The most innovative companies in media and news for 2026

The way we consume culture has fractured into millions of pieces and the far corners of the internet. But media companies are finding creative ways to keep capturing market share.

For publishing imprint Bloom Books, that means capitalizing on TikTok’s rise by turning #BookTok’s viral hits into paperback bestsellers. For Webtoon, it’s doubling down on a dynamic fast-metabolism format with five-minute-long “episodes” that bring comic books to life. The satiric newspaper The Onion is channeling its best quality—humor—into a new revenue stream by opening its own ad agency, while the New York Times is cranking out vertical video reels meant to be viewed on smartphones.

Live sports continue to command audiences, with Beyond Sports offering a unique twist by rendering players as animated cartoon characters in action, in real time. Former YouTube channel turned entertainment company Dude Perfect is chasing the “live” element with a stadium tour, which attempts to land the trick shots and other antics that made it famous. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s buzziest new podcast, TBPN, brings SportsCenter energy to business and technology news.

And AI continues to be a driving force. Some companies are focused on charting a responsible path forward, like cybersecurity giant Cloudflare, whose recent moves block LLMs from stealing journalists’ work. Others explore AI’s potential, like Moments Lab, which is training a filmmaking chatbot. Still others are using AI for the public good, like the Council on Foreign Relations, which is collaborating with Anthropic to rapidly translate thousands of Chinese Communist Party “dark matter” texts never before seen by American policymakers, into English.

1. Cloudflare

For safeguarding the Internet from AI crawlers

Founded in 2009 and now one of the world’s biggest cybersecurity companies, Cloudflare is both buttress and bulwark for much of the internet’s architecture. It speeds up websites by routing data through edge networks—serving 80% of the top generative AIs—and protects 20% of all existing websites from malicious attacks.

That means it’s also equipped to block bots employed by AI companies—trawlers that scrape any written word found online for chatbot training. Some magazines and newspapers have drafted deals to license content to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. But bots from Perplexity, for example, have been caught stealing data without permission, tanking financial incentives for content creators to keep putting out new stuff.

In September 2024, Cloudflare launched AI Audit, which lets websites block AI crawlers with a single click—a service since used by 1 million customers. And in July 2025, it took the trailblazing step of blocking crawlers by default—websites can choose to allow them, with AI companies identifying their mission as training, inference, or search—and it’s now developing a “Pay Per Crawl” feature.

The moves have been cheered by more than 40 companies including Conde Nast, Time, Pinterest, Reddit, and Quora, but for Cloudflare, it’s not just about digital altruism— it’s good business. As CEO Matthew Prince puts it: “Nobody wants to see the world consolidated into 5 AI companies. There would be very few businesses left to serve.”

Cloudflare undergirds trillions of web traffic connections each day, with $2.2 billion in revenue (up 30% year-over-year) from 332,000 customers in 2025.

Read more about Cloudflare, honored as No. 21 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026.

2. TBPN

For becoming Silicon Valley’s go-to tech ‘news’ network

You can’t throw a stone in Silicon Valley without hitting a tech-bro-turned-pundit starting a podcast. But few have enjoyed as meteoric a rise as 29-year-old Jordi Hays and 36-year-old John Coogan, whose TBPN (“Technology Business Programming Network”) launched just 16 months ago and has since skyrocketed to tech-world fame.

Their angle? The pair tackle business news like sports commentators. Each 3-hour episode is energetic and rambling, hyping startup culture, gossiping about the AI talent wars as if they were tracking sports teams trading all-star players, and following buyout deals as if they were heavyweight-fight victories. It’s not hard-hitting journalism, but they seem to have struck gold with a simple idea: Like sports fanatics, the tech world loves drama.

Many observers have drawn comparisons to ESPN’s SportsCenter—and part of the appeal is that TBPN’s hosts, as former entrepreneurs themselves, know the inside baseball (Hays founded crowdfunding VC Party Round, and Coogan cofounded meal replacement Soylent).

TBPN has earned clout both within tech’s elite circles and more fringe crowds on X, with guests ranging from Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen to pseudonymous social media celebrities like @carriednointerest. In December, TBPN inked a partnership with the New York Stock Exchange to broadcast from its trading floor, and in January, both hosts were picked up by blue-chip talent agency CAA.

