Our Fragmented Media Age, and What Might Come Next

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Ever since Dana White, the founder of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, appeared onstage at Donald Trump’s election night victory party and paid homage to a parade of podcasters—Theo Von, the Nelk Boys, “the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan”—media watchers have been talking about the role that alternative media played in boosting Trump, what it reveals about our increasingly fragmented information ecosystem, and what it all means for journalism. While it is still possible for major news media companies to break through in such a climate, “it’s not a predictable or even easily understandable phenomenon, as social media platforms change alongside their viewers,” CJR’s Feven Merid wrote last week. Announcing the result on election night, a video made by one news influencer on TikTok racked up roughly as many views as MSNBC averaged for its Election Day live broadcast, Merid noted. Such figures, one expert told her, are “the new New York Times.”

This week, we saw some further data points on this and related phenomena. On Monday, a much-discussed study from the Pew Research Center reported that roughly one in five Americans—a figure that rises to nearly two in five among young people—say they regularly get information from news influencers, a term that Pew defines as individuals who regularly post about “current events and civic issues” and have at least a hundred thousand followers on a major social platform; Pew found that these influencers skew male and right-wing (though not by much, in the latter case) and tend not to have any background in traditional newsrooms. Also on Monday, Puck’s Peter Hamby wrote about a poll that his outlet conducted in partnership with Echelon Insights, noting that public reaction to Trump’s, erm, controversial cabinet picks has generally been more positive than the frenzied news cycle around them might suggest, and observing that “legacy media is losing its place in the attention economy.” The same day, Abby Phillip, an anchor on CNN, spoke at an event at Harvard. “I feel like I have to talk about my own demise here, but that’s what it is,” she said. “People are not watching TV anymore.” On Wednesday, we learned that several other cable networks, including MSNBC and CNBC, would be spun off by their owner, Comcast—a move that the Times interpreted as a bid to unshackle the company’s movie and theme park assets from “the waning fortunes of traditional television.”

And yet, if Merid was right to say that media fragmentation is not an easy phenomenon to understand or measure, we should be careful not to overstate the extent of legacy media’s demise, at least to this point. The consequences of the Comcast spinoff are not yet totally clear; at Harvard, Phillip also stressed that CNN “remains extremely relevant” in a shifting media landscape. Puck’s polling with Echelon found that for all “the hype about podcasts and TikTok,” TV and streaming remained dominant information sources during the election: majorities of voters “said that TV ads and news coverage of events and rallies were the main vehicles for learning about the candidates,” while nearly 60 percent reported watching the results live on TV. And, as Semafor’s Ben Smith has noted, major mainstream outlets (not Von or Rogan) have broken “nearly all the news” about Trump’s appointments. Similar could be said of the scandals surrounding several of them. Yesterday, CNN contacted Matt Gaetz, Trump’s embattled pick for attorney general, for comment on a previously unreported sexual encounter he is alleged to have had with a then seventeen-year-old. Less than an hour later, Gaetz withdrew his nomination. (He denies any sexual wrongdoing.)  

Other data points also point to the continuing reach and power of traditional journalism. On Tuesday, Apple published a list of the most popular podcasts on its platform this year, and the top show and top series in the US were both New York Times productions: The Daily and Serial. (Rogan’s show was only the third most popular; NBC’s Dateline, This American Life, and NPR’s daily news podcast Up First were all among the top ten shows.) Merid noted in her piece last week that Times content has also performed “exceptionally well” on Facebook of late; it isn’t quite clear why, and the trend could be an anomaly, but in general terms, if influencers are the new New York Times, then the old Times isn’t doing so badly either. Meanwhile, in the UK, Press Gazette reported on new research showing that young people appear to visit news publishers’ websites and apps vastly more often than they say they do.

Such trends, of course, do not amount to a clean bill of health for traditional journalism. For starters, the media landscape in the UK—where the publicly funded BBC has, broadly speaking, served as a check on fragmentation—looks different from that of the US; in the latter country, the Times may be finding success in new media venues, but many other traditional news institutions are withering, especially at the local level. (And on the national TV front, the fear is less one of immediate irrelevance than of increasing obsolescence over time as the medium’s core audience dies off.) But all these differing data points do add up to a picture that is complicated and incomplete, more so than generalizations about the death of journalism would allow. Ultimately, whatever it looks like, a need and desire for new, fact-based information is still out there. The challenge now is to work out which of the old models for delivering it still work—and at what scale—and which need reimagining. In the process, we will need to reexamine some of the shibboleths of the legacy media business.

