There are many truisms about journalism. That it should speak truth to power. That it must be rooted in community. But what do these mean in practice, especially at a time when journalism is facing an unprecedented set of threats – financial, technological, and political?
In this episode, George Miller talks to journalist and media commentator Jon Allsop about the challenges confronting journalism today and how he went about exploring them in his new book, What is Journalism For? Their conversation covers journalism’s complex relationship with democracy and power, the impact of declining local news, the evolving role of social media, and whether there’s reason for hope amid the crises.
Society needs journalism, Jon says, but ‘that is not the same as saying society needs legacy media – large newspapers, cable news networks – and that these things will somehow be preserved in aspic forever, in the current form, and that traditional journalism with its ethical codes and its norms will persist forever.’
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Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
Jon Allsop writes for the Columbia Journalism Review, editing its flagship “Media Today” newsletter.
What Is Journalism For? by Jon Allsop is available on Bristol University Press for £8.99 here.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
01:43 – How do you explain what your job is?
05:02 – When you get up in the morning what is your journalistic diet? What is your routine?
08:27 – How did you decide the best way to tackle the question of what is journalism for?
13:16 – How did you actually approach that process of speaking to fellow journalists?
24:05 – Why do journalists sit so low in the league table of trusted professionals?
30:02 – How worried should we be about the disappearance of local news?
44:45 – Do you think there is reason to be hopeful even with the changing landscape of journalism?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
George Miller: Hello and welcome to the Transforming Society podcast from Bristol University Press. My name is George Miller and I’m the editor of a series from BUP that launched recently: over the next few years What is it for? will explore the purpose of a range of institutions, beliefs, ideologies and other key elements of the contemporary world: from war to philanthropy; nuclear weapons to free speech; conspiracy theories to veganism.
The latest addition to the series is What is journalism for? by Jon Allsop. Jon is a UK-based journalist who has written about the media for the Columbia Journalism Review since 2017 and also contributed to a wide range of other publications, including the Guardian, the New York review of Books and the New Yorker. In his book, Jon writes:
journalism is one way, and perhaps the most important way, that a society talks to and examines itself.
What is all too clear is that this vital societal function faces multiple threats around the world today – financial, political and technological. Journalism feels under assault. Jon continues:
Despite – or, more likely, because of – the sharp contemporary challenges to its form and relevance, interrogating journalism’s purpose is perhaps a more vital task than ever.
That’s just what his book sets out to do and we’ll touch on some of the big questions he tackles in this conversation. When we spoke recently, though, I began by asking Jon, when he meets someone new, how does he explain to them what his job is?
Jon Allsop: Depends who I’m talking to a little bit, but I say I’m a journalist. I wear lots of different hats within that like I guess the stereotype Hollywoodish view of a journalist is, you know, wears a pork pie hat and runs around in a trench coat with a little notebook and receives envelopes smuggled between gloved hands in parking lots or whatever. That’s not really what I do.
I do a weird combination of like analysis, opinion journalism, reporting features; magazine writing, I guess, is probably a less grandiose way of putting it but it does straddle these different types of journalism so yeah depending on the crowd I think there’s a chance I might say that I’m a writer or essayist or journalist. I think these are fairly interchangeable terms for what I specifically do.
GM: And now of course you can add ‘author of books’ into the mix…
But one of the key things you do is you reflect on the media, so you’re actually a journalist who spends quite a lot of their time reflecting on what journalism is and does in the world today.
JA: Yeah, I guess critic would be another word that I could add to the panoply that I just mentioned.
For the last six or so years I have written and overseen a newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, which for those who don’t know is a New York-based magazine based at Columbia University, but not the university – it’s not in any way a student-run publication it’s a professional magazine. We basically cover the world of journalism and media and I think we take quite a broad lens on that question.
So a lot of what I do is a combination of critiquing media coverage, the way the media is engaging with a specific topic, and using that as a lens to think about how we all see the world. I guess that strain of it is particularly about US politics but not exclusively.
And then I do reporting on the experiences of journalists not just in the US but all around the world. You know, stuff to do with press freedom, and the business models of journalism and how they are and particularly aren’t working at this moment in time.
I think it’s like any other magazine that you would read, but lazer-focused on the world of journalism and journalists themselves, which sounds to some people like inside baseball, but is actually super-interesting and, I think, super-important.
Journalists can be allergic in some cases to scrutinizing themselves or thinking that they are the story, even though most journalists do love to talk about themselves. But I think that’s profoundly wrong-headed – it’s a powerful industry and yet it serves coverage and scrutiny and criticism just like any other.
GM: And that’s how I first became aware of your work: because I read that newsletter and I was really impressed by the range and how you’re not just encapsulating the stories of the day but actually reflecting on how they were being reflected in a very wide range of journalism in the US particularly, as you say, in the UK, but also in other parts of the world.
And I wondered, when you get up in the morning what is your journalistic diet? What is your routine? Because you’re not just writing about one story, you’re writing about how that story is playing out in manifold different avenues of the media.
So how do you approach that task? Because it seems to me that that knowledge and that breadth of vision plays into the book that we’re going to talk about in a minute.
JA: Yeah, I like to think that the newsletter that I do and my work in general does take this broad lens. I think that a lot of journalism can become insular, especially in the US context honestly. And so one thing that I’ve been doing, particularly for the last couple of years, is this newsletter on Tuesdays that tries to take debates and themes and topics that are of the moment in the US, but rather than just writing like the typical ‘here are some bullet points you need to know about this thing in a US context’, it’s trying to say, well, is this playing out in the media industry in a different country that our readers, who are mostly if not exclusively in the US might not know about.
