Thinking About The People Formerly Known as the Press

No, journalism isn’t over, but it is changing in fundamental ways

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

In 2006, NYU scholar Jay Rosen wrote a landmark blog post (!) headlined “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” It resonated as a clarion call on the evolving relationship between what it called “the media” (I always prefer the word “press,” because it’s the one Madison & Co. used in the First Amendment) and the consumers and users of their work.

In recent weeks, there have been no end of declarations that the relatively narrow second election of Donald Trump¹ heralds some sort of end of the press as we know it. Those announcements are vastly overblown, in my view. (Anyone who thinks Everything is Different This Time should spend some time with this study reporting that most voters were influenced either by friends— a version of the thesis of widely distributed thought leadership that powered Time magazine and the New Yorker beginning a century ago— or by old fashioned TV news.) But the doomsaying does spring from important phenomena with which I think it’s worth conjuring as this year starts to wind down.

There is still an Audience—in fact, there are now all sorts of newsroom jobs that include that very word in their titles, which there were not when Rosen wrote 18 years ago. But the relationships of readers and viewers and users of all sorts with newsrooms are not what they once were. We all pretty much know that.

What is truly different

Similarly, the time has come for us to think anew about the People Formerly Known as the Press, not because there is no longer a Press in this country, but because its identity and shape is shifting in important ways. Some early thoughts on what those are is the subject of this week’s column.

not so fast

Here is what I see:

• Boundaries in news are blurring. For decades, we have seen a trend to incorporate more analysis in news reports—advocates have defended this as “context,” opponents have derided it as a mask for leavening news with opinion. Both views have carried some validity in varying circumstances. But now, with the rise of the creator economy—facilitated by flattened barriers to entry and increasing consumption (finally!) of multimedia from audio to video to new visualizations—news is being transformed not only in its content but in who is providing it. It remains early days here, I think, with my own guess continuing to be that some of the creators will morph into sustainable news organizations of the future, a few of them perhaps leaders in the field.

• News organizations need to better understand this. One implication, as some are beginning to realize, is potential competition between newsrooms and their best-known personnel. What was once remarkable in the creation of Politico out of the Washington Post and then Axios out of Politico is now almost a commonplace occurrence. And yet many newsrooms still seem to be caught unaware of this possibility. More broadly, I think newsrooms will increasingly want to consider the targeted acquisition of creator entities—while some such acquisitions may eventually occur in reverse, with successful creators absorbing legacy players.

• In opinion, there may no longer be any real meaning to the concept of the “press.” I took some care in the two previous bullets to use the word “news.” In the realm of opinion, which is where much of the post-election chatter has centered, I would submit that the distinction between the “press” and other voices may no longer be significant. Thankfully, we have never licensed the press for purposes of constitutional protection in America, and it is arguable whether there is a meaningful constitutional difference between safeguards for a free press and free speech. Beyond the law, the mélange of opinion running from an individual’s social media post to a podcast or video channel with a huge following to a newsletter of any size to a traditional newspaper editorial or column is no better understood for having distinguished between which of these emanate from the “press” and which do not. If this is what people meant in saying “news” was “over” in the wake of the election, I think their point is better understood if we recognize that it was opinion rather than reported news about which they were talking.

• Authoritativeness no longer effectively carries authority. Another change is that news organizations that do engage in original reporting have surely lost some measure of their ability to enforce a common understanding of facts. There is no question, I think, that large segments of the news audience are today drawn more to authenticity than to authoritativeness. The most thoughtful newsrooms have been trying for some time to grapple with this, but there is much more work to do. That said, we should be careful not to overstate the case. The more distant facts are from people’s lives, the easier it is for them to be misinformed. But conversely, when inflation erodes a household’s purchasing power, or when a breadwinner gains or loses a job, or individuals’ taxes rise or fall markedly, or a family member recovers from or succumbs to illness, or children receive or are deprived of educational opportunities, these facts are more stubborn. One thing newsrooms need to get much better at is understanding, and acting on (that is, reporting on), those facts people actually find most salient, rather than the ones we think they should.

• Authenticity requires transparency, but also more than that. If authenticity is valued, how can it be achieved? One aspect of the answer is greater transparency, from detailed bylines to descriptions of reporting processes to greater openness about the dynamics of our own business to anticipating and pre-butting criticism to more fulsomely acknowledging errors when they occur. Newsrooms have made some progress on these dimensions, although, again, more is needed. Beyond this, however, we need to concede that elevating individual voices over institutional ones may also be a critical element of authenticity. News organizations that cannot permit— and even encourage— variance from their institutional voice will suffer in such an environment.

Thirty years into the consumer internet, change remains the one constant for the press in America. That continues to make this a fascinating time to be in or near the business of journalism. The challenges are large and complex, some of them becoming more so. In response, new thinking is required about who we are and how we need to go about our work. We remain fortunate, I think, to have the chance to try.

1. Trump becomes only the third modern president to win two terms without ever getting a majority of the popular vote. Both of the previous men to achieve this dubious distinction, Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton, won their second terms by much greater popular margins (Wilson by 2x compared with Trump, Clinton by 6x), although Wilson’s Electoral College majority in 1916 was far narrower than Trump’s in 2024.