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Last fall, when Andrew Garfield began promoting the elegiac A24 romance We Live in Time, his publicity campaign centered on a clear idea: Garfield, who lost his mother to pancreatic cancer in 2019, as a sensitive soul still navigating grief. It started with the usual groundwork: tasteful magazine spreads, gauzy interviews with traditional press, the standard junkets. But that was only half the battle. The other half was the thoroughly modern challenge of feeding the internet. Here, the always-game Garfield excelled. He cashed in on a long-running, playfully ambiguous flirtation with Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg. He narrated an essay about loss for the New York Times’ Modern Love podcast, processed emotions with Dax Shepard on Armchair Expert, and even helped Elmo explain grief on Sesame Street. He answered questions buried under puppies for a BuzzFeed video, raided the Criterion Closet, and when a bizarre-looking carousel horse from the film went viral (described by Stephen Colbert as a “horse tripping balls on ketamine”), he rolled with the punches. “Man, I love the horse meme,” he told the AP.

Yet despite Garfield’s full-court press, wide swathes of the internet were inevitably left untouched. No Smartless, the cozy celebrity-cast with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett. His home wasn’t toured by Architectural Digest and his lies weren’t detected by Vanity Fair. Also missing were many other digital stops that have become staples of the modern media circuit: Hot Ones, Call Her Daddy, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, Mythical Kitchen’s Last Meals. In some cases they may not have matched the tone of the campaign — why go on This Past Weekend With Theo Von when you don’t have a movie for the boys? — but there’s also only so much time.

If that ever-expanding menu of publicity options represents a growing opportunity for talent to promote their projects and flex their personalities, it’s also an increasing source of anxiety for PR teams tasked with positioning their clients for maximum exposure among an increasingly fragmented audience. As nearly a dozen publicity veterans told me, somewhere along the line, the press rounds mutated into something unruly. Fifteen years ago, building national name recognition was a straight shot: a newspaper feature, a magazine cover, a morning show, a late-night hit, the trades, some local spots. Today, the New Media Circuit resembles a maddening sprawl: countless possible routes, none guaranteed. “It’s overwhelming,” said one partner at a top PR firm. What used to be a matter of managing relationships is now a game of craps, and the truth is, no one’s sure what works anymore. “The golden age of this job was when I got into it,” says a publicist with three decades in the business. “You could be lazy! Now you actually have to figure out what you’re trying to do.”

There’s a scramble to figure out what it means to master the constantly shifting landscape of the New Media Circuit, where success requires a fluency in weaponizing various corners of the internet. It’s no easy feat. Landing a spot on today’s top podcasts or YouTube shows is as competitive as booking late-night TV during its peak, and charting a course across too many second-tier stops (random TikTok personalities, niche podcasts, etc.) runs the risk of making the talent seem a little small-time. Stars and their teams also have to figure out the new formats of the day, whether it’s having their music knowledge tested or coming up with a hot take while riding the subway, while also working traditional media spots with an eye on producing a moment that can travel online. The New Media Circuit may feel like a radical shift, but at its core, it’s not fundamentally different from the old publicity game: There have always been friendly outlets, but bookings don’t always work out, messages don’t always stick. The difference now is that unpredictability is the norm, and unlike the old days, there’s no guaranteed baseline of attention. “Most of the time, the video just dies in darkness because nothing really lands,” says a marketer for a major film studio. “It never got memed by Evan Ross Katz.”

