Welcome to a special Thursday edition of In the Room, my private email on the inner workings of American media. Today, we’re breaking into our usual biweekly programming to report that Brian Stelter, the cable news-obsessive Zucker acolyte whose Reliable Sources franchise has become a nightly bookend to the D.C.-New York political-media diet, is leaving CNN. Below, what his sudden departure portends for the network, for Stelter, and for the media industry itself.

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Stelter’s departure is both totally unsurprising and yet completely and utterly stunning. Eleven years ago, he emerged onto the scene as David Carr’s younger sidekick in Page One, the documentary about The New York Times’ critical struggles during the financial crisis. At the time, he was a lowly junior media reporter whom the Times, long blinded by the transformations in its own industry,had hired to cover news at a more new-media pace. And unlike most Timesmen, who hail from Harvard or Yale and traditionally climbed the greasy pole of journalism through its exalted regional players, Brian had gone to Towson University and started his own obsessive blog about the TV news industry, TVNewser...