Thinking about journalism's future like an optimist
What economist Albert O. Hirschman could teach us about redeveloping the news economy.
It’s easy to be pessimistic about the state of media.
But too easy? Let’s review the record.
When I look at the newsletters that broke containment outside my usual readership over the past two years, several titles share a particular gloominess: “Journalism’s fight for survival in a postliterate democracy,”1 “Lessons on media policy at the slaughter-bench of history,”2 “Meditations in a journalistic emergency,”3 “You couldn’t create a more anti-news internet if you tried.”4
Unfortunately it’s peak vanity for a writer to get high off public reaction from playing the hits while our other obsessions live quiet lives on Al Gore’s internet (where blogging about Hegel doesn’t get the same traction for some reason). There’s simply a wide audience out there that strongly believes shit is downright rotten at the intersection of media, tech and democracy, and that all the exits are blocked. If you say things are bad, they’ll say you’re right.
Well, what are we doing here? A bleak worldview about digital life in 2026 doesn’t leave much new material for the critic to develop, which at a certain point defeats the purpose of writing the same sort of stuff over and over again. You could just say Neil Postman nailed it in 1985’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that everything downstream of TV (up to and including AI) is a brainrot technology that threatens our civic vitality and call it a career. If the pessimistic case remains true 40 years later, what can you do?
Enter Albert O. Hirschman, the optimist’s economist.
In another field and another lifetime, the legendarily heterodox Albert Hirschman coined a term, fracasomanía, for obsessions with failure that become self-fulfilling prophecies. “The paradigm-based gloomy vision can be positively harmful,” wrote Hirschman, who died in 2012. “When it [fracasomanía] prevails, hopeful developments either will be not perceived at all or will be considered exceptional and purely temporary. In these circumstances, they will not be taken advantage of as elements on which to build.” Hirschman wanted to build, and he was especially interested in what regular people build, without permits, when no one is looking.
This weekend, I finished Jeremy Adelman’s formidable biography “Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman” (Princeton University Press). It has my enthusiastic endorsement as one of those books that got thicker after reading because I dog-eared so many pages.
There was Hirschman’s work on development economics in South America, where he was a tireless champion of local thinkers against patronizing outside experts; his wrestling-together of traditional economics with political science; his journalistic eye for how real people defy top-down plans and abstract predictions; his literary humanism that drew from Machiavelli, Adam Smith, Montaigne and Kierkegaard, which fertilized a lifelong skepticism of official dogmas. (“The real criticism of the reformer is not that he is ineffective but that he might just be effective and that he may thereby deprive the oppressed from achieving victory on their own terms.”)
A heretic against universal ideologies and totalizing theories like Milton Friedman’s Chicago school of economics, what Hirschman did believe in was “the right to a nonprojected future as one of the truly inalienable rights of every person and nation; and to set the stage for conceptions of change to which the inventiveness of history and a ‘passion for the possible’ are admitted as vital actors.”
Hirschman was fond of paradoxes, ironies or reversals of orthodoxy. I could blog off the Hirschman corpus for months. But today I’ll dwell on Hirschman’s thinking on development economics: how weak industries can become strong, or at least how they zig when life zags.
The kind of media we get is structured by the societies and political systems we have. Hirschman observed that economic stagnation breeds political action: from entropy comes motion. That transition from passive to active political energy is exactly what’s happening with the declining news sector today, which is devoting more energies and resources advocating for reforms, subsidies and similar transfers of public resources to support journalistic production with growing, if still tentative, success.
You may think: Danger! News should stay separate and independent from politics! Which is normatively true, of course, and always ought to be in the journalistic sense. The U.S. already has probably the most privatized and market-driven media market in the democratic world (and has been suffering for it accordingly).
But if you put on your Hirschman hat and start looking into details and following slender threads, you’ll see the hidden hand of the intended and unintended policymaker decisions that have been shaping our media industry for decades. Most of these interventions are so indirect or hidden in plain sight as to be practically invisible, especially relative to direct investments like the recently defunded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Consider the spectrum space partitioned off for exclusive use by broadcast licensees; the public legal notices that still support many newspapers; the generous tax breaks for philanthropists funding a 501(c)(3) nonprofit news sector that is the envy of much of the world; discounted postage for periodicals; the exemption of digital media from tariffs; the corporate tax deductibility of advertising and office subscription expenses that subtly favor commercial news outlets that draw on B2B revenue. All in addition to, of course, the protections of the First Amendment and favorable rulings like Times v. Sullivan, which acts as de facto subsidies by diminishing the economic risk of litigation. And there will always be litigation.
