We must start from the supposition that nobody cares about the news.

You’ll scroll headlines and you’ll see a blurb flash by on Facebook or in your email or on Twitter, but most of us don’t want to read a news article. They are long, complex, and often boring and compete with our Netflix and Chill time.

Further, the news business is deeply broken. The editors, desperate to grab your eye as it slides past fights, pornography, and C-SPAN-quality videos of celebrities, politicians, and sports figures performing mundane activities, will write headlines that titillate and capture attention.

Finally, these headlines are free. They are as ephemeral as candy floss and last as long as our eyes rest upon them and then shunt them off. There is no benefit to selling these headlines because no one will pay for them. In fact, the moderation and management of these headlines costs so much that it makes no business sense to correct falsehoods. A bit of rage bait goes well with Trump farting audibly in the Oval Office, and that pairs wonderfully with a pair of tits. The buffet of media is now more Old Country than smorgasbord.

So how do we fix this?

First, Substack, Bari Weiss, and influencers aren’t the answer. Take my own example when it comes to Substack. I’m a career journalist who, at my height, made over $200,000 a year writing about new startups. That was an amazing and heady time circa 2010 to 2016, and that salary was supported by an ad sales team that could actively sell $100,000 ads on the sites we worked for. Brands wanted access to those sites because, in the past, we were the equivalent of that dopamine tango we currently perform on our phones. We’d all wake up, check our bookmarks, and read. Some users would disassociate the website from the news through an RSS reader, but those folks were few and far between. People actually clicked and viewed pages larded with ads, and that led to the rise of the professional blogger.

Now, however, I can send you this newsletter, and you might read it (you probably won’t), and you might subscribe (you probably won’t), and I get nothing. I make $2,000 yearly on this newsletter, and I produce acceptable video content and interviews weekly. I can’t hire a team nor can I pay for anything more than ChatGPT and some editing tools to ensure that I don’t sound like an idiot. I try my damnedest to be interesting, and no one — not the PR people who pitch their clients, not the entrepreneurs, not even Substack — cares to pay me more than is my modern journalist’s due. In the great bell curve of value, I’m firmly on the far left, a lone voice howling into an empty jar that I don’t even own.

Bari Weiss and CBS thought they had it cracked. They figured they’d run to where the audience was. But that audience, the angry boomer who is confused about object permanence, is not paying for news either. In CBS’s case, that audience is worthless. They won’t buy or try anything new, and their fear of immigrants prevents them from being sexually aroused by orange juice commercials anymore. Therefore, even the old models are dead.

Finally, there’s TikTok and Instagram. The ROI on a single influencer video drops off a cliff after a certain point. To truly get Kardashian-style attention for your product, you have to pay $100,000 for a single photo or short video. The resulting traffic, thanks to the rapacious stylings of Meta and ByteDance, is near zero, and the only way to truly make money is to sell something outright, usually some Temu garbage that costs $5 and that you can sell for $100. This drop shipping scam isn’t exactly what Balmain and Proctor & Gamble want to do, and the “news” that influencers produce is suspect at best and certifiable at worst. Those folks will make money, but not much, and they won’t support an entire news gathering apparatus.

So now what?

So now what?

As we’ve discovered, a kind benefactor in the form of Jeff Bezos or some crypto prick will never save news. The idea that billionaires will doggedly spend millions to spread the truth is an ancient one and has been completely debunked in the modern era. Everything that modern news organizations have tried has failed. This is primarily because they are thinking based on an older model, one designed around the Victorian concept of imperialism.

In the nineteenth century, Britain embraced the belief that a standardized media and education system could produce a shared way of thinking across the empire. This was not only about teaching people to read or giving them access to facts. Instead, it was about order. If people read the same newspapers, learned the same history, and absorbed the same moral lessons, they could be governed more easily. A clerk in London and a clerk in Mumbai did not need to live the same life, but they needed to accept the same basic story about how the world worked and who held authority.

This belief emerged from the practical demands of empire. The British Empire was vast and culturally fragmented, too large to control by force alone. Standardized schooling, uniform exams, and mass circulation newspapers did the work of governance. English language instruction, civil service testing, and widely shared media created a common frame of reference. Progress was defined as industrial growth. Authority rested in institutions, and truth moved outward from the center while news was gathered on the periphery and carefully repackaged for a global audience. England made the world flat, and the rest of the world followed that template.

Mass media fit naturally into this system. Newspapers were not simply vehicles for information. They were tools for social alignment and told readers what mattered, what was respectable, and what fell outside the bounds of serious concern. The goal was not constant debate but coherence. A public that broadly agreed on the facts, the tone, and the limits of disagreement was easier to manage. From this, we got the concept of the Overton Window, the idea that there are things that are safe to say (the price of pork futures) and others that are discourteous to mention (the President’s health, the sex lives of the rich).

That model only functioned under conditions of scarcity. Printing presses were expensive. Distribution was slow and limited. Attention was finite. Controlling a newspaper meant controlling a narrow but powerful slice of reality. Modern news organizations still operate as if this world exists, even though its material conditions have disappeared.

