From a Big Tech crackdown to the rebirth of local news, 16 future-minded thinkers predict where journalism will be in 15 years.
It’s almost conventional wisdom right now that the news media is in a fast-moving crisis, with mainstream news sources collapsing and Americans increasingly divided not only in what they read, but even what facts they choose to believe. How much worse will it get? Or is there a way out? When shunted through digital media, information behaves like water: It flows together, it melds and it finds its lowest common level. The trivial blurs with the profound, the false with the true. The news bulletin and the dance meme travel in the same stream, with the same weight. Content collapses.
Journalism will move closer to being part of the solution. Too often, as part of the power structure, it has exacerbated the problem.
News deserts keep growing. Hedge funds continue to acquire local news operations and cut staffs.
In Democrat-majority states, legislators pump public money into the decaying news ecosystem, with journalists self-censoring any critique that might endanger the cash flow, and almost all of which flows to big population centers.
By 2037, the American media landscape may look more like 1837 than 1937. There will be few professional reporters. Many outlets in 1837 were single-person outfits, just as many news operations will be single-person Substacks or equivalents in 2037. Journalistic norms and standards will be the exception, not the norm.
But some time ago, the wall in journalism separating advocacy from objectivity was breached. Today, as we speak, the “who, what, where and when” of storytelling with an added mixture of “how and why,” has given way to outright selling of carefully tailored tales designed to appeal to targeted audiences, told by opinionated reporters untethered to facts.
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https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/01/21/media-journalism-future-527294
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Have you noticed OAN, NEWSMAX are not in the picture! Lol