Media on the incumbent web is in crisis. It turns out that paying publishers for clicks, endless loops of “content” and ads, all served on platforms far beyond their maximum-viable scale is ideal for misinformation, disinformation and the decay of trust.

mean anything at all. On the front page of the gray old Times, I’m liable to encounter a chatty article about frying with propane gas. CNN lavished hours of airtime on a runaway bride. The magisterial tones of Walter Cronkite, America’s rich uncle, are lost to history, replaced by the ex-cheerleader mom style of Katie Couric. One reason the notion

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So it is not just the case that the business of news is challenged, or that people are sceptical of news media and generally hold journalism in low regard—though both of these things are true. It is that on almost every measurable indicator, the social contract between much of the public and the news, as traditionally conceived, reported and... See more

At the heart of this transformation, perhaps, is the reality that news media at scale may have been a collective fiction. In the platform age, consumers create their own content mixes, usually based on trusted or affinity-aligned sources. The very notion of a newsroom —a one-stop, always-on bodega of information spanning politics to sports, manned... See more