One example would be in 2023 when there was this big furore over Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s handling of classified materials, it led to this questioning of whether overclassification – i.e. the idea that just way too much information that should never really be classified gets classified – it led to a conversation about how that’s a big problem. And it just so happened that this seemed to dovetail with this press freedom story I was seeing out of Finland which had to do with journalists being arrested for publishing classified information, even though it was information that people were saying shouldn’t have been classified and even though Finland is by some metrics the best or one of the best countries in the world for press freedom. And so I was able to write something that was like, actually Finland is having the same issue as well.
And I think it helps to create a sense that this is actually a connected world, not only but you know obviously a connected media sphere within that, and hopefully that brings an outsider’s perspective because obviously I am British so this is a strange perch for me to be writing about US stuff so I think trying to bring that broad sensibility to it is what I aim for.
In terms of media diet, I think maybe that’s evolved over the years. I mean, I read a lot of newsletters, things like Politico playbook, for example. I might not always agree with the way they frame things or the way they prioritize the political topics of the day, but one thing I know that they will always do is have a really thorough rundown of what’s in all of the major US newspapers.
I liken it to being like a like a bird: you’re like flying over the information landscape at quite a high level. You’re not seeing things in a ton of detail necessarily, but then you might see one thing that catches your eye and you’re like, oh, that’s really interesting and then you dive-bomb and you can then dig into that and maybe that then becomes a story. So I tried to operate both those levels I try and write things that have a bit more of a 50,000-foot view, like how do all these pieces without going into a ton of detail on all of them. How do they fit together in a way that we might think about the world and how the media is covering it, but also sometimes I might see a tweet or an email notification about a press freedom case in Finland and I might think, that’s really interesting. And I go and talk to the people involved and try and take that dual approach. And, like I said, in international one too. I mean, I read Le Monde in addition to the New York Times every day for example. At least just at the headline level to try and get a broad sense of what’s going on in different places.
GM: So I guess in some ways that all that experience made you very well suited to writing this book, but I also imagine you had to change your optic a bit so that those skills were useful, but you had to take a different view of the terrain in order to tackle as big and general a question as ‘what is journalism for?’ And you decided not to just to roam around the world with two pages on China here or three pages on Russia there, so how did you actually decide what vantage point and what approach was going to make sense for writing a longer treatment?
JA: Yeah, well obviously, as you know better than anyone, this is a series, and so the title of the book is defined right, like the lens of the book is defined. You handed that to me and said ‘Do you fancy having a go at it?’
So it wasn’t a question that I had necessarily come up with or even… I mean, I guess I had been thinking about it, just because it ties into everything that I do. But in this bigger, overarching, philosophical way, I hadn’t necessarily thought about how I would construct an overall answer to that.
And I think I knew pretty quickly that – even though I’d never written a book before, the longest thing I’d written before being about 10,000 words, which is long for a piece of journalism but not book-length – I think it became apparent pretty quickly that the issue here was going to be space limitation, not: ‘Oh my god, how am I going to write 35,000 words as opposed to 10,000?’ Right?
This is a question that you could just take in innumerable directions, and I hope I’m very clear in the introduction to the book in saying that this is a very subjective question. It depends on how you define the terms. You know, even my answer right now might be totally different from how I would answer this question in ten years – or, you know, ten years ago. Right? It’s something that is changing.
There’s a great quote in the book from a great American media critic called Jack Schafer, to the effect of: it’s a question that’s buried in so much magma and bedrock that it’s hard to even get at.
So yeah, even though it ties into things that I write about and think about on a daily basis, you’re right – I had to take a different lens, to step back and think about it in a more overarching way.
And I think basically it was a question of, on the one hand, trying to think back through things I’ve written over the years, through debates that I’d accessed – through, you know, specific stories in the US context or whatever – and try and pull out: what are the philosophical principles here that I think are important? And how can I use these and other examples to illustrate that in an engaging way?
Obviously, journalists like to pull stories through characters and narrative arcs. I think there’s definitely a version of this book that could have done that, but I think it would have been complicated. I think this is quite an overview book. It’s a book that I hope is deft and pacy, but not one that reads like a spy thriller.
But at the same time, I think you do want to have some sense of groundedness – some sense of place. You can’t do 35,000 words on a topic this big and confusing and contested and not have it grounded in at least some sense of place.
So I started thinking about, well – you know – I’m definitely going to write about US journalism, because that’s what I write about mostly, and that was where I was trained as a journalist. I mostly still work for the American press.
British journalism obviously makes sense as a slight counterpart to US journalism. It’s a similar tradition, but there are differences. I’m obviously from the UK, so that makes sense as well.
But then I was thinking it was important for me to step out of my comfort zone and write about a different part of the world – something that maybe I was familiar enough with that I knew it would be interesting (like, I wasn’t going down a dead end), but at the same time would challenge, as I was going, my assumptions – or the framing of ‘what is journalism for?’ in those countries I’m most familiar with.
I initially actually looked at Myanmar and Tunisia, because I had written a little bit about the media ecosystems in both those places for the Columbia Journalism Review. They’re both super interesting because they’re countries that have had a pretty recent period of, to some extent, democratic opening – a growth of press freedom from a baseline of quite restrictive conditions for the press – that have then gone sour, to differing extents.
I think along the way, it increasingly made sense to focus on one rather than both of those, for reasons of length and complexity. So I ended up really drilling down on Myanmar – which I think, yeah, is just a fascinating country generally, and from a media point of view, one where a brutal coup in 2021 has been dreadful for what was a burgeoning independent media sector.
