In 2017, the Washington Post adopted the phrase “Democracy Dies in Darkness” as its official slogan. It was coined by investigative reporter and Post associate editor Bob Woodward in a 2015 conference about his book about the Watergate scandal, and since its adoption, the slogan has remained on the website, just under the title of the newspaper. While it garnered mixed reactions, the Post makes a distinct point–journalism is integral to a functioning democracy. 

Even as technology has improved and social media has become ubiquitous, allowing everyday citizens to broadcast their voices, professional journalism remains important. First-hand accounts are crucial, but the research and the background that news media requires gives more information, and it allows readers to make better decisions. 

As Yves Eudes, a reporter with French newspaper Le Monde, said, “First-hand witnesses cannot see the big picture. They’re not trained to understand whether what they’re seeing is relevant to the big picture or to see what really happens. They’re trained to see what they want to see. If you only rely on Twitter or Facebook, you might end up howling with the wolves.”

Journalism is more than simply an industry–it is the connection between those in power and the people they serve. An article written for the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication titled “The Influence of the Internet on European Journalism” defined journalism as a relationship, one made up of different media, ideologies, and perspectives that connect readers to the information about the world around them. 

Journalism is not an inevitability, nor is it exempt from capitalistic forces. Democracy may depend on the press, but many other ideologies are contingent upon the opposite–a lack or a corruption of free speech. Journalism in America, in broad strokes, is made up of corporations, so it needs money to survive. What this means is that the press can become incredibly vulnerable to profiteering. 

One would think that, if the press needs money to survive, and if democracy depends on journalism, it would create a self-sustaining loop, that journalism would get its money because it needs it, and America–whether its citizens or its politicians–would fund journalism because they need it. However, politicians funding journalism only widens the conflict of interest that politics and media already have. 

The U.S. Census Bureau’s Service Annual Survey (SAS) found that between 2002 and 2020, the estimated newspaper publishers’ revenue dropped by 52.0%. In just twenty years, the press has become an industry slowly running out of money, but it isn’t large news websites like The New York Times or The Washington Post that are held on the brink of collapse, but instead local news, especially in poorer and/or more rural parts of the country.

The pandemic only aggravated this decline. Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism found that between months of late 2019 and the end of May 2022, more than 360 newspapers closed, and by 2025, America is predicted to lose more than one third of newspapers since 2005. 

“This is a crisis for our democracy and our society,” Penelope Muse Abernathy, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor said. “Invariably, the economically struggling, traditionally underserved communities that need local journalism the most are the very places where it is most difficult to sustain print or digital news organizations.”

Where does this decline come from? The shift from physical news to digital has brought massive change to the industry, both in access and in readers. 

Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark found evidence that suggests that the collective global attention span is narrowing due to the sheer amount of information presented to the public, both on news websites and on social media. Because people have more to focus on, they must focus on those things for a shorter period of time. For example, in 2013, a Twitter global trend would last an average of 17.5 hours, whereas in 2016, a Twitter trend would only last 11.9 hours. 

Nicholas Carr, the author of The Shallows and The Glass Cage, predicts that information on the internet will only increase in supply over the next fifteen years. Carr wrote in an article for Politico, “Barring an epochal change of heart or habit on the part of the public, the flow of information will only get faster and more discordant in the years ahead. Even if the current hype about the so-called metaverse never pans out, the technologies of augmented and virtual reality will advance quickly. The information-dispensing screen, or hologram, will always be in view.”

The internet not only impacts news readers, but the larger industry. Much of the free news online is thought to be untrustworthy, and many cannot afford the long-term cost of a news subscription. 

One Dutch study researched willingness to pay for news. A group of 68 people were given a free, three-week newspaper subscription and later asked whether they would pay for that same subscription. None of the participants stated that they would convert to a paid subscription, citing price as the main component for their refusal. 

As the divide between the rich and the poor widens, it is easy to understand why. Some people simply do not have the money to pay for non-necessities and must make do with free news websites.

Richard Stengel, the former editor of TIME and a former Undersecretary of State in the Obama administration, described his prediction of the future of journalism: “The Haves–the 200 or so million college educated folks around the world–will have bespoke and sophisticated content that is tailored to their individual interests that they will pay for with premium subscriptions… The Have Nots–pretty much everybody else–will have advertiser-supported content that is broad and less sophisticated and it will be stoked by algorithms based on emotion and eyeballs.”

The rise in paywalls for quality news websites is already starting to follow Stengel’s prediction, dividing the country into the rich and the poor through not only political or social lines, but journalistic ones. 

Journalism, as an industry, is beginning to lack the money it needs to survive, and its readers are similarly beginning to lack the money to pay for quality news, falling into traps of misinformation instead. It is clear that the tangle of needs, for both the industry and the consumers, is a poison to democracy. 

Some short-term solutions have already grown. Since 2009, philanthropy supporting journalism has nearly quadrupled, and nonprofits like the Pivot Fund are in the process of raising money to support media organizations led by and serving people of color. URL Media and Word in Black are similarly organizing to share revenue across networks. 

Stengel proposed a different, more permanent, solution–a “kind of E-ZPass for news,” in which people can read news without subscriptions, just paying micro-charges per page.

“If the quality press, as it used to be called, is just serving global elites, well, then the whole point of the First Amendment becomes empty,” Stengel wrote. “We have freedom of the press so the press can protect our democracy–not so that it can make money from high-end subscriptions. We need to think as much about the purpose of news as we think about the economic models for it. Neither is easy.”