While the newspaper industry continues to contract, nonprofit news outlets have proliferated over the past decade. But dismissing profitable models for journalism is premature. 

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

Experts discuss the risks posed to journalism as the courts test the limits of press freedom law.

If I recall correctly, the original news peg for a live Kicker recording about threats to the free press was a raid on the home of Hannah Natanson, a Washington Post reporter. By the time Amanda Darrach, The Kicker’s producer, and I were finalizing logistics for the event, which took place in CJR’s office, two independent journalists—Don Lemon and Georgia Fort—had been arrested for covering a protest in Minneapolis. A few days before we recorded, the Post eliminated three hundred–plus jobs. Suffice it to say, I had plenty to talk about. 

I also had dream guests with whom to talk about it all. David Enrich, a deputy investigations editor at the New York Times, wrote the excellent 2025 book Murder the Truth about efforts to overturn the media law precedent set by New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964. Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute, has been involved in litigating dozens of crucial cases on press freedom. In wrapping up the interview, I said I had about seven hundred more questions for them; in retrospect, that may have been an undercount.

Recording live also meant the rare chance to take questions from other smart people, including Fabio Bertoni, the general counsel for The New Yorker, and Tsehai Alfred, the editor in chief of the Columbia Daily Spectator. 

SHOW NOTES
Q&A: David Enrich on the Right-Wing Plot to ‘Murder’ Libel Protections, Jon Allsop, CJR

Barnard suspends WKCR and Spectator reporters who covered Butler Library protest, Isha Banerjee, Columbia Spectator

Can the Media’s Right to Pursue the Powerful Survive Trump’s Second Term? David Enrich, the New York Times Magazine 

Megan Greenwell, host

Amanda Darrach, producer

Jim Bittel, assistant dean of broadcast and multimedia technology, adjunct professor, and multimedia facility consultant 

A.J. Mangone, assistant director, broadcast and multimedia technology 

Pedro Florentin, videographer

Jamal Jones, videographer

Katie Kosma, art director

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

At first, January 7 felt to Bob Batz Jr. like a triumphant day. The U.S. Supreme Court had declined to consider an appeal from Batz’s longtime employer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the latest in a long string of legal victories for the paper’s union. After more than three years on strike, Batz and twenty-four colleagues returned to work in late November. Now, the P-G was legally obligated to reinstate the workers’ previous health plan, plus reimburse costs accrued when management failed to bargain in good faith.

A few hours after rejoicing over the Supreme Court news, though, elation turned to mourning. Citing 350 million dollars in losses over twenty years, the P-G’s owner, Block Communications, announced it would shut down the paper — one of the oldest in the country — effective May 3. The company took no questions from its employees. 

The three weeks since have brought a flurry of activity designed to save some version of the Post-Gazette. Batz and his colleagues have been meeting multiple times a week — sometimes with potential funders, sometimes alone — to figure out the best path forward. This morning, a group of them announced the launch of the Pittsburgh Alliance for People-Empowered Reporting (PAPER), which is raising money to research “worker-owned and non-profit models as well as the potential for a truly independent Post-Gazette.” Forty-nine of their coworkers who didn’t strike, meanwhile, are working to overthrow union leadership in hopes of negotiating with Block Communications. Seemingly everyone in Pittsburgh’s large philanthropic world seems to be chattering about the potential for a nonprofit model.

For this week’s episode of The Kicker, I talked to Batz about the highs and lows of his thirty-plus years at the P-G and his three years on strike, from his job editing the strikers’ award-winning newspaper, to the friendships that ended as a result of the battle, to the efforts to build something new.

SHOW NOTES

Pittsburgh Alliance for People-Empowered Reporting (PAPER)

Pittsburgh Union Progress

Host: Megan Greenwell

Producer: Amanda Darrach

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, which he described as “the Silicon Valley equivalent of al Qaeda,” a “Manhattan-based terrorist organization” that was apparently terrifying tech bros into conformity. 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:

Annual reports are generally pretty boring documents, bogged down with numbers taken out of context and marketing-speak about “thriving in the face of unprecedented challenges.”

Not Jasper Wang’s. At the end of 2025, the cofounder and vice president of revenue and operations at Defector—the pioneering worker-owned sports site that grew from the ashes of Deadspin—managed to reinvent the genre, writing a riveting six-thousand-something first-person words containing not only full transparency on the company’s revenue and costs, but also a meditation on the past, present, and future of worker-owned co-ops. “When Defector staffers speak to journalists interested in starting their own publications, with some frequency we sense that they are naively imagining worker ownership as a panacea to the ills of their previous workplaces, and treating meaningful subscription revenue as a foregone conclusion,” he wrote. “But the truth is that launching your own business is hard, and much harder today than it was five years ago.”

As I started thinking about what The Kicker could sound like with me in the host chair, I knew immediately that I wanted to interview Jasper first. Narratives about exciting new business models like worker ownership often get flattened; rooting for them to thrive can sometimes mean talking less than honestly about the challenges as well as the triumphs. Despite Defector’s innumerable triumphs, Jasper never falls into that trap. Listen to his wisdom wherever you get your podcasts.

SHOW NOTES
Defector Annual Report, September 2024–August 2025

Host: Megan Greenwell

Producer: Amanda Darrach

The Kicker returns with our former host, Josh Hersh, and our new one, Megan Greenwell, in conversation.

Between President Trump’s legal battles against news outlets, the defunding of public media, the rise of creator journalism, wave after wave of layoffs, and at least twelve hundred more things I’ve forgotten, Josh Hersh hosted this podcast during an eventful time for the journalism industry. Then he left! 

Now you have me. I’m an author and magazine features writer, and a longtime writer and editor at publications including ESPN the Magazine (RIP), Deadspin (RIP), GOOD magazine (RIP), and even some that still exist (the Washington Post, Wired, etc.). I’m very excited to be taking over from Josh, who—as you will learn in this episode—was one of the first journalists I really admired. 

Going through the archive of Kicker episodes from Josh’s run, one thing that sticks out is how many of the stories he covered are still relevant now. And a thousand new ones seem to pop up every day, so I don’t think my run is likely to be any less exciting than his. I wanted to have Josh on as my very first guest to talk about what he learned from hosting this show and what advice he has for me. We talked about journalists’ ongoing battle for relevance in the age of streamers and why journalists should never marry journalists. He even persuaded me to pay more attention to TV news. 

I hope to make The Kicker feel approachable and warm, like listening in on conversations at the dive bar around the corner from the newsroom. Mostly, I’m excited to talk to a whole bunch of smart people in the only industry I’ve ever worked in and call it a (part time) job. I’d love to hear from you about what you think I should cover on The Kicker and who you think I should have on. Let’s get going.

Show Notes

Ex-Reporter Relies on the Book, Not the Pen, Joshua Hersh, Columbia Spectator

Alex Jones Says Trump Is Just The Start, Michael Moynihan, VICE News

‘I Try to Find the Question That People Cannot Squirm Out Of’: Nashville’s Phil Williams on local investigative reporting, Josh Hersh, The Kicker

Host: Megan Greenwell

Producer: Amanda Darrach

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

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

When Natalia Antelava cofounded 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 naïveté 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 redlines 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