Happy Friday, and welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email on the inner workings of American media. Today, we turn our attention to The New York Times, and an activist investor’s new plan for leveraging all of Meredith Kopit Levien’s success in expanding the portfolio. Which raises the question: why hasn’t the Times’ peer set, and most notably Jeff Bezos’s Post, been nearly as successful?

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I unearthed this dramatic, but entirely plausible, prognostication of digital media’s future by happenstance this week, while reporting on the status of both VandeHei and Smith’s respective digital media startups, Axios and Semafor, for my most recent column, Axios in Wonderland. But the discovery turned out to be well timed: On Thursday, ValueAct Capital, Jeffrey Ubben’s activist investment vehicle, announced that it had acquired a 7 percent stake in the Times Company, and would be advocating management to accelerate growth and “deepen NYT’s competitive moat.”...