It’s something that really, I think, doesn’t get enough international attention these days, in light of all the other crises going on around the world. So yeah, I felt that that was a good example to drill into, in addition to the ones I was more familiar with.
And then it was just about fitting the ideas around people, and the things that… you know, the things journalists have to do in every story they tell.
GM: Yes, and you decided you were going to interview several dozen journalists in those three countries. And when you told me about that, I remember thinking: what a brilliant idea. And then I thought – but isn’t that just going to, you know, present him with an overwhelming amount of material?
Which, of course, was underestimating your skills as a journalist. And I think probably I was thinking about academics, who might then tend to spend a long time trying to sift through and analyse that data. But you – it seemed to me you were very good at picking out very telling and pertinent things from those conversations.
But tell me a little bit about those conversations. Did you go to all those journalists in those different countries with the same set of questions? Were you interested more in these philosophical, meta questions – or the practice? Or how did you actually approach that process of speaking to fellow journalists?
JA: Yes, so I basically decided that I would do, like, ten interviews per country that I was focused on. And this was initially when I was thinking about looking at Tunisia in addition to the others as well.
This wasn’t – and I should be clear – it’s not like an academic book. This is not a comparative analysis. It’s not a survey. It’s… it’s data in the sense that everything is data, right? But it’s not data in the sense that I’m making a claim that this is a rigorously selected group of interviewees, against some social scientific baseline, that says something that is absolutely true about the nature of what journalism is – if that’s even possible to do.
But it was, you know – I wanted to have a population that was relatively limited, that I knew I would be able to do alongside my other work. And I think I wanted to have longer conversations with well-chosen people, as opposed to just calling up every single journalist I’ve ever spoken to, or throwing out requests and seeing who got back.
So, again – it wasn’t academically rigorous, but there was a degree of thought that went into the selection of these people.
I think particularly in the US context – you know, I obviously know a lot of journalists over there – I wanted to choose people who I knew would have a range of different perspectives on the question. From, you know, Jack Schafer (who I mentioned), who is a bit libertarian-y and certainly a contrarian when it comes to lots of media ethical debates, through people like, you know, Daryl Holliday, who’s this amazing thought leader in the community journalism space.
I wanted to speak to local journalists and journalists at the national level. And yeah, try and just bring in other people’s ideas. But the point of this wasn’t – it was never – to get submerged under their answers.
The idea was to go into these interviews with my ideas, if not completely set in stone (of course, because these conversations can guide your thinking – and that was part of the point), but you know, it wasn’t like I was going in with: I have no idea how I’m going to answer this question. I have no idea how I’m going to structure the book.
I mean, I’d already written the proposal. It had already gone through peer review – if that’s not too in-the-weeds to say – by the time that I came to interview people. So I knew what I was trying to say, and what areas I was going to focus on.
The idea of the interviews was then to texture that. So it’s not just my voice in the book. I can use voices from other people to support my argument, but also at times to disagree with it – right? Or to say, this is a perspective that this guy has that maybe I don’t have, but it’s an interesting, different way of seeing it. It’s about, yeah, again, making that argument more textured – but it doesn’t make it not an argument. You know, it is my book, and it is my answer.
In terms of how I did the interviews, I tailored the questions to things I knew that other person would be in a good position to talk about.
I think with my interviewees from Myanmar in particular, there was obviously a desire to do more reporting, in the sense of finding out what their experiences are like. You know, what the sweep – from being quite a closed system to a more open one, to closed again – in terms of press freedom and other civil liberties, has been like for them.
It was maybe a bit more factually guided than others, where I knew what the factual background was a bit more. But that’s not to say I didn’t get into the philosophical stuff with them – it just maybe was a different route in.
One thing I did do is – I think I asked every interviewee, maybe not every single one, but I tried to ask at least most of them – ‘What is journalism for?’ as the first question of the interview.
And I would say to people: ‘You know, this is an insane first question to ask. It’s totally broad, and I’m not expecting you to, like, give me a comprehensive, well-thought-through answer back. But I’m just interested – where does your brain go? What’s the first thing that you think of?’
And yeah, some people were like: ‘I have no idea how to answer that question at all.’ And others just answered in, like, these paragraphs – just instantly seemed to form in their head, as if they were the ones who had been writing the book.
But I think together, you know, it was super useful. And there is a mini section in the introduction to this book where I juxtapose some of those different answers. And yeah, there really are some quite different answers in there. So yeah, it was definitely – I’m very glad that I did the interviews. That it’s not just my voice coming through in the book.
But I do want to stress that it’s not like a conventional work of: I’m just standing back and having a neutral view on this, and these people can duke it out in a way where I’ve chosen them to be a scientifically representative sample. That’s not really what we’re going for here.
GM: And would it be fair, Jon, to give someone who hasn’t read the book an idea of what you’re interrogating here that you’re interested in I guess a series of key relationships that journalism as its practice today has with democracy, we could call it power I guess also, and with truth and with community and of course there are other things beyond that but those are the architecture of the book is interrogating those dynamics I guess power looking upwards to the controlling context in which journalism is practiced and what it what it’s interrogating and then community that the relationships that the journalist has with people who hopefully will read what they have to say is that is that the nub of your of your exploration.
JA: Yeah, because as I said, you know, it’s a really subjective question. And I don’t claim to be able to offer some universal answer – or even that there is one. So it’s not about laying down, like, if you do these ten things, you have done a piece of journalism, or, if you follow these ten reporting steps, you can call yourself a journalist, and otherwise you’re not.