TBPN relies on no outside investors and says it is profitable, bringing in $5 million in ad revenue in 2025. In September, the company hired a former Postmates and HQ Trivia executive as its first president and charged him with tripling revenue in 2026. According to the company, it already sold almost all its 2026 ad inventory by December.

Read more about TBPN, No. 43 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026.

3. The Onion

For proving print isn’t dead—especially if it’s funny

With newspapers across the country disappearing, The Onion looked very much like yet another casualty. Founded in 1988, the legacy satire brand shuttered its print business in 2013 and was all but left for dead until 2024, when its website was taken over by a new coalition of owners led by Twilio’s billionaire CEO and a former NBC News reporter.

Within months, the new ownership group breathed fresh life into the brand. First, it grabbed headlines with a publicity stunt: buying Alex Jones’ conspiracy-fueled right-wing outlet, InfoWars, out of bankruptcy. The Onion then bucked a long-running industry trend by resurrecting its print publication, which has hit the ground running. In September 2025, a year after it was reintroduced, it ranked as the 13th largest print newspaper in the United States by subscribers, slotting in between the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune, with almost 54,000 paying subscribers in over 50 countries.

Since then, The Onion has only gained steam. In September, it revealed its next act: launching its own (funny) copywriting agency called America’s Finest, creating a new revenue stream. The agency has already netted gigs with Paramount (for its R-rated comedy The Naked Gun); the investing group Subversive ETFs (which targets publicly traded companies that sitting U.S. Congress members have invested in); and Frank McCourt’s nonprofit Project Liberty.

The Onion’s total revenue tripled in 2025, up to roughly $6 million from under $2 million the previous year.

Read more about The Onion, No. 48 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026.

4. Webtoon Entertainment

For turning web comics into Hollywood IP—and vice versa

The comic book universe exploded in the 2020s, and so did Webtoon. The South Korean web comics platform is the go-to place for big brands like Marvel and Star Wars to launch web comics around their intellectual property, already housing franchises like Stranger Things, Godzilla, and the legendary manga series Fullmetal Alchemist. In 2025, Disney took a 2% equity stake in the company and commissioned a standalone app for 35,000 comics from Disney’s iconic catalog. And it’s not the only media giant swinging big with Webtoon. In November, Warner Bros Animation announced a deal for 10 titles, and Webtoon is juggling 20 anime projects with Oscar-nominated studios DandeLion, Aniplex, and Crunchyroll.

Webtoon’s ambition has grown alongside its Hollywood footprint. Beloved by Gen Z for its scrollable format, it branched into short-form video in 2025, releasing 5-minute episodes that infuse 14 Webtoon comics with motion, sound, music, and voice acting. Webtoon is also taking cues from not only TikTok, but also Netflix — last year it revamped its home page with algorithms based on reading history, and it threw open the doors to an online fan merch shop and a 2026 Los Angeles creator residency.

Perhaps Webtoon’s most impressive achievement is the content pipeline it has built: 900 of the platform’s titles have been adapted into over 11 million books, games, toys, TV shows, and films — including by Webtoon’s own studio, whose 2025 productions smashed records in the U.S. and Canada on Tubi. Owned by parent company and internet giant Naver, Webtoon has a sibling, fan fiction platform called Wattpad; both are part of an ecosystem that feeds the other with ever more content for cultivation.

Webtoon boasts 155 million monthly active users, 24 million creators, and [TK 2025 REVENUE FROM MARCH 3, 2026 EARNINGS]

5. Bloom Books

For flipping the script on the book publishing industry 

When publishing houses bet on authors, they typically do it in advance, signing a check after the pitch is made but before the novel is written. But Bloom Books, a 5-year-old imprint of Sourcebooks, is rewriting that business model — choosing instead to buy up the back catalogs of already self-published authors.

It’s still a gamble, but with the odds stacked more in Bloom’s favor. The rise of TikTok’s “#BookTok” made it possible for any story posted online to go viral, amassing millions of fans and a cult following — and those are the stories Bloom targets. The company has honed a lucrative strategy that turns internet blockbusters into paperback best-sellers. The imprint’s focus on romance overlaps nicely with BookTok’s most burgeoning genres — think romantasy and fan fiction. Bloom’s first author was 50 Shades of Grey’s E.L. James, who left a prestige publisher to help launch the fledgling imprint in 2020.

