Sam Liebeskind

Fast-forward to the near future: AI has the potential to change the fundamentals of local news. In 2026, the news organizations that thrive will stop thinking of themselves as publishers and start operating as community information utilities. They won’t just report on the school board meeting. They will show you when it happens, let you search past... See more

Perhaps what we are witnessing is the birth of a cosmopolis characterized by a vastly deeper and more comprehensive kind of fixity than that introduced by print technology. An articulation of civilizational memory so rich, deep, and alive, it constitutes something like a planetary awakening, not merely into a new consciousness, but a new memory of... See more

But the constant changing of these privacy norms might only work to confuse our subliminal user habits even more. Our brains are increasingly disoriented by the different rules of each platform:

On LinkedIn, people can see if I view their profile.

On Instagram, people can see if I view their stories, but not their profile.

On TikTok, people can see... See more

All of this will tend to require that national actors— who sometimes like to act like every solution they offer is, almost definitionally, turnkey— become much better acquainted with the detailed operations of those they are seeking to help. And that will mean understanding that, at the operational level, almost every local newsroom is different,... See more

The mistake of the 1.0 platforms was to optimize for engagement—likes, clicks, and shares. This was a successful short-term growth strategy, but at the long-term cost of sustainability. For engagement includes not only joy but rage, not only mirth but sadness. Incentivizing these things creates hellishness, driving people to disengage, to become... See more

We’ve said this a hundred times before, but it’s always worth repeating: the world’s biggest news organisations aren’t reflecting the world. They are reflecting what’s dramatic, rare, and cheap enough to turn into a story. If you’re after an accurate picture of what’s getting worse, or what’s improving, you’ll need to look somewhere other than the... See more