Journalism is collapsing in the middle of the information war

Just as we need them most, media outlets are failing to cut through Trump's noise.

Photo by Ajeet Mestry on Unsplash

This is how the media collapsed: Economically, then editorially, then politically.

This has been happening for a long time, but the full extent of the danger is now apparent. We're in an information war. Donald Trump is flooding the zone with shit. Constant announcements. Constant proclamations. Immigrants, DEI, Gaza, air traffic control, tariffs, trans rights. Noise. Endless terrible noise.

The public is in desperate need of accurate journalism which cuts through the screaming. We need reporters who can refute what's being said, or interrogate it, or at least put it in context. Instead, journalists - opponents and supporters alike - have become Trump’s handmaidens. They help spread the shit. They hoover it in, churn it up, and spew it out again, wider than before, until everything is covered in it. And then eventually you face a deadly choice: Do you turn it off and risk becoming passive? Or do you keep paying attention and risk going insane?

We're in an information war, but the media is totally unequipped to deal with it.

This week's most damaging media development took place in the offices of the Mirror, as reported by Private Eye. The paper has a proud history. It was Britain's first working class daily. It remains the only left-wing tabloid. Now, staff are being told that they will be expected to hit personal targets for how many views their stories receive on the paper's website, regardless of whether they're writing about showbiz or a social justice investigation.

Basing your editorial policy on clicks is the death of a newspaper. It is a mutilation of any higher sense of what journalism is supposed to be. The reason for this is two-fold. Firstly, because most people are idiots. And secondly, because even the people who aren't idiots will often act idiotically.

I have two news stories in front of me. One of them is about the legal details of Labour's plans for regulatory alignment with Europe. The other is about a man with three nipples. Which will people click on? Obviously, they click on the nipple. Everyone always clicks on the nipple. It's one of the golden rules of journalism.

Even above this level, there is a level of news flotsam which we all consume, convincing ourselves it is important or in some way relevant about the world when it really isn't. I am apparently addicted to the car crash spectacle that is Emilia Perez, from the movie itself, which is a kind of ethical killzone, to the recent statements by its star Karla Sofía Gascón. I could probably construct a case for how that film is the perfect self-contained online controversy ecosystem for the present day. I might even convince myself. But really, it's just frothy political bollocks - offensive this, leading to apology that, followed by outrage this, finished by official statement that.

It takes journalists minutes to write it up. You could churn out the whole thing and publish it in 20 minutes, excluding the legal checks. It's basically free to produce. So people do produce it. And we all read it.

This is what happens when you make clicks the decisive factor in your editorial policy: Crap about a bloke with three nipples. Crap about Emilia Perez. The stuff that you know gets traffic, written in the shortest possible time frame, over the stuff that’s actually important, but will not be read.

You have optimised for the wrong outcome. And then - surprise surprise - the worst outcome occurs.

We've been aware of the clickbait problem for years. The internet shattered journalism's financial model by making the product free. That'll tend to fuck your financial model no matter what it is. Then everyone focused on advertising and tried to amp up their traffic. Then we realised we were just driving ourselves into destitution, so we opted for paid subscription services instead. Very quickly, your most prized attribute as a journalist was whether you could convert readers into paid subscribers to the outlet, rather than how much traffic you got. A small highly engaged audience was better than a large unengaged one.

This was an improvement. It provided a viable funding model. It means outlets could serve an audience with real dedication and be rewarded for it. It was a damn sight better than relying on non-existent advertising and Facebook. But it came with a second threat, which is now making itself painfully felt. Higher quality journalism was increasingly being hidden behind a paywall, while low quality journalism was able to spread everywhere for free. We had inadvertently created a two-tier information ecosystem, a private gated community for news.

People often criticised former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger for having ushered in the age of free news content by putting his paper online without charge. They do not mention that he has been entirely vindicated in his repeated warnings about this secondary threat on the consequences of paywalls. People insist that good journalism costs money to produce and we should therefore pay for, just like vacuum cleaners or chewing gum. That's true. But if people go without vacuum cleaners, there are no repercussions to our democratic system. If they go without good journalism, there are.

We can see the two-tier information system very clearly now. On the one hand you have broadsheets and some tabloids with their paid subscriber model. The i, which I write for, uses one, as does the Financial Times, the Times and the Telegraph. The Observer will soon put up a paywall now that it's been bought by Tortoise Media. Now even tabloid outlets like Mail Online and the Sun are getting in on the act, albeit rather tentatively.

