Over the past month, I have had nine conversations that made me very, very uncomfortable. Nine friends, all great journalists, working for six different media organizations in three different countries. Different backgrounds, varied personalities, different beats, different levels of seniority. Some have been chasing stories for decades; others still have enough youthful optimism left to believe that an impertinent question might occasionally produce an honest answer. All great and thorough news-chasers.
All nine are in utter despair. Not the theatrical, existential despair of a bourgeois-bohemian French philosopher discovering that his café in the 10th has run out of cigarettes and quinoa. The real thing. The exhausted, bewildered, slightly humiliated despair of true professionals who have dedicated a considerable part of their lives to something they believed counted, only to discover that the people running their organizations appear to have developed a rather spectacular allergy to that very thing. Journalism. The messy, expensive, slow and occasionally dangerous business of finding out what the hell is going on: what is happening, why, who is responsible, who is lying, who is paying, who is profiting, and why the official version of events smells like a tuna sandwich left on the backseat of an old Prius parked in Tuscany. Apparently, that journalist-thing-business is perceived as terribly old-fashioned. Have you considered making a TikTok instead?
The great shiny object epidemic
I started my career as a journalist. I then spent years on the other side of the notebook, courting the profession as a global strategic communications executive, and today I am the Chief Innovation Officer of a media agency, which means I have now seen the newsroom from the inside, from the press-influence side and from the side that places the advertising. I understand the pressure on advertising revenue, the migration of audiences, the merciless mathematics of digital distribution, the platform dependency and the uncomfortable fact that a newspaper cannot pay its reporters with noble intentions and a particularly moving editorial about democracy. Running a news media company today takes far more ingenuity than it did when the ad department could sell a double-page spread, go for a three-martini lunch and call it a quarter. I get it.
But something has gone profoundly, almost artistically wrong, because a worrying number of media executives seem to have concluded that the future of journalism lies in doing progressively less of it. In its place, they have developed an almost erotic fascination with shiny things. Events! Influencers! Branded experiences! Creator partnerships! AI-powered content factories! Award ceremonies! Preferably presented in a PowerPoint with at least seventeen references to transformation, a stock photo of young, diverse people laughing at a tablet, and a hockey-stick growth curve that would make a drunk venture capitalist blush.
There will be a gala. There is always a fucking gala. Somewhere, a perfectly coiffed master of ceremonies will announce the Future of Media Excellence Awards, and a room full of people who have never spent a night checking a source will congratulate one another on reinventing journalism. Three floors below, a reporter is wondering whether the newsroom still has the budget for a second-class train ticket to interview someone who actually might know something. But look! The champagne is excellent.
Enter the creator with a ring light
The second great revelation of contemporary news media management is that journalists are replaceable, and what a splendid replacement strategy has been devised. On one side, a free chatbot that produces 800 words about practically anything in the time it takes a senior editor to find their glasses (the optical kind, not the ones you fill with wine). On the other, a 22-year-old creator with a cheap Chinese ring light and 400,000 followers who can explain the collapse of Western civilization in twenty-seven seconds while pointing at floating captions.
What could possibly go wrong?
Before anyone sharpens a pitchfork: the creators are not my target, and some of them are very good. The audience is real. Pew found that 21% of US adults regularly get news from news influencers, rising to 38% of those aged 18 to 29, and a newsroom that ignores those people deserves to lose them. Nor am I attacking AI. I have spent enough time studying, using and occasionally arguing with these systems to know how powerful they are, and they can be a magnificent instrument for journalism: transcribing, translating, chewing through mountains of mothballed documents, spotting patterns a tired human would miss, making a small newsroom considerably more capable.
What a model cannot do is take responsibility for the truth. It cannot be held morally accountable for publishing a lie. It will not protect a source, risk its career, confront a minister, or refuse to publish because the evidence simply isn’t there, and it has no independent commitment to the public interest. It has no values. No courage. No conscience. A language model can produce a convincing article about corruption. A journalist has to establish whether the corruption actually happened.
Reach, popularity and engagement are lovely things to have, and none of them counts even remotely as evidence. A million views do not turn a rumor into a fact, however enthusiastically the algorithm applauds. I am delighted that someone can reach half a million people with a mascara review. I become considerably less delighted when someone in a corner office concludes that this qualifies them to replace the colleague who spent eighteen months investigating public procurement fraud. One has followers. The other follows the money. I hate it when the followers win.