The recurring belief that a wealthy benefactor will rescue journalism is just a modern version of an old myth. Industrial-era tycoons did not buy newspapers out of devotion to truth. They bought them because newspapers were profitable and influential at the same time. Classified ads paid the bills. Influence came along for free. When the money dried up, so did the interest.

Today’s news organizations keep trying to rebuild this nineteenth-century system with modern tools. Paywalls, subscriptions, bundles, and philanthropic grants all assume that the public still wants a single shared narrative and that the main obstacle is distribution or funding. That assumption no longer holds.

The internet destroyed the conditions that made broad, centralized power possible. There is no center now. There is no single audience that needs to be aligned. People do not want to think the same way. They want to feel “understood.” They want to do “research.” They want to feel unique in the world with a feed that caters to their whims. How often are you scrolling on Instagram and find something that is deeply uninteresting to you — homeschoolers dancing or some kind of religious bodybuilder who looks like beef jerky, for example? You feel a twinge of anger because the algorithm didn’t know you.

Modern journalism continues to fail because it is still chasing coherence at scale. It is still trying to speak to everyone at once, like a newspaper laid on every breakfast table of an empire. That world is gone. Media built to shape a unified public mind cannot survive abundance, fragmentation, and choice.

The crisis in news is not primarily a crisis of funding or technology. It is a crisis of theory. Journalism is still organized around a model of power that no longer exists.

How do we solve for this? First, we embrace AI. AI can produce endless content of a quality that is already more than acceptable to the mass of humanity. Stories in the vein of “Politician does X” and “Business does Y” are headline fodder. While potentially vital to a very small audience, most of us are fine knowing that the local high school won the game 5 to 7 or that Apple just released a new iPhone. We don’t need 500 journalists at The Washington Post to tell us that Stanley water mugs are tainted with alarming amounts of LSD. This aggregated information can come from multiple sources — the New York Times, Wired, the Scranton Bee and Ledger — and come with varying levels of context.

The next level is the human editor who will curate this so-called slop. They will work with the AI to select headlines and stories that will get extra exposure through repeat posting to all social media, not just Twitter. The sports scores should show up as a photo on your Instagram feed. A talking head should inform you that a zebra is loose in Willamette. A local influencer turned paid journalist can cover a restaurant review or a school shooting. You need a human to run this apparatus, but one or two of them are cheap.

These small groups can create global news networks similar to the old newspapers, but instead of a “bureau,” you have a “barstool.” One writer and one editor can produce a hundred headlines out of Kyiv a day. One writer and one editor can cover baseball or football or basketball — sometimes all three. By splitting the editorial process into some sort of guerrilla terrorist cell.

Ah, but quality, you’ll opine. What happens when everything is dross?

Isn’t it already? What are you currently reading? Absolute drivel, and you slop it up like a pig to a trough (no offense). You’re not going to buy a newspaper, and you’re definitely not going to pick up a magazine. You’re just fine sliding past news, so why spend millions producing it? Instead, let’s pay the better cells a little more to produce long-form content like reviews, features, profiles, and the like. Stuff that you can sell advertising against.

Most news organizations could easily stop there. The more prestigious or ambitious ones can hire real reporters — of whom there will only be a few left — to write investigations and the like. These can run alongside the radar chaff that is spit out on a daily basis. Further, they can also pay influencers some sort of wage to feature products and services, to interview entrepreneurs and sports stars, and to write focused newsletters on a single topic. But, again, those people need support. It’s hard enough producing an interesting startup newsletter twice a week, and I’m all alone. Imagine having to do it daily? You will need AI operators who can handle video and images, graphics, and animations. You’ll need people who will create eye-candy alongside the news.

You might not believe this will work, but what’s the alternative? It’s clear that The Washington Post is done. The New York Times is hanging in because enough rich New Yorkers will still pay for it. Financial news like the Wall Street Journal exists because the news is actionable and can make readers money. But everything else, the slow drumbeat of history, is valueless and must be treated as such. The real money will come from the upper echelons of the newsroom, just as it used to come from the classifieds page. People don’t deserve a full, human-written and human-curated page of news on a daily basis. They simply don’t. Nor do they want it. They want Cracker Jack where most of the news is boring popcorn interspersed with a few expensive peanuts. Hell, sometimes they’ll even get the prize.

I wish I didn’t have to be this cynical. Further, I know there are other models that might still work. Resilience, where I write regularly, has a very successful event and the news site and newsletter support that mission. If those systems are working, then by all means let them cook.

But for the rest of the media, for the sad-eyed, pot-bellied journalists working at a thousand small markets, their days are done. When Bezos gutted The Washington Post this week, there was a lot of talk from journalists about the camaraderie of the newsroom, how much everyone loved each other. As evidenced by their layoffs, love gets you only so far. You also need money.

A new media is being born. We thought the Internet was the real new media, an always-on firehose of junk that drowned us. Little did we know that we’d all float and that that firehose would wash away all context, all value, and all truth. We need to rethink how we serve news to an exhausted audience, and it starts with destroying the old systems before they collapse on us like some dark-windowed, waterlogged ruin. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to the truth, and we owe it to the future.