Bloom’s 52 authors released 99 books in 2025 — 32 of which became New York Times best-sellers, an impressive hit-rate of almost one-third. The imprint’s small roster punches above its weight, accounting for nearly a quarter of the U.S. romance fiction market. It’s the reason Sourcebook cracked the top 5 publishers by print sales in 2025, according to Circana Bookscan — bumping much-larger rival Macmillan out of the trade’s longtime “Big Five.” Bloom’s success even inspired its own case study at Harvard Business School.

6. Beyond Sports

For sprinkling a little Disney magic onto the sports field

The live-sports industry is booming, and so is the market for alt-casts (alternate telecasts), which augment the game-watching experience with everything from the Manning brothers commenting on the action to Sheriff Woody and Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story re-enacting a hockey skirmish or football pile-up. The latter comes courtesy of Beyond Sports, a Netherlands tech company acquired by Sony in 2022 (for estimates of up to $70 million). Beyond uses AI to transform live gameplay into real-time animations, featuring beloved TV and movie characters. The aim is to bring more kids and non-sports-fans into the fold.

The company’s tech wizardry powers ESPN’s wildly popular NFL “Funday Football” series. 2023’s inaugural Toy Story-themed broadcast became the most-viewed live event on ESPN+ and Disney+ at the time, and a December 2025 Monsters Inc.-themed broadcast—with more than half a million viewers—was praised by sports trade groups as an “unmistakable leap in the art form,” with Beyond producing smooth, natural body movements from a complex tangle of optical trackers and RFID data. (Pixar even had the movie’s star voice actors record 30 minutes of game-time commentary.)

Since 2021, Beyond has won three Emmy Awards, and its audience is growing, with broadcasts moving from streaming-only to primetime cable in 2025. In October, ESPN renewed a deal for more Disney-themed NFL, NHL, NBA, and WNBA games.

On December 1, the company revealed it’s absorbing fellow Sony division Pulselive, which builds digital ecosystems for rights holders like the Premier League and World Rugby. The move signals that Beyond might aspire to expand beyond telecasts, to become a hub for everything from fantasy sports to prediction markets.

7. The New York Times Company

For reinventing itself again and again in the digital age

In the cratering news-media landscape, the New York Times stands out for actually making money—$700 million in revenue last quarter, up 10% year over year, netting out to a 28% bump in investor earnings per share. What’s it doing right? It’s a master of adapting to changing times.

Take its successful expansion into audio/visual content. Its wildly popular The Daily podcast turned the newspaper’s star columnists into prominent talking heads. More evidence of digital savvy: In October, the Times debuted a TikTok-like “Watch” app with short-form vertical videos from eye candy-laden sections such as NYT cooking, The Athletic, and Wirecutter. The self-described bid to lure in a younger audience appears to be working. In Morning Consult’s 2025 ranking of fastest-growing brands, the New York Times was No. 2 among Gen Z. The effort represents a deft pivot from longer-form TV (see: its early-2020s FX/Hulu docuseries) to content geared for mobile, with the company’s video consumption across platforms more than doubling in 2025.

Last quarter, the Times added 460,000 digital-only subscribers, its biggest three-month jump in years, bringing the total number to 12.33 million. The company also credits its success to its strategy of bundling subscriptions, with more than half of subscribers now paying for multiple products.

The latest challenge the 174-year-old paper has had to adapt to is the rise of AI, and in 2025, the Times continued to blaze a trail on copyright lawsuits to protect journalists, suing Perplexity for using its content without compensation (following a 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for similar allegations). It’s also making a statement on free speech in the Trump era, suing the Defense Department and Secretary Pete Hegseth in December over the Pentagon’s restrictions on press access, which the Times called a violation of First Amendment rights.

8. Moments Lab

For creating an AI librarian for video archives

Paris-based Moments Lab (formerly called Newsbridge) is one of many companies training AI models—but it’s found a niche targeting the news industry and Hollywood. Its AI platform, trained on 1.5 billion assets, can “understand every moment in a video and make it searchable.” And its Discovery Agent, launched in September, can field conversational prompts to create whole new videos from raw footage, cutting a filmmaker’s journey from idea to execution down to a brisk three minutes. According to the company’s CEO, it’s just months away from being able to produce a full-length documentary of America’s history from a decades-spanning library of news reels.

