When people trust humans more than brands: the incubator newsroom

This year’s Reuters Institute Digital News Report paints a bleak picture for traditional newsrooms. As the BBC summarizes:

Social media and video networks have become the main source of news in the US, overtaking traditional TV channels and news websites, research suggests. […] More than half (54%) of people get news from networks like Facebook, X and YouTube - overtaking TV (50%) and news sites and apps (48%). 

Not every newsroom is declining — the one I work for, ProPublica, is actively growing. But the industry-wide trend is alarming.

The nature of the news received via social media is often markedly different to that from traditional newsrooms; the latter adheres to a well-established set of journalistic norms, whereas the former is more often unashamedly skewed towards a particular point of view, with lax or nonexistent fact-checking. The report establishes Joe Rogan as the most widely-heard voice in news: although he more properly sits in the entertainment category, 22% of people were exposed to his news commentary. 

Overall, “personality-based news” — where you’re informed through individuals who you follow and trust on social media rather than institutions — is on the rise. Getting your news from AI chatbots like ChatGPT is another rising trend, which is twice as popular among the under-25s (15%) than anyone else (7%).

There has been some hope that the new batch of social networks will give newsrooms a boost. It’s true that users there are more likely to both engage with news stories and pay money to donate or subscribe to news organizations, but they’re still too small to make a big difference in terms of the overall news consumption landscape:

Rival networks like Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon are "making little impact globally, with reach of 2% or less for news”.

Apple News is widely considered by the industry to be a success, but it’s not really: this year it reached 125 million monthly active users across the US, Canada, UK and Australia, while five years ago it reached 100 million. Those might sound like big numbers, but they’re pretty low for a free app that comes bundled with a phone that has 1.38 billion active users. Added to which, that growth rate is very slow: iPhone use itself increased by 33% in that time, meaning that use of Apple News per capita by iPhone users actually decreased. Apple is looking outside news, at games and other non-news features, to boost its engagement.

There have been many other attempts to create news aggregators and news-based social networks over time. At Matter Ventures, I supported several of them. Apps like Particle aim to throw a new spin on surfacing headlines, for example by summarizing them through AI or filtering them through different viewpoints. But historically, most of them have failed to gain anything more than a niche audience.

The Reuters report makes clear that it’s not that people don’t like institutional news brands — at least not when they’re surveyed about them. (There’s always a possibility that people feel like they’re supposed to like them, for example.) But what people say is less important than what they do, and in practice, they’re just not particularly paying attention to them.

Areas that become local news deserts often succumb to local corruption. National news helps people to make more informed decisions as voters and citizens. Journalism is clearly important; what isn’t as clear is whether we need it to come from traditional newsrooms. Newspapers were a historic form of distribution technology that became largely obsolete in the face of the internet. Similarly, there’s little value to be found in preserving traditional news institutions for their own sakes. The important thing is safeguarding the value of journalism: to individuals, and to society.

So how do we do that?

If we’re concerned about the societal value of journalism rather than preserving its existing institutions, the shift from traditional newsrooms to individual personalities on social media isn’t necessarily inherently bad. Much depends on whether these personalities can sustainably provide the same societal value.

Rather than hand-wringing about whether a particular publication should survive, I think we should instead consider the value of newsrooms to journalists. If we believe that journalism is a societal good, but that existing newsrooms might not survive, then we might consider building new scaffolding that addresses the value they currently provide.

This includes:

• Resources: salary, equipment, an office to work from, coverage for expenses, the financial freedom to deeply report stories, access to source archives and databases.
• Legal protections and advice: the protection necessary to withstand lawsuits, subpoenas, and other legal jeopardy. (I would include insurance here too.)
• Fact-checking and editing: help to ensure that reporting is fair, accurate, truthful, and tells the story as well as possible.
• Platforms: a place to publish.
• A community of trust: a brand that automatically imbues authenticity, and a community of potential sources that feels safe providing information to people associated with it.
• Promotion: an audience for their work.

Some of these are easier to provide to independent journalists than others, but for a few of them, options already exist. Some authors on Substack can apply for legal defense through Defender, which claims to help navigate them through legal pressure or challenges. Of course, Substack has to decide that you are worth supporting, which is entirely up to their discretion. Given the platform’s financial support for Nazi authors, this may reasonably give some independent journalists pause. In a platform-centered world rather than a newsroom-centered world, these decisions are made based on platform business considerations rather than journalistic ethics.

