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Several months ago, over discussion with colleagues from Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, a question was posed: What will the news feel like in 2050? Immediately, we thought back to twenty-five years ago. How young we were in 2000, when LiveJournal was new, Talking Points Memo started up, and Y2K style was original. Google had been founded two years earlier; Gawker was two years away. In the spring of 2005, at a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (now known as the American Society of News Editors), Rupert Murdoch, the founder of News Corp, told the crowd that they were being “remarkably, unaccountably complacent” at the dawn of a digital revolution. “Like many of you in this room,” he said, “I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deigned to tell us what we could and should know.” But that world was transforming: Murdoch cited a report that found that people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four were increasingly using the internet to get news; just 9 percent described newspapers as “trustworthy”; 8 percent found them “useful.” Young people, Murdoch said, were “no longer wedded to traditional news outlets or even accessing news in traditional ways.”

A month later, the Huffington Post went live. In Traffic (2023), Ben Smith describes Jonah Peretti, one of the site’s founders, drawing a line on a whiteboard to set expectations for audience engagement: “It showed a single spike in the first week, then a plunge almost all the way down back to zero, then a plateau, and then a long slow climb back up.” That prediction turned out to be pretty close to correct, Smith notes, “but it didn’t fall quite as far as he feared.” Peretti was able to make that estimation because, since his time as a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, he had become expert in what he once called “contagious media,” and what we have generally referred to since as virality—though by now, in our post–BuzzFeed News days (both for Smith, its former editor in chief, and Peretti, who in 2006 started the site as an “internet popularity contest”), the flow of traffic has changed dramatically. (“Jonah was slow to recognize that the future he’d foreseen wasn’t arriving in quite the manner he’d predicted,” Smith writes.) The reasons include reconfigurations of tech platforms’ relationships with news publishers, the emerging field of individual content creators, and the rise of artificial intelligence. As Ryan Broderick, who writes the must-read Garbage Day newsletter, put it recently, “The digital public square in America, the center of our digital lives, that nexus of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X, and TikTok we replaced TV and radio with, is a ghost town.”

So many pivots-to-video, layoffs, and startup-collapses later, we find ourselves in a media environment where, among other things, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is the owner of the Washington Post and attending Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration. For journalism outlets, connecting with audiences feels newly difficult, and today’s young people are shifting once again, as they are more comfortable than ever getting news and information from chatbots. Gina Chua, in a column for CJR’s new Journalism 2050 issue, cites a study showing as much, and remarks (with echoes of Murdoch twenty years ago), “A day is coming, and soon, when people will turn to artificial intelligence for answers to all sorts of questions—despite the host of incredibly well-documented flaws of AI systems in providing accurate, credible, unbiased information.”

If we cannot, in the image of Peretti, sketch out the future on a whiteboard, maybe we can do something like meteorology, and put together a forecast. In this issue’s collection of interviews, essays, and reported features—accompanied by a podcast series hosted by Tow’s Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin, the director of the New School’s Journalism + Design Lab—we are watching the weather: the way online discourse has embraced debunking, how news delivery has shortened into bullet points and expanded to fill the length of unedited three-hour podcasts, the proliferation of bias monitors cataloguing articles and presenting themselves as arbiters of truth, the appearance of AI-powered widgets that deliver information for the price of data collection, the ascent of the news influencer, the demise of search traffic.

Atmospheric pressure forms around Las Vegas, where Perez Hilton, who calls himself the original news influencer, runs an eponymous entertainment site known for picking on celebrities. Over the summer, that got him in some legal trouble, when Blake Lively’s attorneys sent over a subpoena. As Joel Simon reports, every journalist should be interested in Hilton’s case, since everyone in the media has a stake in it—even if they might not see him as a peer. The laws that protect one person’s right to resist legal scrutiny over reporting, no matter what that information entails, can be made stronger or weaker on the basis of edge cases: first came Julian Assange; now it’s the movie star gaper. 

Maddy Crowell profiles Lex Fridman, a podcaster with nearly five million YouTube subscribers who has interviewed Trump; Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India; Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel; Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine; and the artist formerly known as Kanye West. “He allows his subjects to speak largely uninterrupted for hours on end about their lives and their views—which is compelling enough on its own, and all the more so because his guests are increasingly disinclined to speak much, if ever, with members of the traditional press,” Crowell observes. “Accountability reporting this is not.” Still, as Bhaskar Sunkara—the founding editor of Jacobin and the president of The Nation, who was a guest on Fridman’s podcast—tells her, “Allowing speakers to talk at length on their own terms, about wide-ranging topics—one can glean a lot about people’s worldviews.” 