Some still remain free to access. Usually this means that their quality declines precipitously. This is particularly the case for outlets owned by Reach PLC, a company so viscerally hostile to good journalism you wonder whether it is in fact pursuing a conscious campaign to destroy it. The Mirror, the Express and the Star have been gobbled up, as have countless local papers, leaving behind news deserts where there is no decent information at all about people's local councils, or public services, or courts.

Good, hard-working reporters still fight the good fight at these papers. They go and they do their job and they try to uncover things for the public. They are hamstrung and obstructed at every turn. And then, if they are lucky enough to find the time and editorial tolerance to put up a genuine story, it will be vomited over by unclosable video adverts, countless pop-ups, sparse butchered text interspersed a par at a time between display ads, and the internet's vapid guts at the bottom of the piece, demanding you click to find that one weird secret of belly fat or what that soap opera star from the 90s looks like now.

Then, underneath that tier, there is the great informal disinformation ecosystem, a vast ocean of bullshit lapping at our ankles - blogs, websites, YouTube channels, Tiktok accounts, all spewing out abject nonsense about wellness, vaccines, pharmaceutical companies, Ukraine, or God knows what else, burrowing its way onto Facebook, being shared on Telegram, spreading, always spreading, contacting more and more people who had previously been insulated from conspiracy by the standards of a responsible media industry. A shadow world which we used to laugh at, but has now become so vast and powerful it threatens to overwhelm our own.

The other big change in journalism in recent decades has been about speed. Newspapers used to go out once a day. TV news used to happen every few hours. Now, newspapers must publish constantly online and TV news happens every second. That fundamentally changed the approach of the journalist. Reporters would once have spent the day learning about a story before they wrote anything on it. Broadcasters would have tailored their packages for breakfast, lunchtime and evening. Now they must produce all the time. And that creates a fixation on tiny incremental changes, rather than substantial ones.

People tended to get terribly cross about Laura Kuenssberg when she was political editor of the BBC. Mostly this centred on her perceived political bias. That might be right, I dunno. If so, it certainly didn't seem any worse than her male colleagues who received far less abuse. The more interesting thing about her, however, was how she handled the practical reality of all-day political coverage. She was really good at moving on the story just a little bit. She'd speak to an anonymous Cabinet source who would give this tiny extra scrap of information and that would shift the story further forward, then to this spad, who would do the same, then to this chief of staff. And on it went, throughout the day, every day. Breathless. Perpetual.

Funding cuts meant that broadcasters often got rid of the teams who put together news packages. These took time, money and skill - to chat with an expert, secure an interview with the relevant minister, stand up the information, settle on a narrative, put it together, smooth out the edit.

That process got you five minute's broadcast time. Or instead, you could have your political editor reading the latest 'development' off their phone after a media spad WhatsApped them. Or you could get two hothead pundits - people like me, basically - sit them down on a coach and make them fight. Is Churchill good or bad? Should we pick Europe or America? Can a woman have a penis? The world boiled down to lurid black-and-white. But cheap. That's the thing. It was cheap. Much cheaper than putting together a package.

In every era, politicians find ways of hacking the media. Joseph McCarthy was taught by J Edgard Hoover to announce his latest Red Scare target as close to print deadline as possible, so journalists would have to cover it without the chance of actually investigating it. That way, he'd get at least 24 hours of baseless accusations out before anyone had time to refute it.

In our era, these journalistic defects have proved extremely easy to hijack. The retreat of quality content behind paywalls means that our access to accurate information is dictated by our income or willingness to pay. The takeover of vital newspapers by companies without basic journalistic standards inhibits reporters' ability to scrutinise power. The great slosh of conspiratorial content online undermines our ability to know what is true, and thereby facilitates the production of lies. The hyperventilating always-online coverage of the media hypes up whatever Trump and co have spewed out recently. The talking heads get on the sofa and scream at each other, cementing a black-and-white, us-and-them view of the world. Trump and his way of governing is tailored to hack the media as it currently operates.

If you noticed a trace of journalistic euphoria when Trump came back it's because there was. That's the bitter truth of it. How much news did you read about the US when Joe Biden was in power? Pitifully little, I’d guess. You’ve probably read more articles about that country since Trump was elected than you did in the three years of the Biden administration before the presidential election started up again. The same has happened here. Foreign reporters often tell me that their home news desks stopped asking for UK reports once Labour returned to power. Keir Starmer is boring, stable, uncontroversial, seeking a broad electoral coalition. He does not command the clicks. He does not secure the eyeballs.

