Journalism 2050

In the 2024 US presidential election, prediction markets achieved a double victory: they accurately predicted the result—prompting unmatchable publicity—and they found in Donald Trump a powerful ally and promoter. Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to and investor in both Kalshi and Polymarket, the two leading companies in the industry. In the past two years, they have exploited a newly friendly regulatory environment to make their profits and popularity soar. Between May and July, the amount being traded on Polymarket and Kalshi doubled, to fifty-three billion dollars a month. They are now worth an estimated sixty billion dollars combined.

Prediction markets let users put down wagers—which look and sound a lot like bets, but with even looser regulations—on almost everything: traditional sports, tomorrow’s weather, how many times President Trump will post on Truth Social this week, even whether Jesus Christ will return to Earth before 2027. On Kalshi alone, as CJR’s Ivan L. Nagy reported yesterday in an interview with the company’s chief executive, Tarek Mansour, Americans wagered more than 1.3 billion dollars in recent months on the outcomes of the midterms. In this episode of Journalism 2050, cohosts Emily Bell, Heather Chaplin, and Samuel Earle are joined by Kate Knibbs, a senior reporter at Wired, to discuss the rise of prediction markets and what it means for journalism. 

Kalshi and Polymarket have already cut deals with several big newsrooms, offering money and data in exchange for publicity. At the same time, one of their core promotional claims—that their products can reveal what’s happening more accurately than journalists or pollsters—represents a frontal assault on the very outlets they call “partners,” and on the journalists those organizations employ. “I’ve noticed that even though the prediction markets have been really successful at making deals with some pretty big media outlets and names, there’s still a lot of pushback from individual journalists,” Knibbs says.

Credits:

Producer: Sarah Myles

Research: Samuel Earle

Production assistant: Hana Joy

Art: Katie Kosma

Music: Henry Crooks

It may be hard to believe now, but there was a time, in the early 2000s, when many felt that social media would revitalize the public sphere and herald a new age of democratic participation. Two decades later, each week seems to bring fresh evidence of how tech platforms enable, amplify, and even encourage racist and misogynistic abuse. The coordinated campaign against Jane Doe, the woman at the center of the Cornell Seven case, is only the latest example in the headlines.

Julie Posetti, an award-winning journalist and a leading researcher of online misogyny, has watched this worrying reality unfold in real time. Two decades ago, she was optimistic that social media would help women in public life. More recently, she has overseen two major studies for UN Women, in 2020 and 2025, that reveal, based on surveys with women human rights defenders, activists, and journalists, a shocking escalation in attacks against women in public life. “When we surveyed this group in 2020, one-fifth of them reported offline attacks, abuse, and harassment connected to the online violence they had experienced,” Posetti wrote, summarizing the report’s findings. “But when we repeated the survey five years later, that alarming statistic had more than doubled—to 42 percent.”

In this episode of Journalism 2050, recorded live at Zeg, a storytelling festival held this past June in Tbilisi, Posetti joins cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to discuss the stakes for women reporters on the internet and how we got here. “The licensing of networked misogyny is explicit,” Posetti says. “There’s a global rollback of women’s rights happening before our eyes.”

Credits:

Producer: Sarah Myles

Research: Samuel Earle

Production assistant: Hana Joy

Art: Katie Kosma

Music: Henry Crooks

When The Atlas, a digital newspaper, launched earlier this year, it billed itself as “the new samizdat.” The term recalls the dissident networks that distributed forbidden news and literature in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and ’60s, evading the censors. According to The Atlas, today’s samizdat—which roughly translates as “self-publishing”—must evade a different threat: big tech platforms, which wield their own form of imperious control over the flow of information. “For me, the parallel seemed very obvious,” Natalia Antelava, who was born in then-Soviet Georgia and cofounded The Atlas, says. 

