Dr. Phil might not be a real medical doctor, but he sure seems to be good at reanimating his own corpse, because somehow he just keeps coming back from the dead. Just a couple of weeks after his streaming venture, Merit Street Media, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, the second-most-embarassing person that Oprah rocketed into fame is launching another venture called Envoy Media Co., according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Envoy, much like Merit Street, will be anchored by original programming starring Dr. Phil and Steve Harvey. It’ll also include a library of content (Merit Street had a whole back catalogue of Harvey’s talk show and Nancy Grace’s “Crime Stories,” so keep an eye out for those). An Envoy television channel is expected to launch later this month, per Bloomberg.
But the real hook is a feature that will let “citizen journalists” upload their own content to the platform. According to the company, it’ll give people the chance to “share news and stories from their communities while seamlessly integrating curated user-generated content on a national scale.” The details on how that’ll work are sparse at this stage, but it surely won’t lead to terrible outcomes.
The citizen journalist schtick has been tried ad infinitum in the social media era. There is a graveyard full of efforts to create a platform built around such content. Arguably, platforms like Substack and Medium have come the closest to creating something sustainable around such a thing, but even those are dominated more by professional, independent journalists rather than your average Joe. If anything, the YouTubes and Twitters of the world have proven the most effective way to turn a local story into a national one. But who knows, maybe Envoy will crack the code on curating citizen reporting. It’s not like Dr. Phil has a history of running with dubious claims for the sake of content or anything.
If there is any reason to believe that Envoy Media will be a success, you won’t find it by looking at Dr. Phil’s last venture. The streaming option launched in 2024 with a linear cable app and streaming options. Per The Hollywood Reporter, the channel averaged 27,000 viewers during its first year of operation, which is…bad. Its short run through 2025 saw those figures drop to 17,000 viewers, which, if you’re keeping score, is worse. Even the channel’s YouTube channel languished, despite Dr. Phil having a pretty robust presence on the platform. Merit Media has under 90,000 subscribers, and its most recent videos have barely cracked 1,000 views. Not exactly the kind of audience that warrants its own standalone service, but hey, it ain’t my money.
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