The shifting nature of journalism - it's being turned upside down

Prior to this period, WHO rather than WHAT was the prime determinant of who was heard on the media and published. This prevented any balance of views getting public airing. Initially social media changed that. In addition, many academic journalists opened their own websites and published articles in websites such as this one, offering new perspectives to potential readers. These conditions precipitated the beginnings and rise of the early independent media.

Podcasting is the new frontier in journalism. Podcasting was looked down up as glorified blogging, which was more opinionated than factual in most cases. A number of podcasts excelled during the recent US presidential election campaign and challenged the legacy media's viewing audience numbers. Many prominent podcasters are now becoming household names within the independent media. The adversarial David Frost mode of interviewing is being replaced with a successful "sit down coffee talk" style that has become a trademark of Joe Rogan.

Many prominent journalists and broadcasters from the legacy media such as Tucker Carsen, Megyn Kelly, Russell Brand, and many others have moved across successfully to independent journalism. Some of the successes have their own staff of researchers, journalists and production crews. The very top echelon are financially much better off than when they were employed in the legacy media.

Rumble, Spotify, and X (formally Twitter) are becoming premier platforms for podcasters. This area is growing exponentially. They have taken much of the audience the legacy media once had.

Many print journalists have now moved across to Substack. The Substack platform allows articles with audio versions, podcasts, and video broadcasts. Substack is accompanied by Notes, which is a "Twitter like" feed based community that is rapidly becoming a 'go to' place. Seymour Hersh, Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss, among thousands of other journalists have moved across to this reader supported platform. These sites have paywalls and collect subscriptions from readers. Some of the successful Substack sites are reported to earn USD 500,000 gross revenue per annum.

Substack is still growing very fast. However, many new sites fail to deliver what they promise and become dormant, leaving subscribers in the lurch. Many other business model news portals have mushroomed across the world, relying on advertising from their websites. However, many fall by the wayside, unless they are financed externally by a benefactor. Many of these sites are also being blocked by government authorities, which is becoming a major hazard in the independent news industry.

Independent media has shown itself much more capable of going after and exposing the "Deep State" than the legacy media. Legacy media has been shown to have 'relationships' with agents of the Deep State, and influenced from the large revenue streams that Big Pharma provided. Those in this new media aren't burdened by the editorial lines and narratives the legacy media has been caught up in. It appears to be only the conservative side of the independent media that is taking a critical look at president elect Trump's new appointments.

Pushback against independent media

The tool of choice by the establishment to pushback against the independent media are the so-called factcheckers. Factcheckers are usually funded by left leaning political organizations, big pharma, governments through clandestine means, and even the intelligence agencies. The factcheckers with their adversarial approaches usually attempt to destroy narratives, rather than directly tackle facts. The flood arguments with superlative information. Quite often, the factcheckers themselves are often incorrect and misleading, and very difficult to communicate with and obtain a reply, if challenged.

During the pandemic factcheckers often attacked recognized world experts. These organizations were based upon journalists, where medically qualified staff didn't even exist within their organizations. The legitimacy of some of these factcheckers are mostly self-proclaimed.

This highlights a group of journalists within the industry who could be best described as presstitutes. Presstitutes are 'hired guns' employed to put out particular narratives and stories into the public domain. The spread "fake News', or mis-information deliberately. This is very wide spread throughout the legacy media today.

Pressititution has been allowed to flourish today because the legacy media is one of the few places those who want a career as a journalist can be employed. They have no choice but to be lucratively paid pressititutes. This is destroying the attractiveness of journalism today, which is losing favour as a tertiary education pursuit. Jobs in public relations, media promotion and advertising usually turn out to be much more lucrative, and provide better upward career mobility.

A word about AI

One of the biggest threats to the journalism industry is Artificial intelligence (AI). Content in online news portal is sometimes created through AI, making it unnecessary to employ content writers. Articles can be quickly produced through the technology, edited, and posted. However, AI is based upon 'grounded knowledge' already on the internet. Acetic and decorative descriptions created upon feelings of the moment are difficult to recreate in situational news or topic situations. As yet, AI will not be able to replace the spark and innovation of journalists as they work on ideas and hunches for creating content that will benefit the platform they are working for.

All within the independent media have not forgotten what happened to Julian Assange, who exposed war atrocities committed by the US military, and the long suffering he endured. In 2023, 45 journalists were killed in the line of duty. Legal sanctions and lawfare are also being used to silence many within the independent media.

Independent media is the last bastion of hopefully honest journalism that is capable of exposing the excesses of government and "Deep States" in countries around the world. Independent media is now the legitimate "Fourth Estate".