Some potential new models for journalism might in fact be old ones. This morning, Merid is out with a profile of IndyMedia, an initially temporary initiative that harnessed the power of the early Web to offer an alternative to mainstream coverage of protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999, then grew into “a full-fledged open publishing network of activist journalism, with some two hundred community centers and national and global online hubs.” The initiative served local informational needs—especially those of working people on the political left—but was also international in scope. “IndyMedia scaled across topics, so that you could see, for example, that there were struggles around housing justice in New York City and see how they were connected to similar struggles in Spain, or in parts of Central America,” Todd Wolfson, a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, said. “It really bound those things together in a way that we just don’t have at this point.”

IndyMedia declined over time, for various reasons related to its organizational structure and the online information environment in which it was operating. These days, only one of its arms survives: the Urbana Champaign Independent Media Center, in Illinois, which registered as a nonprofit and invested in real estate that now generates the bulk of its revenue. (The rest comes from grants and donations.) But Wolfson and a fellow academic, Victor Pickard, who jointly run an initiative called the Media, Inequality, and Change Center, still view IndyMedia as “the most promising model in recent history for how grassroots community journalism can work,” and as “proof of concept for a revolutionary system.” Pickard believes that public media centers should exist across the country—supported, in an ideal world, by the federal government—and build connections across communities, a “challenge of particular urgency now,” Merid notes, amid all the talk of fragmentation.

We do not live in an ideal world, of course—and even if we did, IndyMedia’s worldview and model wouldn’t work for, or appeal to, all journalistic players. But if this unmoored media moment can teach us anything, it is, perhaps, that journalism initiatives needn’t all look like each other—or have the reputational heft of the Times or major TV networks—to offer something valuable. And the history of IndyMedia shows that fragmentation and its attendant proliferation of new and competing voices is neither a totally new phenomenon, nor one that need be heard as a death knell for the dissemination of news online. If fragmentation is in some respects dangerous, in other ways, it might even be exciting. You can read Merid’s profile of IndyMedia here.

Other notable stories:

• In his column for Politico, Michael Schaffer argues that news organizations and political actors should stop describing Trump’s victory as “resounding” or “dominant.” The election, Schaffer writes, was a lot closer than that, and as California and other states have continued to count ballots, Trump’s lead in the popular vote has continued to shrink; last weekend, his share dropped below 50 percent, and yet that milestone triggered “relatively few headlines.” Schaffer attributes the faulty consensus that Trump won big to myopia on the part of close observers who spent months “hyper-focused on a few swing states and a few bellwether demographics” in which Trump did better than expected, as well as the human need to “justify the emotional investment” in campaign coverage “by finding a sweeping verdict in the results.”

• In the wake of the election, press freedom groups urged the Senate to pass the PRESS Act, a bill that would protect journalists from government surveillance and from being forced to reveal their sources, before Trump takes office; the measure has twice passed the House with bipartisan backing, but has stalled in the Senate. This week, it hit another obstacle when Trump came out against it, urging Republicans to “KILL THIS BILL” in a post on Truth Social. Meanwhile, Jessica Rosenworcel, who has chaired the Federal Communications Commission under President Biden, confirmed that she will step down from the agency in January. And Trump tapped Pam Bondi, a longtime ally, for attorney general after Gaetz ruled himself out. 

• In media-jobs news, Hearst Magazines, which owns titles including Cosmopolitan and Esquire, reportedly implemented layoffs this week, though it’s not clear how many staffers were affected. Elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal reportedly cut a handful of staffers in its Washington bureau, including Ben Pershing, the politics editor. Lachlan Cartwright reported that Dan Eggen, a senior politics editor at the Washington Post, is being removed from his role; in an internal note, Eggen said he was “crushed” by the news. And the Times confirmed rumors that Elisabeth Bumiller is stepping down as its DC bureau chief. She will return to a reporting role.

• Earlier this year, we noted reports that the Garden Island, a newspaper in Hawai‘i, had created AI-generated avatars to report the news in video form—a move that unionized journalists condemned as “digital colonialism.” Now Guthrie Scrimgeour, a former staffer at the paper, reports for Wired that the project has been scrapped. The AI avatars “were never able to figure out how to present the news in a manner that wasn’t deeply off-putting for viewers,” Scrimgeour writes. “In the polarized months leading up to the election, the pair managed to inspire visceral, bipartisan contempt.”

• And the New York City Council voted to speed up the removal of broken newspaper boxes from the city’s streets and to tighten the regulations governing their upkeep and appearance, Gothamist’s Giulia Heyward reports. “I know it’s not the biggest issue in the world. But we get calls from constituents who are really sick and tired of looking at beaten up, graffitied, broken and tipped over plastic periodical boxes on the sidewalk,” one council member said. “How a neighborhood looks matters.”

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.