In fact, I think the book in places is quite critical of this idea of gatekeeping journalism as a profession – where you must have been to a trade school or have a license or whatever. It’s much more fluid and interwoven with society than that. And I guess, yeah, that latter thing guided my approach.
I think what I did was I zoomed in on – if you read a lot of literature that’s at a high level about journalism – there are themes that come up repeatedly, right? So this idea that journalism should be about telling the truth, obviously, or finding out what the truth is. This idea about community and journalism is super important in a lot of literature. And I tried to say, yeah, these are the pillars of what journalism is for. But within them, there’s actually quite a lot of complexity.
Take this idea that journalism should serve a community, for example. I think that’s a very often-stated truism of journalism – I think especially in the US: journalism should be rooted in community, it should be about serving a community. And I think, yes, that’s true.
But then – what is a community? I mean, you know, there are communities that are geographic. There are also communities that are ethnic, or religious, or that unite around a special interest. I went to the profile of a French magazine called Flush, which is about toilets, which aims to serve the community of people who work in and think about toilets. And it was actually super interesting, because it used toilets as a way to assess big questions about the world – in a way that sounds totally silly when you say it, but actually makes a ton of sense if you think about it for longer than five seconds. So, you know, actually, what community is, is complicated.
And then I think you have the secondary question of: what happens to the people outside the community you’re serving? It can just be that that’s your focus, and that’s fine – because you don’t report on the people in the next town over. But if your reporting is accidentally, or intentionally, laying down narratives that make you hate the people in the town over – or make you think it’s us against them, and doesn’t start from the premise that yeah, you have these sub-communities, but actually today, in this globalized world, we’re all one big community with these shared challenges – then how does that work?
And ‘hating people in the town over’ might sound silly, but what if the community you’re serving is conservatives – which is, you know, a thing that lots of media companies do? What if the community you’re serving is liberals? What if you’re trying to make those people hate the people who think differently from them?
What if, in the case of Myanmar, there are real issues about hate campaigns that can then spill over into real life? How is the media complicit in those? These, I think, are very consequential questions.
So it’s about interrogating those ideas – not denying that they are what journalism is for. Journalism is for serving community. That’s one of the pillars that makes it what it is. But again, within that, there’s a lot of complexity.
I think what was also interesting for me was to interrogate – and I hope this is a key message of the book – journalism’s place in wider society vis-à-vis other institutions. Because I think journalists can be tempted to see themselves as the heroes of their own narrative, or as this backstop when other institutions fail.
Which obviously, you know, is a problem – particularly now in this world where so many institutions seem to be crumbling and in poor shape. How can we fill the gaps? Or how can we make society better?
I think it’s about trying to say that… because there is an old-fashioned view in journalism that this is not journalism’s job – in the sense that it’s unethical to do things like this. It’s unethical to insert yourself into a community dispute over a pipe issue in the street, because you’re a journalist and you should be covering it from an objective point of view.
I don’t necessarily agree with that. I think these things often actually can only really be worked out on a case-by-case basis, as to how journalists should relate to them.
But I certainly think that journalists are members of their communities, and therefore have a stake in community problems – and shouldn’t try to hide that fact or wish it away. I just think that’s impossible.
But at the same time, saying that something is compatible with what journalism is for isn’t the same as saying that it is what it is for.
And I think there can be this mission creep among some journalists – in a very well-intentioned way – that makes them start to think that they should be doing all these other social functions, that actually, in a very ideally functioning society, would fall to someone else.
Basically, it’s not to say it’s wrong to think about journalism in those terms per se. But it’s to say that actually, those core pillars that are about scrutinizing and thinking about and reporting back how the world is – those are themselves really, really difficult. And society does need them.
And whatever the outcomes that attach to that – unfortunately, that might not be something that’s in your control. But it doesn’t mean that what you’re doing is pointless, or futile, or that no one cares, or that no one’s paying attention.
So I think it’s about, yes, not just saying what journalism is for, but what it could be for, and how that’s nuanced. It’s about trying to situate that within a broader social institutional picture. I hope.
GM: I mean, it’s relatively easy to see why people in power might be suspicious of journalists. But why do you think journalism as a profession so often ranks very low in professions trusted by the public?
Because, you know – truth-telling, speaking truth to power, investigating, bringing things to light – they’re all very noble aims. So is it that our conception of journalists is too broad, and we extrapolate too much from the worst, and the tabloid foot-in-the-door journalism, and that tarnishes the whole thing?
I’ve always been a bit perplexed that journalism consistently seems to score so low. And I guess since Trump weaponising mainstream media, it’s almost – you know – it’s become a pejorative in some right-wing circles.
So why, when journalism at its best seems so laudable and noble, do journalists sit so low in the league table of trusted professionals?
JA: I think that is an enormously complicated and difficult question. I think there’s an enormous amount of hand-wringing going on about, like, why does no one trust us? And I totally understand why. I think the answers to that question are not going to be found in this book per se. I think there are a number of things.
I think that journalists, in too many parts of the world, are out of touch – are not, you know, historically have not been representative of the communities they’re supposed to serve. In terms of social class, in terms of race, ethnicity, gender – it’s very, very important to have newsrooms that do represent a community.
For far too long, we know that that has been a big failure. And still – actually, in the UK, for example – the statistics around the social class breakdown of people who work in national newsrooms are just horrifyingly unrepresentative. I mean, it really is a profession that just does not have any working-class representation in it – hardly at all.
