Lessons learned in The Building of Lost Causes“The skills we developed while facing down the fossil fuel industry — persistence through trolling campaigns, converting readers one by one, turning an upstart publication into essential reading — these aren’t just about journalism. They’re about how to keep building when everything around you feels like it’s crumbling.”
By Linda Solomon Wood
Embrace the barbell“It’s time to abandon middling stories and go very short or very long.”
By Millie Tran
Prediction markets go mainstream“If all of this sounds like a libertarian fever dream, I hear you. But as these markets rise, legacy media will continue to slide into irrelevance.”
By Taylor Lorenz
The rise of informal news networks“Once the goal is no longer to recreate news organizations as they existed in the past, but rather to ensure that reliable news and information flows — that there is a place in people’s lives for deliberation and debate — then possibility blossoms.”
By Heather Chaplin
Back to the bundle“If media companies can’t figure out how to be the bundlers, other layers of the ecosystem — telecoms, devices, social platforms — will.”
By Ben Smith
The longform renaissance“When journalists take the time to explain these layers, it signals respect for the intelligence and curiosity of their audience.”
By Geetika Rudra
Data and context makes a comeback“In the quest to remove friction from our everyday lives, we have designed and adopted digital products that narrow our field of vision and traded exploration for convenience.”
By Robin Kwong
Newsrooms will keep losing their conservative audiences“It grieves me to predict that even the newsrooms who say they want to serve all Americans won’t do any of this. At best, they will mostly continue to ignore the problem. At worst, some journalists will blame the audience.”
By Jonathan Stray
The media reckons with AGI“Rather than treat AGI as a fringe concern, we must be proactive and ambitious: taking the possibility seriously, considering the implications, and starting a public, democratic conversation.”
By Shakeel Hashim