The Atlas is published monthly via PDF—“the least sexy technological application imaginable,” as Simon Allison, fellow cofounder of The Atlas, admits—and distributed over Signal. “That lets us bypass digital censorship, of both the authoritarian and algorithmic varieties,” the paper explains in its latest edition. Aiming to provide a truly global perspective, the project grew out of a collaboration between Antelava’s Coda Story, a nonprofit news organization established in 2016, and Allison’s The Continent, an Africa-wide digital newspaper that publishes stories via PDF “for Africans and by Africans.”

In this episode of Journalism 2050, recorded live at Zeg, a storytelling festival held this past June in Tbilisi, Antelava and Allison discuss what inspired The Atlas with cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin. “Right now, we’re all making bets on the future of journalism. No one knows exactly where we’re going,” Allison says. “But any bet that is predicated on a big tech company’s platform is going to fail.”

Credits: 

Producer: Sarah Myles

Research: Samuel Earle

Production assistant: Hana Joy

Art: Katie Kosma

Music: Henry Crooks

In 1990, a chance encounter in the office elevator changed the trajectory of Razia Iqbal’s career. She was then a subeditor at the BBC on a six-month contract. Days later, she was on a flight to Pakistan as the BBC’s foreign correspondent, after the position had been vacated at short notice. It was supposed to be a quiet stint. But shortly after she arrived, Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s prime minister, was dismissed from office, prompting a political crisis, and Iqbal, who had no experience as a broadcaster, found herself providing rolling coverage on television and radio for the BBC World Service’s global audience.

Iqbal never looked back. Across the next thirty years, she became one of the BBC’s most ubiquitous and successful journalists. She worked as a foreign correspondent in Sri Lanka during the civil war in the 1990s; as the anchor for BBC Newshour, the channel’s flagship radio show on current affairs; and as an arts journalist. She left the BBC in 2023 and is now a visiting professor at Princeton University; she also serves on the editorial board of The Nation. 

In this episode of Journalism 2050, recorded live at Zeg, a storytelling festival held this past June in Tbilisi, Iqbal reflects on her career and the state of journalism in conversation with cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin. Since the 1990s, Iqbal has had a front-row seat not just to world events but also to the transformation of the journalism industry. “I feel like we are in a clarifying moment where you need to take a stand, if you believe in journalism,” she says. “I still only just believe in journalism.”

Credits: 

Producer: Sarah Myles

Research: Samuel Earle

Production assistant: Hana Joy

Art: Katie Kosma

Music: Henry Crooks

In Georgia, since a new party took power in 2024, founded by a billionaire oligarch with links to Russia, journalists are facing unprecedented attacks. All sorts of repression have become more common: physical assaults, arrests, arbitrary fines, suspensions of accreditation, and more. But perhaps the most devastating blow was less direct. After the government clamped down on all foreign funding and grants to Georgian organizations, citing them as examples of malign foreign interference, many independent media outlets lost as much as 90 percent of their budgets.

Now journalists in Georgia are fighting back. In August of 2025, more than twenty online media outlets launched The Lights Must Stay On, a campaign to raise awareness of their collective struggle against authoritarianism. The effort gave rise to a new network, Sinatle Media, with a simple objective: to keep independent media in Georgia alive. It is based on the recognition that this can only happen when journalists work together. 

In this episode of Journalism 2050, recorded live at Zeg, a storytelling festival in Tbilisi, cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin speak with two members of Sinatle Media: Lika Antadze, an executive director of Chai Khana, which gives a voice to underrepresented groups in the region; and Nino Bakradze, the editor and cofounder of iFact, an investigative media collective. What have they learned from their shared fight against a despotic regime? How do the precarious economics of journalism today make it more vulnerable to political attacks? And why did a flea market, of all things, fill them with hope? 

Producer: Sarah Myles
Research: Samuel Earle
Production Assistant: Hana Joy 
Art: Katie Kosma
Music: Henry Crooks 

When Ronald Reagan won the presidency, in 1980, it was a victory long in the making. For almost half a century, conservatives had plotted ways to cut taxes and undo workers’ rights. Their playbook for political influence went something like this: create a think tank, publish reputable reports, build relationships with journalists and politicians, and disseminate free-market ideas to the public, creating a new common sense. 