So I think there is that sense of alienation and detachment.
Clearly, you know, there have been elite media consensuses around things that are very consequential that have been totally wrong – and that have contributed to an erosion of trust. I mean, I think it cannot be overstated how much the media cheerleading around the war in Iraq – not just cheerleading from an opinion side of things, by the way, but actually reporting things that were just wrong – damaged trust. Right?
You know, when in the UK the media consensus is, Brexit is never going to happen, and then it does happen – you can look like idiots.
Obviously, that was not necessarily a media consensus across the whole sweep of the ideological range of British publications. But I think at the elite liberal media level, it probably was.
So I think there’s this sense of: not being representative, not listening, getting things wrong. All those things are big problems. And I hope that a lot of what my work does is try to interrogate those.
I mean, the news media is not something that just should be trusted, right? It has to – well, I don’t say ‘earn trust,’ because that implies that we’re the only people who have control over this (which I’ll come on to momentarily – I don’t think that’s the case). But it is true, right? You know, we have to do things that at least merit trust.
Just assuming that people should trust us because we know what’s good for you, we know what the truth is, and we’re telling you – that’s not how journalists should think about their jobs. They should think about their jobs with way more humility than that.
But then I think again – and this is part of the book – journalists often like to think they can control things that they can’t control.
When you have political movements that are using the elite media as a proxy for elites generally – when they are saying, basically, at least implicitly, it’s because of the New York Times and their fake news that your life sucks, and that you’re dissatisfied, and that you feel angry – that is a weaponized movement of hatred that is coming from a very, very high place.
You know, the highest office in the US. Currently, the similar is true all around the world.
That is enormously powerful, and it’s very hard for journalists to combat – because part of the appeal of it is it drags journalists into a necessarily adversarial posture, where you have to fight back against it, because you’re under attack.
If you don’t fight back, you’re patsies, basically. But if you do fight back, they can say, look at these people fighting us – they’re total hacks, they’re biased, etc. etc. They just hate me. By extension, they hate you. This is very hard to overcome.
But – to end on a more hopeful note – and I think you touched on this in the framing of the question – I also do think some of this data about trust in journalism being low should be taken with a pinch of salt. Or at least, you should interrogate how the question was posed in an individual survey – what the media was defined as being.
Because if you say to someone in the UK, who is an avid Guardian reader but absolutely loathes The Sun, The Daily Mail, right-wing tabloids that they see as gutter press who violate people’s privacy and are racist and all the rest of it – do you trust the media? – if their mind, first of all, goes to The Sun and The Daily Mail and the gutter press, they will say ‘no.’
That doesn’t mean they don’t trust the media, though – because they might trust The Guardian, The BBC, The Independent. They still – I mean, I think that actually is a person who probably has quite a healthy level of trust in media.
And you could absolutely make the case the other way. If you hate The Guardian, and people ask you do you hate the media, and what you have in mind at that moment is this part of the media that you do actually hate – you might say yes, I do hate them.
It’s a hugely multitudinous category, in a way that I don’t think is quite comparable to asking someone do you trust lawyers, or do you trust teachers – right? You might, with those, be thinking of an individual example of a person. So there might be that aspect of selectivity.
But I don’t think it’s quite the same idea as the media as a category, which has become something that looms over your head in a way where it’s not necessarily like – you might know people in this profession, but the media is coming at you from different directions, and in very different ways. I just think those questions can be quite sweeping in a way that demands us to interrogate the data they pop out.
I don’t necessarily think the picture is always as bleak as those surveys suggest. But, for the reasons I said earlier, I’m not denying it’s a real problem. It clearly is a real problem. I just think the extent of it is something we need to be open-eyed and open-minded about.
GM: You were talking about community a bit earlier, and I wondered: how worrying is it – how worried should we be – about the disappearance of local news? About local newspapers? How they’re hollowed out? How they’re disappearing?
You know, we see the job loss figures across the western world for people in local newspapers. It seems to me that they’re a really important part of the whole ecosystem, in all sorts of ways – for connecting community, and making things in community apparent. Even for things like training journalists – you know, for journalists learning their trade on the ground, and then perhaps ending up at a national paper or a specialist publication.
So if we take that block out of the edifice, does it really have implications that go all the way up, as well as at the grassroots level?
JA: Absolutely. It’s extremely concerning – because it’s not just like taking one block out of a Jenga tower. It’s like taking out the bottom blocks, right?
So much national news is premised on knowing about what happens at lower levels – in different communities, cities, towns around the country. Because if you don’t know what’s happening there, you can’t necessarily build this national story.
So yeah, it’s like undermining the whole edifice. If you take that block away, national news then becomes more premised not on people who are on the ground gathering facts in localities.
I mean, some national publications are big enough to be able to afford to send people, but they won’t always necessarily have the insight. And crucially, they won’t always stay as long as people who actually live in that place and cover it for a local paper. So national news then becomes more nationalized in the sense that it’s about national political issues that people in a capital city, with political agendas, are propagating.
And then, obviously, if you don’t have robust local news serving communities, people are then consuming that national news – and that colours the entire way they see the world, right?
They start to see things in terms of national political divides, rather than: this issue is happening in my town, and I know about this in quite a nuanced way because there was this reporting, which doesn’t actually have anything particularly to do with national-level politics, in a local paper that I subscribe to or pay for.
I think the US is a very good example of all the dynamics I’ve just mentioned. Obviously, not to say that local news is totally dead – there are still local papers that do amazing work. There are increasingly these non-profit startups that are trying to fill the void a bit. But, you know, I think they’re really not reaching people at the scale that local news used to reach people in the past.
