Journalism 2050

It may be hard to believe now, but there was a time, in the early 2000s, when many felt that social media would revitalize the public sphere and herald a new age of democratic participation. Two decades later, each week seems to bring fresh evidence of how tech platforms enable, amplify, and even encourage racist and misogynistic abuse. The coordinated campaign against Jane Doe, the woman at the c...

When The Atlas , a digital newspaper, launched earlier this year, it billed itself as “the new samizdat.” The term recalls the dissident networks that distributed forbidden news and literature in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and ’60s, evading the censors. According to The Atlas , today’s samizdat—which roughly translates as “self-publishing”—must evade a different threat: big tech platforms, whic...

In 1990, a chance encounter in the office elevator changed the trajectory of Razia Iqbal’s career. She was then a subeditor at the BBC on a six-month contract. Days later, she was on a flight to Pakistan as the BBC’s foreign correspondent, after the position had been vacated at short notice. It was supposed to be a quiet stint. But shortly after she arrived, Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s prime minist...

In Georgia, since a new party took power in 2024 , founded by a billionaire oligarch with links to Russia, journalists are facing unprecedented attacks. All sorts of repression have become more common: physical assaults, arrests, arbitrary fines, suspensions of accreditation, and more. But perhaps the most devastating blow was less direct. After the government clamped down on all foreign funding a...

When Ronald Reagan won the presidency, in 1980, it was a victory long in the making. For almost half a century, conservatives had plotted ways to cut taxes and undo workers’ rights. Their playbook for political influence went something like this: create a think tank, publish reputable reports, build relationships with journalists and politicians, and disseminate free-market ideas to the public, cr...

Before Elon Musk, there was Henry Ford: an attention-seeking car manufacturer, newspaper owner, and media celebrity who pushed reactionary views on the public and transformed society around his business interests. “Fordism” was more than a mode of production, it was a way of organizing society, involving large factories, nuclear families, stable employment, and affordable cars, refrigerators, and...

How can journalism survive? Perhaps the question would once have sounded unduly panicked, but it has only grown more pressing over the past twenty years. Between 2004 and 2019, newspapers lost an astonishing 77 percent of their jobs—more than any other industry on record, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics . In early February, the industry suffered another historic blow, as the Washington...

In 2016, Sarah Alvarez, a former civil-rights lawyer and reporter, reimagined what journalism could be. Rather than break news or publish stories on a website, her project, Outlier Media , promised to provide the people of Detroit with information on any property they wanted, via text message—all they had to do was ask. Alvarez hoped that with vetted information, locals could hold landlords to acc...

In 2007, Valleywag, Gawker ’s gossip column devoted to Silicon Valley, published a short piece about a then-little-known venture capitalist and tech founder, under the headline “ Peter Thiel is totally gay, people .” Thiel’s sexuality wasn’t a secret, nor was the piece mocking. “Peter Thiel, the smartest VC in the world, is gay,” it read. “More power to him.” But it was the first time this informa...

In 2006, Jay Rosen, the media scholar, published his influential article “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” His medium was as important as his message. Although the essay would later appear in media-studies textbooks, it was first published on his blog, a form invented in the late 1990s that seemed, in Rosen’s words, to give everyone their own printing press. Armed with such technologies...

It has been called “the last good day on the internet”: on February 26, 2015, Americans flocked online to watch fugitive llamas in Arizona evade their captors on a live broadcast, shortly before an ambiguously colored dress—blue and black to some, white and gold to others—was uploaded online. At BuzzFeed , which sent the dress to unprecedented levels of global virality, Ben Smith watched it all un...

When Natalia Antelava co-founded Coda Story in early 2016 to cover democratic backsliding around the globe, she wasn’t expecting the tech industry to be such a big part of the story. It wasn’t only that autocratic regimes were benefiting from compliant Silicon Valley companies. By launching a new media organization, Antelava also discovered how entangled journalism itself had become with some of t...

Examining an ongoing crisis for press freedom—and how to manage security risks going forward. For Journalism 2050’s inaugural live event, Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin are joined by Azmat Khan, the director of Columbia’s Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism, and Anya Schiffrin, a professor at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, to discuss the consequences of the war...

Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin speak with the smartest minds in media to discuss the roots of today's crisis in journalism, from democracy's decline to the rise of AI, and to explore the uncertain future of journalism in the digital age. This series is brought to you by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Columbia Journalism Review, with help from the New School's Journalism +...

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.) Since then, Rushkoff has been o...