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Journalism's fight for survival in a postliterate democracy
The truth is going out of business as technology turns us into a folk-story society, ripe for influence by a demagogue.
After many years of watching my fellow journalists suffer at legacy newspapers, digital startups, big commercial newsrooms, small nonprofit outlets and public media all alike, here’s what I learned the hard way: America’s marketplace of ideas has a competition problem. Someone, somewhere, puts in the work of finding original facts, distributes them to a smallish crowd of news junkies and nerds who subscribe directly or are looking for something specific on Google, and then a flywheel effect kicks in: the good stuff then gets filtered out into a far larger ecosystem of social media, TV, radio, bloggers, influencers, dinner tables, coffee shops, city councils, state lawmakers, think tanks, FBI agents, etc. But one of the poorly understood infrastructural changes happening to this ecosystem in recent years is that our trillion-dollar platforms have grown increasingly hostile to distributing writing, either by driving news off their services, degrading hyperlinking, shifting to AI-plagiarized summaries, and relying more on user-generated content.
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