At some level, it’s still a numbers game. Working the New Media Circuit often means rapidly throwing as much stuff at the wall as possible to see what sticks. But even that approach requires a level of curation, finesse, and a bit of dumb luck. “Actors on Actors is that to me in a nutshell,” says the marketer. “If you told me this time last year that Colman Domingo and Kieran Culkin would be my favorite of these, I would have not believed it. I can’t imagine a more random pairing.” Publicists and execs point to Timothée Chalamet’s A Complete Unknown press run as a model of a campaign that’s mastered the New Media Circuit: ubiquitous yet surprising (flexing music cred with Nardwuar, bro-ing out with Theo Von, clowning around with Brittani Broski), quirky (riding a Lime scooter onto a red carpet), and somehow still intriguing (how was he the only one on a panel of football experts to call Ohio’s win over Miami on College GameDay?). He presents as someone eager to match the energy of whoever’s in front of him, always ready to play the game. More importantly, his appearances feel like natural extensions of a carefully shaped idea: Chalamet as a multitalented art-kid savant who can’t quite be pinned down.

“I thought Timothée looked like the most humble person in the world when he showed up at his own lookalike contest,” says one film-studio executive. But safely sustaining that sort of authenticity can be a tricky task when you’re doing a three-hour podcast. “Some clients really thrive in that environment, but I know plenty who feel anxious about the conversation,” says the partner of a major PR firm. “‘Where is it going to go? Are they going to bring up something I don’t want to talk about?’” Part of Chappell Roan’s appeal is her vivid, unfiltered energy, but that same disposition drew hand-wringing from mom influencers after she called motherhood “hell” on Call Her Daddy. That’s why knowing what you’re dealing with is vital. No star should sit down to tape Club Shay Shay thinking that the show will edit anything out.

Invariably, with so many goals, tones, and formats, not every stop on the tour is going to be a perfect fit for the talent — but they at least have to make an effort. Kim Kardashian’s Actors on Actors pairing with Chloë Sevigny is a case study in what happens when an A-list celebrity doesn’t even try; the spectacle that emerges is watching Sevigny awkwardly carry that conversation all on her own.

“I’m not gonna lie to you: So many of these appearances are completely mid,” says one publicist who routinely works on movie rollouts. “You can feel how the talent just sees it as checkmarks on the press tour.” Of course, there’s always the opposite risk of trying way too hard. In a recent This Past Weekend appearance, Mark Zuckerberg, already robotic by default, comes off even more alien in an oversize shirt and gold chain as he attempts to kick it with Theo Von. “I really like driving manual-transmission cars,” he says, looking at a picture of his ultraexpensive Cadillac. “And it’s, uh, a good one.”

While many of the New Media Circuit’s most influential stops took root during the mid-2010s digital-media boom — Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper was a Barstool breakout, Hot Ones launched under Complex Media’s First We Feast banner, Good Mythical Morning’s Rhett and Link built a YouTube empire out of sincerity — it was the pandemic that really tipped the scales. With productions shut down and celebrities still seeking attention, podcasts and web shows — cheap, nimble, and with not-insignificant built-in audiences — offered a safer alternative to morning shows and soundstages. “That’s when a lot of the old-school publicists who print their emails and have assistants highlight them started taking us seriously,” an executive at a major YouTube channel told me. Some celebrities even took this opportunity to build publicity stops themselves; that’s what led Bateman, Arnett, and Hayes to start SmartLess. By the time the pandemic began to subside, that nascent publicity ecosystem had crystallized into something foundational; just a few years later, there’s an expectation that even presidential candidates should pay patronage to these new outposts. It’s become gospel that Donald Trump won his second presidency in part because he successfully courted Joe Rogan and a slew of other new-media hosts while Kamala Harris didn’t.

But if this new reality of celebrity publicity is permanent, the destinations that comprise it are anything but. New shows surface daily. Influencers rise and vanish by the hour. Tomorrow’s buzziest press stop could just as easily be a Twitch streamer — or a ChatGPT bot. Nevertheless, certain trends have emerged. The hosts who anchor these new institutions aren’t “serious” interviewers, at least not in the Terry Gross sense. “I’ve always looked at the show as one that celebrates more than it scrutinizes,” said Hot Ones host Sean Evans on a recent episode of The Town. Which is, in a sense, fine, since “serious interviews” aren’t the point — and it doesn’t mean they can’t extract a headline-making quote or coax out a surprisingly intimate moment. “We think about it in terms of hospitality,” says an executive behind a major celebrity podcast. “We want guests to feel comfortable.” The deal is simple: Show up, have a good time, and ideally, everyone walks away looking good. Sometimes the guest says something revealing. More often, they don’t. Either way, the audience is there for the hang.

