Ross Douthat, who joined The New York Times as a conservative Catholic opinion columnist in 2009, is heading over to CBS’ 60 Minutes as a correspondent. He is one of the major new hires since ex-NYT journalist and founder of The Free Press Bari Weiss took the editorial reigns of the legacy news organization.

Douthat was the youngest opinion writer ever hired at the Times at just 29, and for the last 17 years, has been documenting the chaos and drama of our political life from the rare perspective of a conservative addressing a largely liberal audience.

Around a year ago, Douthat started hosting a weekly podcast called Interesting Times in which he interviewed various prominent people in culture, media, and politics including Vice President J.D. Vance, writer Rod Dreher, and most recently, Bryan Johnson, an entrepreneur who is now famous for trying to increase his natural life span through a strict diet and physical regimen.

Douthat has done a good job, as a relatively new interviewer, in pressing his guests with questions while also giving them the benefit of the doubt. If you’ve listened to the podcast, you’ll hear Douthat often “steel manning” his guests’ argument before gently entering his more critical line of questioning. To interview Johnson in this way, who has garnered a lot of (negative) attention for his bizarre efforts to “live forever,” is no easy task. One can see why the folks at 60 Minutes would want someone like that to help spearhead their interviewing program.

For some, though, the news of Douthat’s departure from the Times came with mixed feelings. Douthat, even though he’s also a podcaster, made his reputation as a thoughtful opinion journalist, and as mentioned before, he was one of the few at the institution at odds with the progressive zeitgeist. Mere Orthodoxy editor Jake Meador lamented Douthat’s move as something more than a change in job title; it’s a symbol of the seismic shift from print to visual and audio media and also signals an era that values individual “creators” more than the institutions that house them. Writers are out. Personalities are in. Meador writes,

Because media endeavors are today largely built around personalities there is always a strong incentive to find more ways to put that personality in front of your desired audience. 

Meador worries this is a recipe for burnout. Douthat was able to keep up his duties as a writer and podcaster quite well over the last year, but Meador also makes mention of other media figures who underwent similar career transitions into video media and did not fare so well. I see Meador’s concern as a call for our cultural institutions to be okay with letting writers do what they do best, which is…writing words.

It’s hard for a lot of writers, me included, to navigate the pressure to be a “content creator” in addition to simply putting words down on a page. There is nothing wrong with launching a podcast and a YouTube show, but there is also nothing wrong with rejecting video and audio media forms out of preference for the written word. I hope Douthat continues, even in his new role, to write. We need more writers and thinkers like him.