Many journalists are instinctively hostile to Starmer and Biden not so much out of political opposition, but because they're bad for business. And they love Boris Johnson and Trump not so much because they agree with them, but because they’re good for business. They provide more content. More fuel for the news engine.

What can we do about this?

The first issue is the funding model. We have managed to secure a consensus on the need for people to fund journalism. That's great - it's a much better position than we were in before. We now need a similar consensus on the dangers of paywalls.

Those two priorities sound mutually contradictory but they don't need to be. Most of my income comes from people giving out of a sense of social responsibility. This newsletter is funded by paid subscribers. They get nothing back, except the knowledge they are funding it. My podcast, Origin Story, gets most of its funding through Patreon. Our supporters do get a few things for free - an extra episode here and there, some additional content at the end of an episode. But the core product goes out for free and is available to everyone.

I know this is not always possible. It's particularly difficult to achieve when the journalism covers areas few people are invested in - on housing benefit say, or probation. But we can create an expectation from readers and journalists of a system where we fund journalism not for access, but to help it spread. We can imbue journalism with a sense of social duty. If there are outlets you think do good in the world, and you can afford it, you should support them.

Perhaps consider getting rid of one of your TV subscriptions. Look at these techlord scumbags, scrapping their equality programme in the face of a Trump triumph, like the vapid shameful micro-dick hypocrites they so obviously are. Do not give them your fucking money. One cancelled subscription should net you an extra £15 a month, which you can use to support three journalism projects. Trust me: they'll value it more than Amazon and you will have done concrete good for the world, on an otherwise uneventful and rainy Friday morning.

Second, think clearly about what you're reading. Is it informing you? Are you gaining a deep understanding of something - anything - or is it empty calories? How long are you spending on social media? How is it making you feel - empowered or defeated? What kinds of publications are equipping you with the kind of information about the world which allows you to accomplish things, as an informed citizen or a campaigner?

This week's newsletter was inspired by an article about the Mirror in Private Eye. You should read Private Eye. It's not perfect, but for £45 a year you get a magazine absolutely packed with genuine news which will also make you laugh. My views on the information war were informed by Martin F. Robbins' Substack post on how Trump broke the news and from this piece by Janus Rose on 404Media. The most reliable and enlightening news reporting I read about the US came from Wired magazine, which has become utterly vital. If you're interested in immigration you should be supporting the Free Movement blog by Colin Yeo. If you're interested in welfare and inequality, you should be supporting the painstaking investigative work of Chaminda Jayanetti. I could go on. I probably should, but I need to send this newsletter out.

Find people you believe in. Support them so they can do their work. Encourage them to make at least some of their work publicly available in some way - perhaps through open sections, or by set time-windows, or through a basic and subscriber tier.

Most people I know are having a similar question at the moment: How're you feeling? How're you staying sane?

We all feel powerless. As I wrote on here recently, the best tool against this is to aim your activity at the areas where you can make a difference. The journalism you consume is one of those areas. Every click of your mouse is a decision, which is recognised at the outlet. Trust me when I say this - I spent years looking at the back-end of a website. We know what you're doing and we act accordingly. Each click is a vote for what you want more of.

Every pound you spend on journalism is a massive world-changing decision for someone, which may make what they do viable. And each message you send, on email or social media, about the way you think responsible journalism should operate, will have a big impact on those who create it. They are thinking about these things. And if they see that debate from readers, it helps focus their attention on what needs to be done.

The last few weeks have shown how vulnerable we are to the information war. But we have the power to turn the tide. We are not powerless. We just needed a wake-up call. And by Christ we've got one.

Odds and Sods

I watched Anora last night. I've not seen anything quite like it - a film that kept me on the edge of threat and laughter, mingled together at the same time, for such a long period. It's a truly adult piece of work, not because there's lots of nudity in it - although there is - but because it is involved in complicated and unresolvable sentiments. A film that refuses to be sweet or cynical, hopeful or despairing, but remains constantly in some strange place between them.

Also, if you're a Londoner you've got just under a month to get yourself down to One Man Musical at Underbelly Boulevard Soho. I won't tell you anything except that 1) it is a miracle they have not been shut down by legal threats and 2) I haven't laughed that much in a very long time. I mean dangerous laughter, the kind that prompts strange noises, where you actually feel physically stifled, struggling to breath. It is glorious.

See you next week.