Today, the art of political influence is rather different. Think tanks no longer claim the power they once did and, since the rise of social media, newspapers and traditional journalists have lost their grip on public opinion. Perhaps this new state of affairs was best captured by Elon Musk when, shortly after taking over Twitter, in 2023, he declared that all press inquiries would receive an automated reply with the poop emoji. That is not the move of someone who believes the press is an essential tool in influencing public opinion.

In this episode of the Journalism 2050 podcast, cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin are joined by two guests: Kim Phillips Fein is a renowned historian of American conservatism and capitalism and the author of Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan, among other books. Samuel Earle is the author of Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party and a PhD candidate at Columbia Journalism School. Together, they ask: How has the nature of political influence changed? What are the implications for journalism? And what, if anything, can the left learn from the right’s success?

Producer: Amanda Darrach

Research: Samuel Earle

Production Assistant: Riddhi Setty

Art Director: Katie Kosma

Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez

Music: Henry Crooks

Before Elon Musk, there was Henry Ford: an attention-seeking car manufacturer, newspaper owner, and media celebrity who pushed reactionary views on the public and transformed society around his business interests. “Fordism” was more than a mode of production, it was a way of organizing society, involving large factories, nuclear families, stable employment, and affordable cars, refrigerators, and televisions.

In a new book, Muskism, Ben Tarnoff, a technology writer, and Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, analyze Musk in similar terms, as a maverick businessman who stands for a new type of society and a new social contract. They find that “Muskism” provides a far more dystopian package than Fordism’s offering. It is a world of strict and unforgiving hierarchies where governments exist in symbiotic relationship with Silicon Valley, social welfare erodes, and Musk is a self-appointed “techno-king.” Want safety or stability? Buy a Cybertruck. 

In this episode of the Journalism 2050 podcast, Tarnoff and Slobodian join cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to discuss Muskism’s vision of society, where it came from, and what the implications for journalism are. What does Muskism offer the public besides dystopia? How did Musk’s purchase of Twitter fit into his plans? What does journalism free from Muskism look like?

Producer: Amanda Darrach

Production Coordinator: Hana Joy

Research: Samuel Earle

Art Director: Katie Kosma

Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez

Music: Henry Crooks

How can journalism survive? Perhaps the question would once have sounded unduly panicked, but it has only grown more pressing over the past twenty years. Between 2004 and 2019, newspapers lost an astonishing 77 percent of their jobs—more than any other industry on record, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In early February, the industry suffered another historic blow, as the Washington Post announced it was laying off nearly half its staff. When even a legacy media outlet like the Post struggles—when even ownership by Jeff Bezos, who has a net worth of two hundred and fifty billion dollars, cannot guarantee stability—it is easy to wonder what hope there is. Is journalism slowly, or not so slowly, going kaput? 

Not so fast. 

In this episode of Journalism 2050, we’re joined by two guests who show—in different yet equally promising ways—what the future of journalism can look like. Vanan Murugesan is the executive director of Sahan Journal, a widely acclaimed local news organization in Minneapolis that was set up in 2019 to cover immigrants and people of color. Joshi Herrmann is the founder of Mill Media, which launched in Manchester in 2020 and now provides high-quality local journalism across six different cities in the UK. 

Sahan Journal is one of a growing number of nonprofit news organizations that rely on philanthropic grants. (The Institute for Nonprofit News now counts over four hundred members.) Mill Media’s success is based on subscriptions. Both are thriving, and both provide models that others can follow. What are the risks and rewards of each approach? Have we been too quick to accept that journalism cannot be profitable in the digital age? And what changes when, with rising authoritarianism, the pressures confronting a free press become political as well as economic? 