Journalism is supposed to be inconvenient
Real journalism is uncomfortable by design. It asks questions people don’t want to answer, opens doors people would prefer to keep closed, reads documents that were never meant to see daylight, listens to people who have been ignored, checks whether the numbers add up, calls the second source, then the third, and goes back because something doesn’t quite fit. That fingerspitzengefühl, you know… And sometimes, after weeks of work, it discovers that the original hypothesis was wrong, which means there is no story at all… Try explaining that to a management committee. Their arithmetic shows the whole problem in miniature. The dashboard can count the article. It cannot count the article that was rightly killed, the lie that was never printed, or the contract that was never signed because someone at city hall knew a reporter would ask. A journalist produces words the way a surgeon produces stitches: at the end, after the part that matters. Before that, the job is investigator, witness, skeptic, translator of complexity and, when necessary, a monumental, square pain in the arse.
That last quality is so much more important than the others. A healthy democracy needs people who are professionally trained to be difficult: people who refuse to accept that a press release is a fact because it arrived on expensive letterhead, who ask why a government contract went to a company founded last week, who notice that the minister’s figures don’t match his own administration’s, who remember what a CEO promised three years ago and have the impudence to ask what happened. People who are not terribly impressed by titles, polished shoes, beefed-up cars or the follower count on a LinkedIn profile.
We need them precisely because they are inconvenient. And increasingly, we treat that inconvenience as an inefficiency to be eliminated.
The snackification of reality
There is the sad conviction that news must become endlessly shorter, lighter, faster and more entertaining. Snackable. (By Toutatis, how I hate that word.) As though reality were a bag of sour chips to be consumed between two Instagram stories and a video of a golden retriever learning to play the piano blindfolded.
Of course attention is limited, and of course formats evolve. A brilliant sixty-second explainer can be worth more than a dreadful six-page article, and journalism has never been defined by word count. But making complexity accessible is one ambition; pretending complexity no longer exists is quite another. A war, a constitutional crisis or the collapse of a regional industry rarely survives being reduced to five things you need to know before breakfast. Sometimes understanding requires twenty minutes of concentration, three pages of context and the humility to accept that the world does not divide neatly into heroes, villains and people with better social media teams. Just sometimes, dear reader, you simply have to make the bloody effort. The job of journalism is to help us understand reality well enough to make decisions about it, and reality has never once agreed to fit our attention spans.
Democracy doesn’t come with a content calendar
What genuinely frightens me is that we have spent the better part of a decade discussing misinformation, foreign interference, algorithmic manipulation, echo chambers and the industrial production of bullshit. We have watched conspiracy theories become political platforms and fabricated images outrun every correction. Our response, apparently, is to weaken the one profession whose central purpose is to establish what can actually be known.
Brilliant.
We have more information than at any moment in human history; we are drowning in it. What a democracy needs is trustworthy information, independently gathered, rigorously verified, properly contextualized and publicly available. It needs people who can tell a fact from an allegation, an allegation from an opinion, and an opinion from a particularly well-funded piece of propaganda, and institutions willing to publish truths that upset advertisers, shareholders, governments and occasionally their own readers. It needs journalists with time, editors, legal support and institutional backing, free to do the job without justifying every investigation against the engagement figures of a dancing cat. Journalists who are more than decoration, kept in a dusty corner of a spectacularly shiny building so that management can point at them during the ESG presentation.
The reason the shiny things keep winning the budget meeting is embarrassingly simple. The value of a gala lands on the publisher’s own income statement. The value of an investigation mostly lands on somebody else’s. When local newspapers die, local mismanagement does not politely pack its bags and leave town, and economists have put a price on it: in a study of US counties between 1996 and 2015, Pengjie Gao, Chang Lee and Dermot Murphy found that after a local newspaper closed, municipal borrowing costs rose by 5 to 11 basis points, costing roughly $650,000 extra per bond issue, alongside higher government wages and deficits. That is one country, one kind of watchdog and one measurable symptom. Nobody at the gala ever receives that invoice. The taxpayers do, years later, without knowing why.
Switching off the lights doesn’t empty the room of scary things. It just makes it harder to see who’s moving around in it.
An LED wall will not save the Fourth Estate
Let me be clear. I have nothing against events, influencers, champagne or even the occasional grotesquely expensive gala; I have attended enough of the latter to know that some of them are rather good fun. None of them is an editorial strategy.
