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In 1992, a writer named Douglas Rushkoff signed a contract for Cyberia, his book about the internet subcultures of the West Coast. The next year, his publisher canceled it, according to Rushkoff’s recollection, on the grounds that “by the time the book came out the internet was going to be over.” (He later found a different publisher, and the book came out in 1994.) Rushkoff is our first guest on Journalism 2050, a new podcast series from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and the Columbia Journalism Review, in which Heather Chaplin, the director of the New School’s Journalism + Design Lab, and I ask an eclectic group of guests to help figure out what the scenarios for our field are over the next quarter century. 

Of course, that’s no easy feat. Rushkoff’s take underlines just how badly journalism and publishing have fared at prediction, particularly when it comes to our own existential risks. Rushkoff, often known as a “futurist,” prefers to call himself a “presentist”—since he thinks metabolizing what is happening at any given moment is a more profound task than looking ahead, making him an intermediary to the future. It is a role that carries with it the dual implication of both optimism and the possibility that, as Rushkoff puts it, “the patient is dying.”

What are the key inflection points from the past that might have changed the course of journalism had we acted differently? For Rushkoff, it was the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s John Perry Barlow and “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” calling for the internet to be unshackled from government control. “What we didn’t realize in that inflection point,” Rushkoff said, “was that if you get rid of government, you create a free space for corporations.”

Other Journalism 2050 guests include Azmat Khan, a Pulitzer Prize winner who runs Columbia’s Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism, and Anya Schiffrin, a professor at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, where she serves as a codirector of the technology policy and innovation concentration. In a taping before a live audience, Khan and Schiffrin considered the rapid takeover of the internet by commercial and political entities whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of journalism. Take the war in Gaza, Khan said, “which has, in so many ways, led to one of the most unprecedented assaults on freedom of the press, on journalists, and on freedom of speech.” Israel, Khan observed, has outlined a playbook for excluding international press from regions in conflict, discrediting local reporters, and then targeting journalists’ physical safety. “If you shut down independent voices,” Shiffrin said, “you can get away with murder under cover of darkness.”

We’re also joined by Ben Smith, whose career has been a relief map of digital progress and regression in journalism: from a local reporter to a blogger for Politico to running the iconic, ultimately doomed BuzzFeed newsroom to the New York Times to founding Semafor, where he is the editor in chief. One of Smith’s inflection points was what Charlie Warzel has described as “the greatest day on the internet”—which started with two escaped llamas and ended with a global argument about the color of a dress. “Looking back on it, the reason the dress spread was that it was divisive in a literal sense,” Smith recalled. And then: “Arguments the platforms saw as engagement and amplified to everybody.” The good-hearted and silly, he found, soon became a monetizable division of extremes.

Our guests fill in a vivid picture of how the development of the commercial Web, the rise of social platforms, and now the forced march of artificial intelligence have left us in a place where the next steps are decidedly human. What is the best path to the future? Candice Fortman and Sarah Alvarez, founders of a Detroit local news project called Outlier Media, identify a “journalism of care”—which sounds soft, but entails the hard work of figuring out how to get the most important messages and information to people with the fewest resources. Tapping into local organizing, and bringing the community into the journalism process, they have learned, can endure where other models have failed. The future for journalism cannot be lashed to particular technologies or platforms. It must live in real space. 

That applies broadly: the major lesson learned from Big Tech; authoritarianism; and financial, political, and economic pressure is the need for organization. Maria Bustillos, the founder of a journalism cooperative called Brickhouse Media, told us that the inflection point of one person—Peter Thiel, who bankrolled the libel lawsuit that took down Gawker—was that he didn’t like certain coverage and “could just spend a lot of money and deprive millions of people of reading whatever they wanted, and end livelihoods.” Bustillos, who covered every day of the Gawker libel trial, has since made it her mission to “increase and create opportunities for people to practice journalism in an atmosphere where that would not be possible.”

Among the journalists, researchers, political scientists, and technologists we’ve been talking to, there was a remarkable consensus on the path forward: providing information, and connection, from the ground level. We will be releasing new episodes of Journalism 2050 every two weeks—please find us here, or check us out wherever you get your podcasts.

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