Suggested Reading:

• “Straight to your inbox: meet the journalists shaking up local UK news,” The Guardian, July 2024
• “Sahan Journal Is Built for When the National Media Leaves,” CJR, December 2025

Hosts: Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin

Producer: Amanda Darrach

Production Coordinator: Hana Joy

Research: Samuel Earle

Art Director: Katie Kosma

Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez

Music: Henry Crooks

In 2016, Sarah Alvarez, a former civil-rights lawyer and reporter, reimagined what journalism could be. Rather than break news or publish stories on a website, her project, Outlier Media, promised to provide the people of Detroit with information on any property they wanted, via text message—all they had to do was ask. Alvarez hoped that with vetted information, locals could hold landlords to account and avoid property scams in an increasingly hostile housing market. It was to be the first of many such services that Outlier would provide, all centered around making important information more accessible, in line with people’s needs. “I was not satisfied with covering low-income communities for a higher-income audience,” she said in 2018. “I wanted to cover issues for and with low-income news consumers.”

Outlier Media now stands as an example of an innovative local media landscape defying the darkest prophecies of journalism’s future. Outlier has pioneered a new journalistic approach—highly interactive, collaborative, responsive, practical, community-focused—to old goals: holding the powerful to account. Its text message system exists alongside original investigative reporting, which is targeted “on issues where better information alone can’t make a difference,” as its site explains. Outlier’s radical mission is journalism that serves not people’s curiosity but their material needs.

In this episode of the Journalism 2050 Podcast, Alvarez and Candice Fortman join Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to discuss community-focused news, how the media landscape has changed over the last decade, and what the future holds. Alvarez is the James B. Steele Chair in Journalism Innovation at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication. Fortman is a media consultant who served as Outlier Media’s Executive Editor between 2019 and 2024.

Suggested Reading/Listening:
How Outlier is helping Detroiters get millions of dollars back from Wayne County, Nieman Lab, April 2025

Candice Fortman, Commencement address for the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Class of 2025, May 2025

Civic Guides: How to solve everyday issues in Detroit, influence local decision-making and make the city work for you — written for Detroiters by Detroiters, Outlier Media (series)

Producer: Amanda Darrach

Production Coordinator: Hana Joy

Research: Samuel Earle

Art Director: Katie Kosma

Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez

Music: Henry Crooks

In 2007, Valleywag, Gawker’s gossip column devoted to Silicon Valley, published a short piece about a then-little-known venture capitalist and tech founder, under the headline “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” Thiel’s sexuality wasn’t a secret, nor was the piece mocking. “Peter Thiel, the smartest VC in the world, is gay,” it read. “More power to him.” But it was the first time this information was made public, and Thiel didn’t welcome the attention. He vowed privately to get revenge on Valleywag. It took him almost a decade for his quest to succeed. In March 2016, a lawsuit against Gawker brought by Hulk Hogan over the publication of a leaked sex tape resulted in its bankruptcy. Hogan, like everyone else, only discovered the identity of his mysterious and dedicated benefactor after the trial.

The Gawker trial was a turning point, both for Thiel personally and for perceptions about the tech industry. His friends would say that, without the Gawker trial, Thiel’s early endorsement of Donald Trump that same year was unthinkable. To others, Thiel’s readiness to simply shut down an online publication that he did not like revealed, perhaps more than any other event up to that point, the authoritarian tendencies of the tech industry and how hollow its commitments to “free information” were. The outlook for digital journalism was ominous.

What are the lessons from the Gawker trial, ten years later? What is its political legacy? And how can digital journalism build a safe future in the face of such severe threats? In this episode of Journalism 2050, Emily Bell is joined by three guests. Maria Bustillos is a journalist, editor, and self-described “information activist” who reported from the courtroom during the Gawker trial. Samuel Earle is the author of Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party and a PhD candidate at Columbia Journalism School. Marine Doux is the cofounder and editorial director of Médianes and a research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. 

SHOW NOTES:

“Hulk Hogan is the Donald Trump of ‘sports entertainment,’” Maria Bustillos, Popula

Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue, Ryan Holiday

“Editorial Independence Means Technological Independence,” Owen Huchon, CJR

Médianes Studio—A European Partner for Independent Media

Producer: Amanda Darrach

Production Coordinator: Hana Joy

Research: Samuel Earle

Art Director: Katie Kosma

Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez

Music: Henry Crooks