There seems to be plenty of opportunity for Moments in this space. Speed is king in news, and journalists are increasingly expected to deliver reports in near-real-time. Meanwhile, there’s mounting pressure in Hollywood to crank out more entertainment, faster and cheaper than before, a la Netflix. Moments doesn’t hide the fact that it might accomplish this by replacing human workers with tech: Its CEO told Business Insider last year that a US financial media client already admitted it would need fewer editors.

Founded in 2016, Moments works with giants including Warner Bros. Discovery, Thomson Reuters, Sinclair, and LVMH. Banijay Entertainment, the production company behind reality TV hits Survivor, Big Brother, and MasterChef, also signed a deal in September to organize its vast video archives, and Hearst is among the clients testing the new agentic AI.

In 2025, the company doubled its revenue, tripled its number of users, raised $24 million in funding, and won “Best of Show” awards from the National Association of Broadcasters and International Broadcasting Convention.

9. Dude Perfect

For nailing the trick shots on a stadium tour

Dude Perfect began as a YouTube channel in 2009, with five college guys attempting crazy feats like bucketing a basketball thrown from the nosebleed seats of a full-size stadium. Now 17 years later, the group is running a media juggernaut focused on what they call “sports comedy.” Its diverse business pursuits include filming a Nickelodeon TV show, designing a toy for Walmart, endorsing drive-thru coffee chain 7 Brew, and claiming 19 quirky world records (like longest barefoot Lego walk).

In 2024, the company netted $100 million from venture capital firms and hired a former NBA executive as its first CEO. In 2025, it spent that much of that cash, revealing a sprawling theme park-esque headquarters in Texas and hosting a summer “Hero Tour,” in which performers attempt mind-boggling trick shots live at arenas in 21 cities across the country. Although the Hero Tour’s follow-up theatrical release in Regal Cinemas flopped (not everyone can pull off a Taylor Swift-style hat trick), the tour itself was a hit, with 15 sold-out shows and over 200,000 spectators. The group, which has publicly leaned into its founders’ Christian backgrounds, snagged the nation’s largest promoter for faith-based events for the tour. it also forged partnerships with Samsung Galaxy and Google Gemini, headlined Arthur Ashe Kids Day at the U.S. Open, and is releasing trick shot games on Nex Playground’s motion-powered gaming system this summer.

Dude Perfect has been profiled in Forbes, The Associated Press, The Ankler, and on the Texas A&M blog (the guys’ alma mater). And its YouTube channel, where pro athletes like Serena Williams, Steph Curry, and Luka Doncic have joined the antics, has more than 60 million subscribers.

10. Council on Foreign Relations

For enlisting AI to bring previously unreachable Chinese texts to scholars around the world

Amid China’s ascent on the global stage, the Council on Foreign Relations—the 105-year-old think tank and publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine—turned its eye eastward. In 2024, it launched the China Strategy Initiative, aimed at navigating the fraught geopolitics between China and America.

Enter China Open Source Observatory, the initiative’s new project, which seeks to shed light on the so-called “dark matter” of China policy—hard copy material from the Chinese Communist Party that is greatly influential but isn’t online, and thus isn’t “seen” by Americans. The observatory is employing AI to scan and translate a cache of 10,000 Chinese government texts that have never before been digitized.

The U.S. government did similar translation work from 1941 to 2013, but with new AI tech, the observatory saw a chance to fill the void—opening a window into Beijing even as it closes its doors to U.S. officials. The observatory collaborated with Google and Anthropic engineers to supercharge the effort, pushing LLMs to achieve what it calls “near-perfect” Chinese language translation accuracy, even on specialized subjects like military affairs and diplomacy. The texts will be freely available and AI-crawlable—meaning the fruit of the project’s labor will become public knowledge via AIs like ChatGPT (sans some sensitive material only available to researchers). The first 1,000 volumes will be released this spring.

Project leads Rush Doshi and Tanner Greer say the council’s work has already been used by scholars, policymakers, and journalists for papers, board meetings, and exposes. In the past year, the China Strategy Initiative’s analysis has shown up everywhere from Congressional testimony on Taiwan to a column in the New York Times.

Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more.