But the story began, as it seemingly must, with that inescapable character: Donald Trump. The battleground was the treatment of race and racism in America. In a crucible of proclamations, disputes, and meetings, the requirements of the newspaper as an institution collided with the post-journalistic call for an explicit struggle against injustice. It sparked a melodrama over standards at the Times, featuring a conflict between radical young reporters and befuddled middle-aged editors. Its language aimed to commodify polarization and threat: journalists had to “scare the audience to make it donate.” At stake was survival in the digital storm. The new business model required a new style of reporting. Post-journalism “mixes open ideological intentions with a hidden business necessity required for the media to survive,” Mir observes. Rather than news, the paper began to sell what was, in effect, a creed, an agenda, to a congregation of like-minded souls. It entailed a wrenching pivot from a journalism of fact to a “post-journalism” of opinion-a term coined, in his book of that title, by media scholar Andrey Mir. Under such circumstances, what commodity could be offered for sale?ĭuring the 2016 presidential campaign, the Times stumbled onto a possible answer. Today, nobody under 85 would look for news in a newspaper. As supply vastly outstripped demand, the news now chased the reader, rather than the other way around. The amount of information in the world was, for practical purposes, infinite. Led by the New York Times, a few prominent brand names moved to a model that sought to squeeze revenue from digital subscribers lured behind a paywall. The survival of the rest remains an open question. For most newspapers, no alternative sources of revenue existed: as circulation plummets to the lowest numbers on record, more than 2,000 dailies have gone silent since the turn of the century. Advertisers fled to online platforms, never to return. The digital age exploded this business model. Opinion, which divided readers, was treated like a volatile substance and fenced off from “factual” reporting. The aim was to herd the audience into a passive consumerist mass. To a considerable degree, this commercial imperative determined the journalistic style, with its impersonal voice and pretense of objectivity.
Traditional newspapers never sold news they sold an audience to advertisers.
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