themselves directly to an audience they've built, the institution's monopoly weakens even if it doesn't disappear.
The counterweight worth stating plainly: institutions still supply things individuals can't easily replicate alone — legal backing, editorial infrastructure, aggregation of a broad reader base, crisis-proofing when one person's reputation takes a hit. The realistic picture isn't "individual brands replace institutional ones," it's a renegotiated split where both still exist, but the individual now has a credible exit option the institution has to keep in mind, which changes every negotiation between them even when the individual never actually leaves.
You're a talented specialist inside a large, well-known organization, and you've never seriously considered whether your reputation is portable. You start asking a blunt question: if you left tomorrow, how much of your professional trust would come with you, and how much would stay behind with the institution's name? For most people the honest answer, historically, was "almost none of it" — but you notice that isn't automatically still true, because the tools for building a directly-owned audience exist now in a way they didn't for the newspaper columnist's predecessors.
You start, cautiously, building a small amount of that portable trust deliberately — not quitting, not going rogue, just making sure some fraction of the relationship with your audience or your clients runs through you personally rather than exclusively through the institutional brand. Years later, when you're deciding whether to negotiate harder inside the organization or take an outside opportunity, you notice the decision feels different than it would have felt for someone with zero personally-portable reputation. The balance of power moved a little, in your specific case, the same way it moved for the columnists — not because the institution stopped mattering, but because you stopped needing it exclusively.
It's worth being precise about what, exactly, a newspaper brand was providing to a columnist before the shift Sutherland describes. It wasn't distribution alone — printing and physical delivery mattered, but the deeper asset was vouching: readers trusted an unfamiliar byline because the masthead had spent decades building a track record, and the newspaper effectively lent that track record to every writer it published. The columnist's talent was real, but the trust readers extended on day one of reading a new writer was borrowed capital, not earned capital. Disintermediation doesn't happen because talent stops needing a platform — it happens the moment a talented individual can build their own trust reserve directly, at which point the borrowed capital becomes optional rather than essential.1
Not every institutional relationship is equally vulnerable to this shift, and the diagnostic is specific: ask what the institution's core function actually is. If the honest answer is "it vouches for people to an audience," it's exposed — that function is exactly the one individuals can now build for themselves given enough time and the right platform. If the honest answer involves something an individual genuinely cannot replicate alone — legal infrastructure, physical distribution, capital-intensive production, regulatory standing — the institution's position is much sturdier, disintermediation or not. The mistake many institutions make is assuming their historical value (aggregation, prestige, the masthead) is the same as their structural value; the two overlapped for a long time mostly because building an independent audience used to be genuinely difficult, not because the institution's core offering was ever irreplaceable.
This shift doesn't redistribute power evenly across everyone who might benefit from it. The columnists who successfully built independent brands were, by construction, unusually good at the specific skill of building a personal audience — which is a different skill from being unusually good at journalism itself. A brilliant, undercelebrated writer with no instinct or interest in self-promotion gets none of this new leverage even though the underlying shift theoretically applies to them too; the institution that previously vouched for them uniformly regardless of their self-promotional talent may now extract more value from them precisely because they lack a credible independent exit. The shift doesn't just move power from institutions to individuals — it moves power specifically toward the individuals capable of building an audience, which is a narrower group than "everyone talented."
Institutions aren't passive in the face of this. The predictable response, once an institution notices its columnists have exit options, is to try to own more of the individual's brand-building output directly — requiring bylines to build on the institution's own platform rather than an independently-owned channel, structuring contracts around the institution retaining audience data, or simply paying enough to make the exit option not worth exercising. None of this reverses the underlying shift in leverage; it's the institution paying a premium to keep functioning as the necessary intermediary a little longer, which is itself evidence the disintermediation Sutherland describes is real — an institution doesn't need to fight this hard to retain talent it still had uncontested leverage over.
Sutherland's evidence here is historical-observational rather than data-driven — he's narrating a shift he watched happen in journalism and extrapolating the mechanism, not citing a study of columnist-brand valuations. The tension worth naming honestly: this shift plausibly concentrates outsized reward on a small number of individuals capable of building large personal audiences, while leaving most professionals — who are excellent at their craft but not natural self-platform-builders — no better off, and potentially worse off if institutions respond by extracting more value from staff who lack a credible exit.
This is the institutional-relationship analogue of Family-Owned vs. PLC Brand Building (same batch) — both describe customers/readers extending more trust to an accountable, named individual than to a diffuse institutional identity. The family-business page shows the pattern at the level of company ownership; this page shows the identical preference reshaping labor relationships between talented individuals and the institutions that once fully intermediated their audience.
Business — Attention as the Last Moat. That page argues attention itself, not any particular platform or institution, is the scarce and defensible asset in a media-saturated environment. This page's disintermediation story is the historical mechanism by which that shift actually happened: as soon as individuals could hold attention directly rather than borrowing an institution's attention, the moat relocated from the institution to the person. Read together, the two pages show cause and effect across a generation — disintermediation is the event, attention-as-moat is the resulting landscape.
Psychology — Attribute Substitution: Trust as Proxy for Competence (same batch). Readers trusting a newspaper brand was always, underneath, a form of attribute substitution — "is this reporting reliable" (hard to verify directly) got answered by "do I trust this masthead" (easy, inherited, institutional). Disintermediation doesn't remove the substitution, it just relocates the proxy from an institution to a person: readers now ask "do I trust this specific columnist" instead. The insight neither page reaches alone: the underlying cognitive shortcut never changed across this entire historical shift — only the object the shortcut points at moved, from masthead to individual, which means the same mechanism that built newspaper-brand loyalty for a century is now building individual-creator loyalty just as fast.
Sharpest implication: every institution that exists mainly to convey trust between a skilled individual and an audience is one platform-shift away from becoming optional — not obsolete, but negotiating from a permanently weaker position than it held when it was the only bridge available.
Generative questions: