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

In 2006, Jay Rosen, the media scholar, published his influential article “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” His medium was as important as his message. Although the essay would later appear in media-studies textbooks, it was first published on his blog, a form invented in the late 1990s that seemed, in Rosen’s words, to give everyone their own printing press. Armed with such technologies, he said, the public would no longer simply consume journalism as passive spectators. They now owned the means of media production. A beautiful democracy and a newly accountable press were sure to flourish. 

As Rosen knows as well as anyone, the world did not quite pan out that way. What was initially understood to be a technology of liberation became, increasingly, a mechanism of control: a means of surveilling the public, selling ads, and generating enormous profits for a small number of companies. Journalism and democracy both entered periods of sustained crisis from which they have yet to recover. The internet has even begun to abandon participation as part of its core ethos. As a recent analysis by the Financial Times shows, “social media has become less social”: partly because of these platforms’ algorithms, people are interacting with one another less and returning to the passive media consumption that the internet was supposed to disrupt. In this context, it seems that the people formerly known as the audience are… once again the audience.

In this episode of Journalism 2050, Rosen joins Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to discuss where it all went wrong and what journalists can do to fight back. Were the assumptions that the internet would help democracy and journalism simply naive? What did commentators fail to see at the time? What should we make of the return to blogging culture via platforms like Substack and Medium? 

Further Reading:

“The People Formerly Known as the Audience,” Jay Rosen, Press Think, June 2006

“Have we passed peak social media?” John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times, October 2025

“Winter is coming: prospects for the American press under Trump,” Jay Rosen, Press Think, December 2016

Hosts: Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin

Producer: Amanda Darrach

Editor: Emily Russell

Production Coordinator: Hana Joy

Research: Samuel Earle

Art Director: Katie Kosma

Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez

Music: Henry Crooks

It has been called “the last good day on the internet”: on February 26, 2015, Americans flocked online to watch fugitive llamas in Arizona evade their captors on a live broadcast, shortly before an ambiguously colored dress—blue and black to some, white and gold to others—was uploaded online. At BuzzFeed, which sent the dress to unprecedented levels of global virality, Ben Smith watched it all unfold. He realized in that moment just how popular divisive content could be. In hindsight, it was a grim foreshadowing: social media created the perfect conditions for an exceedingly polarizing presidential candidate to thrive.

In this episode of Journalism 2050, Smith, the cofounder and editor in chief of Semafor, joins Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to reflect on the thrill of being a journalist in the early years of social media, the internet’s evolution since then, and how AI has become the latest vehicle for techno-evangelism. Even as politics and the tech industry tack right, he insists upon his “core conviction” that good journalism will always find a way to survive.

Should we mourn journalism’s past? How worrying is the future of the news? If Ben Smith was starting out now, would he even be a journalist? Over twenty-five years, as a blogger, editor, and founder—from Politico and BuzzFeed News to the New York Times and, now, Semafor—Smith’s career has always been a revealing indicator of the state of the journalism industry, and where it’s going next.

Further Reading:

• “What Colors Are This Dress?” BuzzFeed, February 26, 2015
• “The Internet of the 2010s Ended Today,” by Charlie Warzel, April 2023, on how BuzzFeed News “defined an era.”
• “The New York Times’ success lays bare the media's disastrous state,” Emily Bell, The Guardian, February 2020
• “Why the Success of the New York Times May Be Bad News for Journalism,” Ben Smith, New York Times, March 2020

When Natalia Antelava co-founded Coda Story in early 2016 to cover democratic backsliding around the globe, she wasn’t expecting the tech industry to be such a big part of the story. It wasn’t only that autocratic regimes were benefiting from compliant Silicon Valley companies. By launching a new media organization, Antelava also discovered how entangled journalism itself had become with some of the same companies, which proclaimed their commitment to a free press while quietly cozying up to their enemies.

In this episode of Journalism 2050, Antelava joins Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to discuss the naivety with which news organizations treated the likes of Google and Facebook in the early years of the internet, and some of the bizarre conferences, collaborations and initiatives that resulted from it. To secure journalism’s future, Antelava warns, there must never be such innocence again. “We got into bed with the wrong guys, and we got ourselves in big trouble,” she says. 

How responsible are journalists for the perilous state of their industry? Who are their “natural allies”? And as the authoritarian tendencies of the internet’s gatekeepers become clearer and clearer, what compromises might journalists make, and what red lines must they draw?

Further Reading:

Coda Story: An interview with Richard Gingras

The Guardian: Apple and Google Accused of Political Censorship Over Alexei Navalny App

Freedom House: The Uncertain Future of the Global Internet

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

Examining an ongoing crisis for press freedom—and how to manage security risks going forward.

For Journalism 2050’s inaugural live event, Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin are joined by Azmat Khan, the director of Columbia’s Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism, and Anya Schiffrin, a professor at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, to discuss the consequences of the war on Gaza on journalism and what history can teach us about the role of the press in times of crisis.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, it took only ten weeks at the end of 2022 for Israel to kill more journalists in Gaza than had previously been killed in any one country over an entire year. The attacks have not relented in the three years since: while barring international journalists from entry, the Israeli military has treated journalists inside Gaza as acceptable collateral damage and even, at times, explicit targets. In September, Irene Khan, the UN special rapporteur, described it as “the deadliest conflict ever for journalists.” 

These attacks on journalism, and the limp response from the US and other powerful countries, set a dangerous precedent for the future. How might journalists and media organizations take the defense of their principles and values into their own hands? What lessons can we learn from the past? What tools do journalists need to navigate this new world? 

Further reading: 

• Urgent Ideas for Defending Press Freedom in Gaza, Columbia Journalism Review, by Azmat Khan, Meghnad Bose, and Lauren Watson
• Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Journalism from Around the World, edited by Anya Schiffrin

Producer: Amanda Darrach

Production Coordinator: Hana Joy

Research: Samuel Earle

Art Director: Katie Kosma

Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez

Music: Henry Crooks

In 1992, a writer named Douglas Rushkoff signed a contract for Cyberia, his book about the internet subcultures of the West Coast. The next year, his publisher canceled it, according to Rushkoff’s recollection, on the grounds that “by the time the book came out the Internet was going to be over.” (He later found a different publisher, and the book came out in 1994.) Since then, Rushkoff has been one of the most entertaining and pointed futurists (though he prefers “presentist” these days) chronicling Silicon Valley’s effects on culture and communications. His books include Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, and Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of Tech Billionaires. His Team Human podcast is required listening for skeptics of artificial intelligence.

Emily Bell, the founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, and Heather Chaplin, the director of the New School’s Journalism + Design Lab, ask Rushkoff about what lessons we can draw from the anarchic free spirited origins of web publishing that can be applied to our present moment of techno authoritarianism and the dominance of Silicon Valley. 

As for what Rushkoff's outlook is for 2050, “the worst case is we will have ceased to be”—a bleak scenario. But the more optimistic case is that we will see a stratified media ecosystem emerge, with a number of large global players collaborating on complex stories, and a rich vibrant network of smaller local and niche players. 

Further Reading and Listening:

“We Will Coup whoever We Want: the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros”

Team Human podcast

John Perry Barlow : A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Producer: Amanda Darrach
Production Coordinator: Hana Joy
Research: Samuel Earle
Art Director: Katie Kosma
Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez
Music: Henry Crooks

Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin speak with the smartest minds in media to discuss the roots of today's crisis in journalism, from democracy's decline to the rise of AI, and to explore the uncertain future of journalism in the digital age.

This series is brought to you by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Columbia Journalism Review, with help from the New School's Journalism + Design Lab. 

Journalism 2050 is supported by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and available wherever you get your podcasts