There has clearly been a huge diminution in local reporting resources – not just in the US, but in the UK and elsewhere. And yeah, it’s fundamental. It really is a fundamental part of journalism.
We need people with their eyes on their local government, on their local bin collection – because again, while it’s not these journalists’ responsibility to make these things work better, it is their responsibility to critique, to analyse, to report the truth about how they’re working, why they might not be working as well as they can. And obviously, that then serves as an accountability mechanism.
There’s pretty compelling evidence that when you take local news away – in the US context, for example – local levels of corruption go up, and local levels of service delivery go down. Because politicians realise they’re not being watched.
It is hugely, hugely important.
And I think there is very clearly demand for it, in the sense that people do want to know what’s going on in their community.
Whether that translates into demand in the economic sense – like, I will pay for this, I will pay for this particular newspaper or website – is a totally different question.
I think we have a real issue with that economic side of things. And, you know, I talk a bit towards the end of the book about some visions for how that could potentially work better – or a direction of travel for that that might work better. But there are no easy answers on that front.
I do think that people want this information – whether or not they say they trust journalists, or whether or not they say they want it, or whether or not they say they want to pay for it.
Humans need information about the world going on around them. And the world – even, you know, one street over from where I’m sat now – is too big a place for me to be able to directly go and experience that myself in a reliable way.
We need people who can interpret that. Tell us what’s going on. Criticise it – in the sense of thinking critically about it. It’s hugely important. And the disappearance of it – yes, is alarming.
GM: And of course, into the vacuum now has rushed social media content – which may not be local news, and certainly won’t be reported by a local journalist. But that thirst to know about the world beyond our own street can be fulfilled, and is being fulfilled, in other ways.
Ways which, I guess, you and I might see as really quite detrimental to the health of democracy, and all sorts of other things that we hold dear.
But there is the TikTokification of what people consume by way of news. And I know there’s a debate there – I know there are some people doing interesting work on TikTok – but that curiosity that we have as human beings can be fulfilled by other means…
JA: It can. And it’s of enormous concern when that is concentrated across a relative handful of major digital platforms whose algorithms are controlled by unaccountable billionaires, and are totally opaque. Right? I mean, that is just very concerning. Like, we don’t know why we’re seeing what we’re seeing.
We have some good ideas – which are to do with how content that spikes strong emotions like hatred, anger, and fear does well algorithmically. We know that. But it’s not based on any sense that, you know, at these very big social media companies, there is transparency about why they’re doing what they’re doing.
And yeah, you know – Facebook can just turn around one day and say, ‘Well, actually, news content isn’t really popular with advertisers,’ or, ‘It’s not really doing very well, so we’re just going to dial that down. And we’re going to dial up pictures of your family and cats instead.’
I mean, that might be the nicer end of the spectrum of the stuff they could be dialing up – but it still does real damage. You know, newsrooms that build strategies around that then lose a load of money. And that, clearly, is a problem that has seen whole newsrooms go bust – in addition to a bunch of journalists just losing their jobs generally.
I do want to say, though, that I just think social media is a reality of the world we live in. Complaining about it as this inherently dreadful thing – for journalism and for people’s ability to perceive the truth – isn’t going to make it go away.
And it is also a huge arena where, yeah, there’s competition for who you can reach. And the things that cut through aren’t always the most truthful, or in the public interest – to put it very mildly. But there is an opportunity for more voices to come through that way. And some of those can be responsible. And they can do journalism.
I think it is a very different world to the one where the mainstream media considered themselves to be society’s informational gatekeepers to a much larger extent. But I think saying that it’s inherently and in all ways worse than that is clearly not true. Right?
Those gatekeepers did not always act responsibly. They clearly represented the strata of society that were very homogenous.
Now, if you want to oppose the Iraq War because you see an elite media consensus that is cheerleading towards it, you can go and start a blog in the early 2000s. Right? And that can become quite influential.
Now, if you want to draw attention to the word Gaza or other things that you think the mainstream media is not covering well enough, you can go on TikTok and you can do it.
It doesn’t mean that you’ll always be guided by a journalistic spirit, or necessarily doing journalism – but you absolutely can be.
A point I make in the book – and this is borrowed from an American journalist called Hamilton Nolan – is: there isn’t this priestly class of people who are journalists, and everyone else is the rabble receiving journalism.
It’s an act. You know, if you do journalism – if you apply critical thinking, and you try and get to the truth, and you’re quite rigorous about it, and responsible about it – you can do journalism.
I mention this in… you know, obviously a good portion of the book is focused on Myanmar. Citizen journalism there has become enormously important – because the professional journalists have been put in jail, or driven out of the country, or they’ve quit their jobs.
So you have, in many cases, civilians using their cell phones to document stuff.
In a way that feels very techno-optimist, even a bit out of vogue for us in the West – who maybe associate that with the Arab Spring, but then that all went wrong, and actually this promise was completely unfulfilled. Well, no. Actually, in lots of parts of the world, this is still super, super important.
That’s not to say there are not legitimate questions as to how those people are doing what they do. It’s not to say they get everything right, or that they’re always responsible, or that they don’t, even on occasion, make things up or push an agenda.
It is a noisy and unregulated and difficult and random information environment that we’re all, in the world, experiencing. But I don’t think that that means there are no opportunities within it for journalism to cut through.
I would just finish by saying quickly, if it’s okay, that – especially in the US right now – there’s a ton of hand-wringing about these pro-Trump podcasters who allegedly now control the entire information landscape, and they’re totally in Trump’s pocket, and this is terrible.