Trust is transitive in a similar way. If you attach yourself to a platform like Substack, perhaps because you’re sold on its free tier, the potential to gain more readers through its network effects, and its easy revenue-generating features, any missteps the platform makes reflect on you. Many publishers have discovered that readers now judge them based on their choice to share a platform with Nazis. In a world where platform decisions affect personal reputations, independent journalists must weigh the benefits of reach and monetization against the reputational risks of guilt by association.

On the other hand, a newsroom has similar properties to a platform: a decision by ownership, for example Jeff Bezos blocking the Washington Post from endorsing Presidential candidates or repointing its opinion pages to endorse libertarian values, also carries a hit to trust. Journalists in the Post newsroom who had nothing to do with these decisions will have suffered a reputational hit (as well as potential job instability drawn from mass cancelations). Being a part of a newsroom doesn’t immunize journalists against abrupt business changes.

Given that incumbent newsrooms are failing, and platform-based independence comes with new risks, I don’t think the solution is one or the other. Instead, it’s worth trying to imagine a new kind of newsroom: one that meets the moment in terms of platform, trust, and voice, but provides the quality assurance, support, continuity, and opportunities for collaboration that newsrooms at their best provide.

What if a newsroom was more like an incubator?

Unlike traditional newsrooms, which tend to centralize audience and revenue under the institution’s brand, the incubator model is semi-decentralized by design. It treats the journalist as the primary unit of trust and invests in them accordingly, while providing them the support, backup, and network they need.

In this model, the newsroom “invests” in individual journalists by guaranteeing a base salary in exchange for a minimum volume of quality stories, giving them a platform, and providing editorial, legal, and fact-checking support. Readers follow individual journalists and can support them, for example through subscriptions or donations. The journalist keeps most of the revenue, but a percentage is funneled back to the newsroom in order to cover costs and allow the newsroom to grow. 

Each journalist publishes under a domain name that they own and control. If they ever choose to leave the newsroom, they can take their domain, their subscribers, and their archive with them. But because the newsroom provides infrastructure, distribution, and a trusted brand ecosystem, many will choose to stay. Star performers who bring added benefit to the newsroom will be retained with better profit-sharing deals. When journalists collaborate on stories, the platform automatically calculates and distributes profit shares. Journalists are free to — and actually are expected to — do more of their own promotion across social media, because that’s who people want to follow, but the newsroom provides safety mechanism to, for example, shield journalists from abuse should it occur.

Journalists who are just starting out will benefit too: there is a homepage for the newsroom that aggregates new stories and lets you search by topic in all the usual ways. Because every journalist is on the same platform, traffic can be recirculated between them through automatic features in the UI: readers who came for a big-name journalist will be prompted to read a similarly-good story from someone they haven’t heard of yet.

That recirculation means that the journalists have to be reasonably compatible; this isn’t a model that necessarily invests in radically different modes of storytelling. Everyone must also agree to a fact-checking and editing process before publication. Editors offer guidance — suggesting beats, sharpening pitches — but they don’t hold veto power. Journalists retain creative control. Fact-checkers and editors who do sensitivity and ethics checks do hold veto power, ensuring a level of truthfulness and quality and that the newsroom’s legal protection can function, but journalists can always take the piece elsewhere if they choose.

The result is a personality-led factual newsroom where journalists have wide latitude to write and promote their work, and where readers can follow journalists they particularly admire while discovering new ones. The societal benefits of journalism are preserved, but the model shifts to reflect a modern truth: people trust people more than brands.

Ideally, there would be many of these — each with its own governance model and editorial mission. A newsroom incubator in the style of The 19th could ensure more inclusive stories are told. One in the style of ProPublica might orient its incubator funding around investigative stories that take longer to report. Some might be worker-owned co-operatives, while others might be traditional private companies with an institutional backer. Each would be its own experiment in voice, governance, and public trust.

There’s no need to preserve institutions for their own sakes. But we do need to preserve truth and democracy. To do that, we need to be ready to imagine new futures that go beyond traditional structures and support what really matters. This thought experiment is one embodiment of that idea, which is intended to start a conversation. There will be many others.