Yet most of these overt or subtle frameworks that support news media production come from 20th century policy frameworks. The 21st century regulatory equivalents have been more unfavorable as lawmakers have preferred stimulating growth for the U.S. tech sector (now powering the nation’s economy) over supporting the diminishing returns of the country’s mature and now-declining media sector.
Consider, now, the toothlessness of contemporary antitrust doctrine in incentivizing a hyperscaler economy, which has allowed Google to monopolize with impunity the advertising and search markets at the expense of news providers; the immensely valuable legal immunities Big Tech platforms get under Section 230, which forces liability-conscious news outlets (only partially shielded in comparison by a merely elevated burden of proof under Times v. Sullivan) to compete on an uneven playing field with a mindless ocean of defamation; and a copyright orthodoxy of fair use that, while essential for journalists’ reporting, has expanded into a justification for wholesale AI plunder and replacement of the journalist’s labor on the open web.
Of course, for the journalists working on hyperscaler platforms, there’s no copyright dispute to have whatsoever; any right to revenue-sharing was probably signed away long ago in the hyperscaler’s unbargainable terms of service. The platform journalist is the internet’s Uber driver, and there is no union to bargain with the algorithmic dispatcher.
It could be argued, and has been, that this regulatory array is the best possible outcome for consumers, for free expression and for the frictionless distribution of content. It would not, and couldn’t, be argued that this regulatory array is the best outcome for inducing an industry that produces original journalism to produce more of it instead of less. Diminishing returns being what they are, the math will say many journalists need to leave the field to do something, anything else, if only for their own welfare. The overall availability and quality of original news falls; consumers wander away from a deteriorating product; society is impoverished by dwindling sources and transmission of accurate information; technological innovations keep multiplying the ease of producing and distributing inaccurate information for the survivors to compete against. This is journalism’s development trap.
While my tendency is to loudly complain (Hirschman calls this “voice”), Hirschman might prefer to look at the unintended consequences of these embedded regulatory decisions that have disadvantaged news production and see what good might have come of it. Well, one of those unintended consequences has been the development of a hardscrabble generation of independent journalists and publishers, struggling with the identical revenue and audience problems as their forebears in an identically unforgiving marketplace, but with a renewed sense of social mission for a new generation. Of course, it would also be a classic Hirschman connection between ostensibly opposed forces to observe that the ranks of the independents are filled with veterans who got their reps in and cut their teeth in corporate media (and are now often supported by the household income from a partner’s corporate job). But such are the subtle paradoxes that shape unofficial change. The thing about talent is that it doesn’t sit still for long, it wants to do something.
The stagnation of economic conditions in the news industry has also led to renewed political energy to recreate economic conditions that allow for growth again. It’s only logical, according to one of Hirschman’s landmark social science essays, “Political Economics and Possibilism”:
It has often been noted that an industrialist, for example, has the option of spending most of his time and energy improving the efficiency of his production and sales organization or on lobbying in the nation’s capital for special tariff protection or other legislation favoring his firm and industry. Disregarding the adverse value judgment that attaches in this example to political action, we may bring this sort of option into contact with the tendency of economic growth to run into decreasing returns when it proceeds within an unchanging institutional framework. … Once [producers] notice that the marginal productivity of economic action is diminishing in comparison to the prospective marginal productivity of political action, there will be a tendency on their part to substitute political for economic action.
Bolding mine.
Hirschman observed that these efforts at political regeneration are not likely to recreate the kind of sector that existed before, noting that efforts of “system maintenance” to “maintain or restore a social organization or way of living that is threatened or weakened have yielded unintended innovational change in modern societies.” In fact, “history could be viewed as the process of men in general, and the ruling classes in particular, continually outsmarting themselves in their efforts to reproduce and maintain the existing order.”
We could not possibly know what the media sector will look like in 10 years, as rapid changes in technology, consumption, culture and politics inevitably make a joke of all our long-term plans. The present already belongs to the improvisers. It seems to me that the news sector has some kind of future, hopefully even a bright one. Hirschman might call this future the “nonprojected” kind.
As a lifelong reporter about to make a big pivot to whatever comes next, I do wonder about the idea of writing for the sake of writing, thankful that's even an option at 70, but not wanting to give up my passion.
I don't want to tell stories, I want to keep helping others tell their stories. I've been riding the wave of daily news for a half century and think I might be able to find a niche. But there are some other things I might be able to do related to AI, the community, ETC. If you need a smile or laugh: http://aifanboyconfessions.blog :-)