Journalism Is Dead, Long Live Journalism

The Obituary Everyone Saw Coming

The newspaper is dead. This isn't controversial anymore; it's just arithmetic. Print advertising revenue collapsed by 80% in two decades. Newsrooms shed half their staff. Local papers vanished entirely from hundreds of communities. The institution that defined professional journalism for over a century is functionally gone.

Good riddance? Not exactly. But also not entirely tragic.

The mourning over journalism's death often confuses two very different things: an industry and a practice. The industry (with its ad-subsidized business model, its gatekeeping hierarchies, its professional class of credentialed reporters) that's what died. The practice of investigating, documenting, and explaining events of public importance? That's harder to kill.

What the Industry Actually Was

Here's something people forget: the golden age of journalism was an accident.

The newspaper business model worked because of a quirk in advertising economics. Newspapers bundled classified ads, display ads, and news content together. Readers came for any of these things (job listings, car sales, local news) and advertisers paid for access to those eyeballs. The journalism was essentially subsidized by people selling used furniture.

This wasn't some noble arrangement designed to serve democracy. It was a business. A profitable one. And for a while, that profit happened to fund serious reporting.

When the internet unbundled everything (when Craigslist ate classifieds and Google ate display ads) the subsidy disappeared. The journalism had never been paying for itself. It had been riding along on other revenue streams. Once those dried up, so did the newsrooms.

The Myth of Objectivity

The professional journalism that emerged from this model came with its own ideology. Objectivity. Balance. The view from nowhere.

This was always partly a marketing strategy. Newspapers needed to appeal to broad audiences to maximize advertising reach. Taking strong editorial positions alienated readers (and their eyeballs). So "objective" reporting became the standard, not because it was epistemologically superior, but because it was commercially useful.

And it created problems. The fetish for balance produced absurdities: treating climate deniers as equally credible as climate scientists, framing every issue as having exactly two legitimate sides. The commitment to access journalism meant reporters couldn't afford to antagonize powerful sources. The professionalization of news created a class of journalists more similar to each other than to the communities they covered.

None of this means professional journalism was worthless. It produced genuine investigative work. It created accountability mechanisms. It documented history. But the institution was never as noble as its mythology suggested.

Where Journalism Lives Now

So the industry collapsed. Where did the practice go?

Everywhere. And nowhere coherent.

Some of it migrated to nonprofit models, investigative outfits funded by foundations and donations. This works for certain kinds of journalism, especially long-form investigations that don't require daily production. But foundation funding comes with its own constraints. You can't bite the hands that feed you, and wealthy donors have interests too.

Some of it went to Substack and similar platforms, individual journalists building direct relationships with paying readers. This model rewards voice and personality over institutional credibility. It's produced some excellent work. It's also produced an enormous amount of opinion content masquerading as reporting. (Not that the old model didn't have that problem too.)

Some of it dispersed into what might be called "accidental journalism": subject matter experts documenting their fields, hobbyists investigating topics that interest them, witnesses recording events on their phones. This isn't journalism in any traditional sense. But it often serves the same function: creating records of events and making information public.

And some of it just disappeared. The city council meetings that nobody covers anymore. The local corruption that goes uninvestigated. The small-town events that vanish without documentation. This is the real loss: not the prestige outlets, but the boring, essential coverage of ordinary civic life.

The Access Problem

Here's the thing about journalism that rarely gets discussed: most of it was always dependent on access.

Reporters need sources. They need people who will talk to them, give them documents, explain what's happening. This creates an inherent tension. The people with the best access to information are usually the people with power, and those people have interests in how they're portrayed.

The professional model handled this tension through institutional backing. A reporter for a major paper could afford to antagonize a source because the institution would protect them and find other sources. Independent journalists don't have that protection. They're more vulnerable to access capture, becoming dependent on maintaining relationships with the powerful.

But professional journalists were also subject to access capture, just at an institutional level. Entire beats became captured: reporters who couldn't afford to lose access to the White House, or Wall Street, or whatever institution they covered. The constraints were different, not absent.

What Actually Matters

Strip away the institutions, the professional norms, the business models. What's the core function journalism is supposed to serve?

Creating public knowledge. Documenting events. Investigating wrongdoing. Explaining complex systems. Holding power accountable. Making the invisible visible.

These functions don't require newspapers. They don't require credentialed professionals. They don't require any particular institutional form. They require people with curiosity, access, and the ability to communicate what they find.

The internet radically expanded who could do this work. It also radically fragmented it. There's no longer a shared information environment where "the news" meant roughly the same thing to everyone. There are countless overlapping spheres, each with different standards, different assumptions, different relationships to truth.

Is this better? Worse? It's different. The old system had serious problems: concentration of narrative control, professional blindspots, commercial pressures warping coverage. The new system has different problems: fragmentation, misinformation, economic precarity for practitioners.

Long Live Journalism

The practice of journalism, the act of investigating and documenting and explaining, isn't going away. Humans are curious. We want to know what's happening. We want someone to make sense of complexity for us.

What's changing is how this work gets organized, funded, and distributed. The institutional forms are in flux. The professional identity is fragmenting. The economic models are still being figured out.

But the need remains. Someone has to show up at the city council meeting. Someone has to read the budget documents. Someone has to ask why the water is contaminated. Someone has to document the events that would otherwise vanish into the past.

The newspaper is dead. Journalism continues, transformed, dispersed, struggling to find sustainable forms. The question isn't whether journalism will survive. It's what shape it will take, and who will have the resources to practice it.

The obituary was accurate. The succession is unclear. And somewhere, right now, someone is documenting something important, without credentials, without institutional backing, without a business model, simply because it matters and they can.

Long live journalism. Whatever it becomes.