I think, to a not insignificant extent, that analysis is true. I’m not trying to downplay the concern about it at all.
I also think, though, that assuming one side has monopolised the information environment when they’ve won an election by 1.5% is an overreaction. It’s just confirmation bias.
But also: a lot of these podcasters, and even right-wing media figures who otherwise spread disinformation or aren’t responsible to the truth – or don’t even necessarily always talk about politics – they still have to talk about political information. They still have to talk about information that is basically true, and has come from somewhere.
Maybe some of them just purely make things up – but actually the vast majority don’t. They’re reacting against things that they see in the mainstream media.
Now, they might be doing it in a way that trashes the mainstream media. But they’re still acting on this supply – this funnel – of information about the world that is true.
If that doesn’t constitute a form of demand for journalism – even if it’s one that’s uncomfortable and difficult and doesn’t translate into the resources we need to do our jobs, and even in many ways makes our jobs harder – it still is better than living in a world where anything goes. Where no one cares about facts at all. Where everything is just dead. And there’s no demand for journalism.
I think one thing I’ve learned doing this book and my CJR work is: I think there really actually is a demand for that basic act of new factual information about the world. It just is warped. And looks different to how it maybe did in the past.
And yeah, it’s important that we try and figure out how to make sure the good information that’s responsibly put together reaches more people than the stuff that would distort it.
But it’s – yeah. I think it’s a nuanced and complicated picture, basically. Maybe more so than some of the critics would attest. But still challenging, for sure.
GM: Yes, and when I heard that the Democratic governor of California had started a podcast and had had Steve Bannon on – and hadn’t pushed back when Bannon said that Trump (he said this several times) won in 2020 – I thought, Oh dear…
You know, they’ve seen something in the media sphere, they’re trying to replicate it… but actually, this is probably not going to help.
JA: Well, yeah – I mean, this is actually an interesting example. So yeah, Gavin Newsom – who is, in many ways, the archetype of a career politician, coastal Democrat, who is supposed to be disdained by real America these days – yeah, started this podcast. It’s a long-form interview show, clearly trying to get the Democrats into this lane where Joe Rogan operates, or where Republicans are perceived as having a huge advantage. And from what I’ve heard of it, the podcast itself is a joke.
I mean, yes, as you say, he has on these right-wing figures in the name of, I guess, debating with them – but actually, he doesn’t really debate. He just asks them questions and then says, ‘That’s interesting,’ when they say things like, ‘The last election was stolen.’ Right?
It feels like a bit of a one-sided fight – which, given he’s the host, is a bit weird.
That being said, though, I think there is something interesting going on there as well – which is: these shows are very long. Right? Like, Joe Rogan’s podcast – very long. Gavin Newsom’s podcast – you could question whether it’s the best use of his time, governing a state which has the, you know, whatever, biggest economy in the world. But it’s pretty long. And at times it is actually substantive.
There is an exchange about issues – even if, again, I think he could be pushing back stronger on some blatant falsehoods.
And like – I don’t think we were starting from a point here where politicians were maximally accessible, or communicating with the media in a good way. And is there a case to be made that, actually, compared to a world where politicians never speak to the public and hide behind carefully sculpted, focus-grouped press releases and tweets – and never say anything of any interest, never try and engage their opponents really directly (apart from, like, a debate once every five years), never say anything controversial – is there a case to be made that these podcasts, even though they are a way of circumventing the traditional news media as we understand it, are totally a bad thing? I don’t know.
I think, actually, maybe if this is the first step towards an understanding that politicians feel they can actually speak their minds more – that they can speak at greater length, that they can actually engage with issues in a way that’s like an hour and a half long, and people will listen to it – maybe that’s like a step away from the dumbing down of politics, and this disengagement with issues-oriented, policy-oriented media. Maybe. Again, that’s quite a tentative conclusion.
And I think what Newsom’s doing – and why it doesn’t, in my opinion, really work – is because he’s taking that spirit of don’t embarrass myself (apart from in ways where I maybe want to put out a controversial thing as like a trial balloon or whatever) and applying it to a format where that doesn’t work.
But I think if you actually embrace the format a bit more, it’s not entirely an unhopeful thing.
And like – I guess this is like a side effect of Donald Trump, who’s obviously been bad for the media and press freedom in so, so many ways that are hard to sit here and enumerate.
I think what he has done, though, is break the idea that to win in politics you have to be this corporate suit who focus-groups, within an inch of its life, every single thing that you say.
That you can – and I guess it’s the irony with Trump, because he actually doesn’t tell the truth very often – but at least if you appear to tell the truth, if you appear like you’re speaking your mind, people actually like that.
If that can unlock, you know, in other people, a sense that: Actually, maybe I will do a podcast. Or maybe I’ll go and talk to this journalist for an hour and a half and trust them to boil down the nuance of what I’m saying. Or: At least I don’t really care if they don’t, because it’s not going to make or break my career.
Maybe that’s stepping into a new political era – in terms of political messaging and communication, at least.
And maybe that place just isn’t quite as bleak as it might seem.
Again, challenging – certainly – for traditional journalists. But like, I don’t think we’re coming from a place where everything worked really well, is I guess what I’m saying.
And there are opportunities in this new information landscape that we’re stepping into, I think.
GM: So to round things off, Jon – I mean, the headwinds do seem to be considerable, and they seem to be blowing a lot stronger since Trump 2.0.