Or prominent figures can bypass interviews altogether, and go the direct-to-consumer route, as Kyle Paoletta writes: “Boom. I press it,” Trump told a gathering of conservative social media stars during his first term, speaking of Twitter, “and, within two seconds, ‘We have breaking news.’” Across the board, politicians are increasingly taking a similar approach, while “the White House’s communications office issues SEO-savvy articles with titles such as ‘Guard Assisting Law Enforcement in Making DC Safe’ and ‘President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian’ that rank highly on Google News.” As Paoletta notes, “If the media isn’t able to find a way to challenge the official narrative on those same feeds, journalists risk losing the chance to hold the powerful to account in real time.” 

To make sense of the competing stories that inevitably arise, there has come a growing number of bias monitors, visible like cloud cover—appearing, as Amos Barshad reports, to supposedly rescue us “from our conspiratorial online disinformation hell.” Barshad spent time with AllSides, an originator of the form; during a staff meeting, before anyone got into the substance of the news, they checked in about their personal political persuasions. John Gable—a founder of the company (“right bias”)—tells Barshad, “We’re bringing power back to regular people to think for themselves.” 

That is a noble goal, if tricky to achieve. Lucy Schiller reports from the front lines of AI widgets tacking on to digital outlets and extracting our data, in the aim of delivering the best possible targeted “chumbox” ads, “so called for their easy comparison to cheap bait, and familiar for their ubiquity online—including on trusted news sites.” Taboola, among the most prominent purveyors of these ads, has teamed up with USA Today on DeeperDive, which uses AI to draw from the paper’s archive to answer readers’ questions. According to a recent survey, Schiller learns, “despite the relatively low interest among readers in using such tools,” 56 percent of news publishers have been “looking into possibly developing or adopting chatbots, if they had not already.” 

That may be owed to awareness of precipitation. As Chua puts it: “Expecting readers to stay the same—or believing we can lecture them into abandoning AI-generated stories—is a fantasy we can’t afford to indulge.” Already, we are seeing audiences abandon major news organizations in favor of their favorite individual journalists—who now bear burdens unique to news influencers, as Yona TR Golding writes. “Independent journalists are not being fully honest when they say, ‘We don’t have to worry about anything. We’re fully independent,’” Mehdi Hasan—formerly of MSNBC, who has gone on to start Zeteo—tells Golding. “Actually, you’re dependent: you have to worry about your audience.” 

Mary Retta, assessing industry-wide anxiety over “news avoidance,” sees in this picture formations of news engagement—the sources just may not be traditional. “People are maybe more inclined to trust what’s coming from a person rather than what’s coming from a brand,” Philip Lewis—who shares news related to African Americans to a large following on X and on his Substack, What I’m Reading—tells Retta. “Obviously you have the entire history of Black people and the news,” he says. “We’ve been distrusting because we’ve been left out of the conversation for so long, we don’t know if we can trust anyone.” But that doesn’t equal disengagement, as Retta notes: Pew has found that “Black people often overindex in watching the news.” As Lewis says, “I think it’s a matter of how it gets to us.” 

Elsewhere in the issue, Joshua Hunt talks with Liz Kelly Nelson, the creator of Project C, whose focus is to help “journalists navigating the independent creator economy” on platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Substack. Camille Bromley assesses debunking, the purest distillation of our online discourse. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian examines what the crisis for press freedom in Gaza portends for journalism. And we do, in the end, include some predictions, by seeking answers from figures who have weathered shifting media climates, including Ben Smith, now the editor in chief of Semafor, as well as David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker; Emma Tucker, the editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal; and Don Lemon, a former CNN anchor, now host of “The Don Lemon Show” on YouTube. “I’ll probably be dead, or retired at the very least,” Kara Swisher, the podcaster and New York magazine contributor, envisions. “I suspect screens will be everything, and everywhere. And there will be screens that aren’t actually screens, too. They’ll just appear in the air, but won’t be attached to anything.”

We do not know what exactly the future holds, much as we may want to believe we do. Journalists feel this tension all the time: the desire to serve audiences the impossible answers they seek, tugging against the humility required to remind them we can’t. There are a lot of unknowns about the next twenty-five years. But we can, at least, dress for the weather. 

This piece is part of Journalism 2050, a project from the Columbia Journalism Review and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, with support from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.

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