The Wellness Wars: Newsrooms Chase a $2 Trillion Health Boom

CNN is following The New York Times into wellness coverage as a subscription play — but the audience already belongs to creators.

Legacy media in the U.S. has settled on wellness as its next great subscription engine. As The New York Times pulls in new readers with lifestyle fare — sleep, GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, peptides — CNN is racing to run the same play behind its new premium app. A wellness market worth roughly $2 trillion a year, combined with the pressure to replace shrinking advertising with subscriptions, has made the category one no newsroom can afford to ignore. This account draws on reporting by Julia Alexander for Puck.

Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien signaled last summer that the paper would keep leaning into soft wellness coverage. Strength in lifestyle, she argued, widens the funnel and reaches readers the paper might not otherwise touch. The Times has run sleep guides, first-person GLP-1 essays, and investigations into Chinese peptides alongside its harder health reporting.

The executive replaying that strategy at CNN is chairman Mark Thompson, who led the Times's digital transformation before moving over. In August 2024 he framed the field bluntly — “health, wellness, and living longer are news” — and placed it alongside business, tech, and climate as core to CNN's future. Last year he and digital chief Alex MacCallum hired Choire Sicha out of the Times's Style desk to oversee new soft-news verticals, wellness among them.

The scale explains the rush. McKinsey's Future of Wellness research puts the global consumer wellness market at about $2 trillion a year, with the U.S. alone near $480 billion and growing 5 to 10 percent annually. More than 80 percent of American consumers now call wellness a daily priority. Gen Z and millennials, just over a third of the adult population, drive more than 41 percent of wellness spending. Roughly 5 percent of all Google searches — about a billion a day — concern health or wellness.

At the front of that market sit GLP-1 drugs for weight loss and diabetes. As Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro have gone mainstream, the category is estimated at around $60 billion in 2025, with forecasters projecting $130 billion to $250 billion by the mid-2030s. The testimonials, side effects, and pricing fights around these drugs light up search and social feeds, turning the coverage into material that can chase traffic and subscriptions at once.

The open question is whether audiences want wellness from legacy players at all. In Pew Research Center surveys, more than half of Gen Z get health and wellness information from influencers, mostly through short-form video on TikTok and Instagram. While most news consumers rely on X and YouTube, upward of 80 percent of Gen Z wellness consumers lean primarily on Instagram. For established outlets, that is both an opening and a wall.

The most promising strategy — creator partnerships — is also the hardest to execute. In a field owned by homegrown stars like neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and the Glucose Goddess, even hiring the talent is fraught. Bari Weiss tried to bring longevity doctor Peter Attia, who commands more than 10 million followers, to CBS News, but the two split over a controversy tied to Jeffrey Epstein. Weiss kept the instinct anyway, continuing to work with Huberman and physician-author Mark Hyman to widen the range of stories she tells.

Health misinformation runs deep on social platforms, and that raises the value of a trusted source — an opening for brands like the Times. Levien has called wellness and health important coverage the paper can approach rigorously.

None of that matters if no one reads it. The Times has room to spare: it added 1.4 million net digital subscribers last year to reach 12.8 million, cleared $2 billion in digital revenue for the first time, and moved closer to its 15-million target for 2027. CNN, by contrast, has struggled to launch its premium app and turn new hires into video personalities. Sanjay Gupta, preparing exclusive content for CNN's streaming app, is a major talent who guided anxious viewers through the early pandemic — but he is not the kind of figure younger audiences chase, especially when most of the wellness content they watch is free.

The push to fold creators into the whole product continues. Last October CNN International launched a CNN Creators desk under former Vice producer Andrew Potter, building short-form content and routing those journalists back into the main feed through a dedicated show. The Washington Post opened its Well+Being vertical in 2022 and brought over Tara Parker-Pope, founding editor of the Times's Well blog; she has since left, and Well+Being has been folded into WP Ventures, the outlet's so-called third newsroom.

Growth narrows to creators because audiences want hyper-personalized content. The algorithms serving video are already personalized, so broadly appealing articles no longer suffice — and no newsroom can match that with reporters alone. That is what gives influencers, who arrive with their own audiences, renewed leverage.

The fastest route for newsrooms may be the Substack acqui-hire, or lower-risk licensing deals. Katelyn Jetelina, who writes the pandemic-boosted newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist, sits near the top of the science rankings with more than 400,000 subscribers; her focus on public health and debunking misinformation could map neatly onto a partner like CNN.

Legacy media will not out-shout the biggest voices on social and short-form video. What it can do is plug into those channels, validate the most authoritative among them, and build a health-and-wellness destination audiences trust. In an era of AI slop and social misinformation, that trust may be the last real differentiator. With so many players crowding in, though, there isn't enough of it to go around.

The stakes travel. The shift toward subscription models, stronger verticals, and creator partnerships is one Korean news organizations and K-content companies face at the same time. A trusted brand that vets and packages expert creators is a model worth studying well beyond wellness.

Sources

· Puck, Julia Alexander, “The Wellness Wars” (June 13, 2026) — original reporting

· McKinsey & Company, Future of Wellness research (2024–2025)

· Pew Research Center, surveys on Gen Z health and wellness information

· The New York Times Company, Q4 and full-year 2025 results (Feb. 4, 2026)

· GLP-1 market size: estimates from Grand View Research, Fortune Business Insights, and others