But would you say the message that you would want to leave with the reader is that we are, despite those challenges, the media landscape is evolving – and it will find new forms? And some will persist, and some will change. But we shouldn’t catastrophize, and think that we’re living through the era of the death of journalism.
There is actually… there is actually hope – even if the landscape in ten years’ time looks very different from how it did ten years ago, and even from today?
JA: I think there’s a more hopeful and a less hopeful answer to this question – and I think both are true and important, as I hope I demonstrate in the book.
I think journalism is essentially important to society. I think it’s part of governance – or like, how society regulates itself. And I think if it were to completely die and go away, that would be terrible. It would be the equivalent of getting rid of healthcare, or other public services that we’ve come to rely on.
And yeah – it’s a very, very bleak landscape for it out there. It is in inexorable, seemingly economic decline, with a few exceptions of outlets that have managed to reach a particular audience and therefore monetize that.
But you know, in general terms, there is just not enough of it. Especially at the smaller grassroots level, where it’s really, really important.
It is under full-frontal attack. Democracy and civil liberties – including freedom of the press – are eroding in so many places around the world, including the US. Which – you know, having this conversation 15 years ago, maybe some of the seeds for what’s happening now, in terms of attacks on the press, would have been apparent. But it’s really been an accelerated timeline of how acceptable it has become to go after the press.
Not just rhetorically, but also now in regulatory ways. Through spending cuts, if you’re talking about things that are publicly funded. Through lawsuits – lawsuits that get more and more outlandish.
It is really, really difficult. And it is bleak. And I don’t want to sugarcoat this with false hope. I don’t think journalists do that – as I actually say in the book, about any topic.
And I think that there is a profound – and I don’t think it would be a total exaggeration to use the word existential – crisis around how journalism is paid for. There does not appear to be a reliably money-making commercial model for journalism that will produce it at scale, and in the public interest enough to work across the whole of society.
Certainly not in a way where it’s also then available to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay for it. I think we need to be exploring public media options – publicly funded media options – especially in the US, but also here and elsewhere, a lot more than we are.
But you know, the rejoinder to that – that it’s difficult to criticize people who pay your paychecks, or that Trump- and Elon Musk-type people could just come in and cut the money – yeah, of course those are weighty considerations.
That being said – and I guess I’ll finish on the more hopeful answer – there are, even now, movements in Democratic-run states in particular in the US to do more when it comes to publicly supporting journalism.
And that doesn’t necessarily entail handing over money. It might be doing a training program for journalists to then go and work for news organizations – that’s publicly funded. It might be tax credits, so that if you have a certain number of subscribers, they can claim a tax credit on the paper subscription, and you can claim a credit on them, or whatever.
These things were – I don’t say unthinkable, but these were not popular ideas ten years ago. Or maybe even longer ago – when the idea that journalism should be a purely market enterprise in the US, and the government shouldn’t get involved at all, and that was totally taboo.
I think that taboo is being broken, actually. And I think it’s happening at levels that are below what is the most visible stuff – but that is still serving quite a lot of people, actually. Or happening in states that have a lot of people in them. Again, that is not a substitute for this happening at national levels or at scale. But it is a seed of hope.
As are alternative business models, where people are working out ways to have non-profit journalism that reaches people, that fuses journalism into the community – so that members of the community are doing journalism themselves.
Again, I want to be very clear: these things are not yet happening at a scale that is needed to replace what is being lost. Absolutely not. And that is a huge, huge challenge. But – you know – I think there are ideas out there.
I also think society needs journalism. Whether society thinks it hates journalism… you know, I touched on this earlier. It just does need it.
That is not the same as saying society needs legacy media – large newspapers, cable news networks – and that these things will somehow be preserved in aspic forever, in the current form, and that traditional journalism with its ethical codes and its norms will persist forever. It is absolutely not about that.
A lot of these places are in existential trouble. But something is going to replace that stuff – or texture it. Because that act of needing to know things about the world, and to have people who think critically about it on your behalf, is – I think – an essential human need.
Now, I think there’s, again, a very real chance that if we get into a situation where we don’t know how to pay people to do that in a way that’s rigorous, then that’s a huge, huge problem.
But it doesn’t mean the need isn’t there. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have the tools to meet that need.
It doesn’t mean – you know – we live in a world where journalism is in decline, but information is as available as it’s ever been. Or much more so. You have information that is extraordinarily available.
The local paper in a small town in Idaho might have died. And that’s terrible – for the people who live there, and also for people who want to find out information about that town. It makes it a news desert. But the paper in the town over might be thriving. Or non-profit. And I – sitting in London – could go and look at the website and read all about this small town in Idaho.
That, like, 40 or 50 years ago, unless something caught the eye of a national journalist, that then got into a print newspaper, that then was read out on air and I consumed it that way… I mean, I have an extraordinary ability to see that now. It’s actually completely phenomenal.
So yeah – the internet has challenged and basically broken, in many ways, the commercial business model for journalism. But it’s also a huge opportunity. To get and share information. For different perspectives. For different voices to come across.
We are not living in a world where these things are inherently or inevitably shutting down.
I think this is a moment of – yeah – a moment of crisis. No question about that. But out of crisis, often, it makes you do the hard thinking. It makes new things be born.
And when that need is there – to carry over from the period of crisis to the next thing – I’m confident that journalism will survive. What it looks like? I don’t know. And unfortunately, you won’t find the answer in the book. But hopefully what you will find is an argument as to why it will survive. Why it’s so needed. Why it’s a public good.
GM: Jon, thank you very much for appearing today on Transforming Society.
JA: Thank you so much for having me.