Finding a candle in the dark

"Predicting the future of journalism with any precision may be a fool's errand, though the broad - and mostly bleak - contours are obvious enough: local news will still face collapse; public trust will continue to buckle under the twin pressures of social media brain rot and partisan echo chambers masquerading as "news." AI experimentation will carry on, though previous overinvestment will hopefully cool, and most of the genuinely useful applications will be internal tools."

"To top it off, we are living in a second Gilded Age. An openly racist, misogynist, xenophobic, and anti-fact era that assigns value by transaction and demands loyalty over truth. Institutions that once held civic or moral authority now defer far too often to wealth and raw political power. We aren't drifting toward autocracy and oligarchy; we're already knee-deep in them."

Local news is likely to continue collapsing while public trust erodes under social media-driven misinformation and partisan echo chambers. AI investment will persist, but the most practical uses will be internal newsroom tools rather than public-facing breakthroughs. Newsrooms that avoid developing technical expertise will purchase vendor products from firms prioritizing profit over journalistic values, risking abandonment when inconvenient. Contemporary politics resembles a new Gilded Age marked by racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and anti-factuality, where wealth and political power increasingly override civic and moral authority, producing conditions akin to entrenched autocracy and oligarchy.

Read at Nieman Lab