You cannot compensate for dismantling a newsroom by hiring a spectacularly photogenic host, installing an enormous LED wall in the lobby and announcing that you are now a premium multimedia experience ecosystem. And you cannot expect the public to keep trusting an institution that has quietly traded its capacity to investigate the world for its ability to throw a cocktail party about it. There is something almost obscene about watching media organizations celebrate their own importance to democracy while cutting the number of people employed to defend it. The investigative desk was closed last month. But the lighting is magnificent.
The people behind the bylines
Which brings me back to my nine friends, because behind all the grand arguments about platforms, AI and business models there are people. People who have missed birthdays because a story broke, spent evenings calling sources instead of eating with their families, stood outside courthouses in the rain, sat through interminable parliamentary hearings, traveled to places nobody wanted to visit and listened to stories that would keep most of us awake for weeks. People who made mistakes, corrected them, doubted, and carried on. People who still care, which is what makes their despair so painful to witness.
They are not asking to be protected from change. Most of them have survived more technological revolutions than the executives now explaining disruption to them: the internet, search, social networks, smartphones, video, podcasts, live blogs, data journalism, audience analytics, and now generative AI. The future doesn’t frighten them. What frightens them is that the people entrusted with building it seem to have forgotten why their organizations exist. They watch the budgets flow toward spectacle while the money for substance evaporates, and they watch the profession they love being treated as a legacy cost. And they are tired. God, they are tired.
I have never quite managed to let go of my attachment to the press, even after years on the other side of the business, among strategies, advertising models, audience measurements and the occasional executive who treats a journalist’s question as a personal insult. I still believe in it, though not blindly. Journalism has its failures, its arrogance, its herd instincts, its lazy shortcuts and its own collection of self-important idiots. I have met a few. Some of them have probably met me. The answer to imperfect journalism is better journalism, and certainly not its replacement by an automated content dispenser with an excellent tone of voice and no idea who is trafficking in the dark.
One question for the corner office
If you run a news media organization, here is a suggestion. The next time someone pitches an expensive initiative involving an influencer, an immersive experience, a content innovation hub or a champagne-fueled celebration of your brand’s magnificent relevance, ask one question: how will this make our journalism better? Leave the impressions, the annual-report photography and the Cannes case study out of it for a moment. How will it help us discover, verify, explain and publish something the public needs to know?
There may be a perfectly good answer. Events can finance reporting. Technology can free up time. New formats can carry important stories to people who would never otherwise meet them, and commercial invention can pay for editorial independence. Excellent. Do more of that. But if the honest answer is that it will make the brand look younger, sexier and more appealing to people who don’t read the news, you might first check whether the journalists upstairs have enough time to verify their sources. Or whether they still have jobs.
The most valuable thing a serious media organization owns is the trust accumulated by people who spent years getting things right, and that trust is visibly draining. The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report puts trust in news at 37% across 48 markets, the lowest since it began measuring in 2015, with significant falls in 29 of them. The same survey finds trust in news met on social media at 22% and in news delivered by AI chatbots at 20%, while trust in many established news brands has held up better than trust in news overall. Hold those numbers next to the replacement strategy. The channels the shiny-object crowd is betting on are exactly where trust is weakest. What still holds is the thing they are cutting.
When the last journalist leaves
I keep thinking about those nine conversations. Nine people who still believe that facts matter and that journalism is part of the infrastructure holding a free society together, and who sound as though they are apologizing for caring. It makes me sad. It also makes me furious, because this is the moment when the world is most volatile, most manipulated and hardest to read, when convincing nonsense can be manufactured at industrial speed, and when we should be investing in the people who know how to investigate, verify and explain. Instead, we are asking whether a chatbot can write the piece faster and whether a creator can make it go viral.
In April 1971, at the bottom of the Boeing bust, two real-estate agents rented a billboard near Seattle’s airport asking the last person leaving Seattle to turn out the lights. It was a joke, and Seattle kept its lights on. I wonder who will flip the switch when the last journalist has gone.
Perhaps the AI will handle it. Perhaps the creator will livestream it. Perhaps management will throw a gala to celebrate the successful completion of its editorial transformation program, with a keynote on the future of truth and an inspirational video. Outside, in the dark, the politicians, the fraudsters, the propagandists and the assorted professional manufacturers of bullshit will be having the time of their lives, with nobody left to ask the second question or make the third phone call.
But what a magnificent fucking gala.
