As my colleague, Axios media trends reporter Sara Fischer, wrote 18 months ago(!): " In the smartphone-dominated world — where any media company can access almost anyone at anytime — the fight is shifting to dominating a person's attention."

So there's a growing need for the type of people who can steer teams to tell stories and deliver information in a way that gets potential customers to take heed.

Driving the news:

• Airbnb this year started a print magazine — it's free for hosts or $18/year for everyone else.
• Bumble, a dating app, launched a lifestyle magazine.
• Netflix is publishing a free magazine "to promote its programs and stars ahead of this year's Emmys," Bloomberg reports.
• BlackRock, the giant money manager, recently hired a global head of content.
• Robinhood, a millennial-based financial services company, last month bought MarketSnacks, a financial newsletter and podcast company.
• Stripe, a payments company, published a book last year.
• Goldman Sachs has a talk show.
• Blue Apron, Slack, Away, Shopify and Casper have created their own podcasts.
• Verizon is hiring an "Editor in Chief-Social" to oversee an editorial team tasked with "high frequency coverage" of Verizon activities.

By the numbers: The proportion of people on LinkedIn who report they work in content/editor roles at non-media companies has grown by 32% in the past decade, according to LinkedIn data. The biggest increases were at "consumer," "high tech" and "corporate" firms, like marketers and consultancies.

Yes, but: Sara insists that I note much of this content creation is not typical news or journalism; many of these editor jobs are more accurately described as "head of content" roles.

Our thought bubble from Axios Chief Financial Correspondent Felix Salmon: "Basically the adjacency model is a gruesomely inefficient way for companies to communicate. It’s, like, here’s something you do know that you want to read, let’s put it next to something you don’t particularly want to read, and maybe you might read that anyway."

• "Much better to create something that people do want to read directly, and give them that. You know how every company is a technology company? Well maybe on some level every company is a media company, too. There’s no point felling trees in forests if nobody hears them."

Editor-in-chief's note: The writer of this piece, about how editor in chief is the job of the future, is the editor in chief of Axios. He is aware of how preposterous this might look. 🙄

Driving the news: The Boeing 737 MAX wasn't grounded last week because the U.S. took the lead. It was because the EU, China, and many other countries acted first, rattled by two plane crashes under similar circumstances.

• The U.S. response "undermined American credibility as the pacesetter for global aircraft standards, while potentially ushering in an era in which international regulators — particularly those in China and Europe — assert growing clout," as the Washington Post put it.

And the U.S. is having trouble persuading other countries to follow its lead — especially on the Trump administration's efforts to block Huawei and other Chinese telecommunications equipment from being used in 5G.

• Global trust in U.S. leadership is near record lows, according to Gallup; 31% of people worldwide surveyed last year said they approve of U.S. leadership, lower than Germany and China.

So on some of most consequential issues that will shape the world this century, the U.S. is taking a back seat, like privacy, foreign investment, climate and finance.

Our thought bubble, via a sentiment Axios World editor David Lawler says he's hearing more often: When countries take action around the world, their first thought used to be, "What will Washington think?" China's goal is to make them think about Beijing just as quickly, if not before.

The bottom line from Eurasia Group and GZERO Media president Ian Bremmer (punctuation his):

this didn’t start with trump (remember obama’s "assad must go" and "russia must leave ukraine"), but it's sped up dramatically with his america first-style unilateralism, weakening us-led institutions that had already been eroding through neglect. the geopolitical balance in the world is changing fast; american perceptions of those changes, not so much.

Go deeper:

• America's great foreign policy divide
• America's resurgent hegemony
• How Mike Pence wields foreign policy power

• The NY Times' Neil Irwin captures the debtgeist: "Economic orthodoxy that ruled for decades held that fiscal responsibility was inherently good and the national debt a leviathan to fear. Now the intellectual and political currents are flowing — gushing, really — in the opposite direction."

That's after the national debt passed $22 trillion, the most ever — $2 trillion of that while Trump was in office.

• And despite a strong economy, the deficit last year hit a six-year high.

This is a rare zone of agreement for left, right and center:

• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has indicated openness to "modern monetary theory," the idea that deficits don't matter for countries that are running below their economic potential.
• Trump didn't once mention the debt or budget deficits in this year's State of the Union address — nor did he mention it last year.
• Warren Buffett, the third richest man in the world (after Bezos and Gates), said in his most recent letter to investors: "Those who regularly preach doom because of government budget deficits (as I regularly did myself for many years) might note that our country’s national debt has increased roughly 400-fold" over the past 77 years.

Why it doesn't matter, from Axios Markets editor Dion Rabouin: inflation, which over the past decade or so has been a non-factor, even after back-to-back years of above-trend growth and government spending binges.

• Economists have argued about the reasons, pointing at everything from the internet to the lack of unions to globalization to the way companies have invested their profits. But the end result remains the same.

The two arguments:

Debt matters ... Axios Future editor Steve LeVine warns against a "glib new gospel."

• Steve emails: "If debt really doesn't matter, you should be able to print any amount of money without impact. But none of the glib economists will go that far. That's why I call them glib. Because they are suggesting that we go out and spend more when all they really can say is, well, inflation and interest rates are low now."
• And Fed chairman Jay Powell said in Senate testimony last week: "[I]t is widely agreed that federal government debt is on an unsustainable path. As a nation, addressing these pressing issues could contribute greatly to the longer-run health and vitality of the U.S. economy."

Debt doesn't matter ... Axios chief financial correspondent Felix Salmon: "There is no evidence from 240 years of American history that the level of the national debt has ever really mattered."

• "The U.S. prints its own currency and can borrow as much as it likes, increasingly from domestic investors. Per Buffett, deficit hawks have preached doom for decades. They have never been proven correct."

1 fun thing: A man named Ian Hammond proposes improving American's balance sheet by selling Montana to Canada. The price? Just $1 trillion.

• Hammond’s petition is getting traction online.