This shift in the press circuit can largely be traced back to late night, where the focus moved from the style of Johnny Carson or David Letterman’s often substantive, sometimes contentious conversations toward viral stunts typified by James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke gimmick and most of the things Jimmy Fallon does on The Tonight Show. But while no one ever mistook Fallon for Christiane Amanpour, the difference now is that in the New Media Circuit, everything is late night, and talent can pull off entire publicity campaigns without ever sitting for a difficult conversation. “The value of doing interviews with journalistic rigor will always exist,” says one publicist. “But now you can just do one of those and really round it out with much more friendlier stuff.”

Traditional spots like NPR’s Morning Edition or the odd magazine profile still matter, mostly because their older audiences have money advertisers would like them to spend. “You can’t just stop doing press for people who you know are always going to be there,” says one partner at a prominent PR firm. Those demographics still need stars too, as illustrated by Glen Powell’s campaign for Twisters, typified by a good ol’ brand integration with Ram Trucks, that leaned hard on his throwback American heartland appeal. There’s also the matter of prestige. “Old media isn’t how you sell, but for a lot of people, it’s how you show you’ve earned your place,” says one music publicist.

And those legacy platforms can still spark viral moments. Case in point: the Wicked press tour. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo made the rounds on podcasts like Las Culturistas and YouTube shows like Oui Oui Baguette, but the campaign’s most viral moment emerged from a traditional junket interview, when their sincere, slightly baffled reaction to an Out.com reporter’s comment about people “holding space” for the lyrics of “Defying Gravity” became an irresistible meme. Still, as traditional audiences age or drift away, the impact of these old tentpoles is diminishing. “There used to be kingmakers,” says one literary agent, citing The New York Times Books Review, Fresh Air, and national TV spots. “None of these things really work as the pillar of a campaign anymore. Now you need everything to hit at the same time from multiple different directions, and even then it doesn’t always work. It’s totally maddening.”

Predictably, not everyone is sold on the New Media Circuit. Some are merely skeptical; others are openly hostile: “Don’t fucking talk to me about Hot Ones,” one A-list publicist told me. The reality is that it’s hard to tell if any of it actually moves the needle in name recognition or even ticket sales. “Unless there’s an ‘I am clicking through and buying a ticket’ button on whatever the fuck’s feed, I’m not sold it helps,” another veteran Hollywood publicist says. Yes, there are more metrics than ever — followers, views, streams, engagement rates — but they’re slippery, and no one seems to agree on what counts as impact anymore. In an ecosystem dominated by algorithms, even the most viral press push can feel like a whisper compared to the Netflix homepage or Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist. If the most powerful recommendation engine is the platform itself, what’s the point of doing press at all?

On some level, the goal is simply to achieve saturation. “Think about the Severance activation,” says the publicist, referring to a stunt where the cast appeared in Grand Central Terminal in a recreation of the series’s office set. “Suddenly it’s become part of the cultural conversation because it’s on everyone’s feed.” If you’re lucky, your message lands, but often, just being omnipresent is enough.

That’s why focusing on any one creator or stop can miss the larger point. The instability of the landscape means no two press tours will — or at least should — look the same. When Chalamet gears up for another Oscar run later this year with Marty Supreme, retracing the same steps — Theo Von, Nardwuar, Brittani Broski, College GameDay — would be unlikely to land with the same effectiveness. “So much of this business is a miracle,” says the publicist who longed for the days when they could be lazy. “Everything has to line up just right and be good in their own respective ways.” Chalamet’s team can’t be in the business of chasing past miracles. Their job is to create the next one.