Finding a candle in the dark

Predicting the future of journalism with any precision may be a fool’s errand, though the broad — and mostly bleak — contours are obvious enough: local news will still face collapse; public trust will continue to buckle under the twin pressures of social media brain rot and partisan echo chambers masquerading as “news.” AI experimentation will carry on, though previous overinvestment will hopefully cool, and most of the genuinely useful applications will be internal tools. Meanwhile, newsrooms skittish about maintaining their own technical expertise will keep buying “safe” products from tech firms that have never cared about journalism except as a delivery vehicle for their profits, and that will drop us the moment we become inconvenient.

To top it off, we are living in a second Gilded Age. An openly racist, misogynist, xenophobic, and anti-fact era that assigns value by transaction and demands loyalty over truth. Institutions that once held civic or moral authority now defer far too often to wealth and raw political power. We aren’t drifting toward autocracy and oligarchy; we’re already knee-deep in them.

Carl Sagan saw this coming. In his final book, The Demon-Haunted World, he warned how a public stripped of critical reasoning and scientific literacy would be easy prey for demagogues and misinformation. That prophecy has arrived. So how, as he asked, do we find a candle to light this darkness?

I don’t pretend to know, but the past offers clues. We’ve stood in moments like this before. The grotesque excesses of Tammany Hall and its peers eventually provoked the reform-minded Progressive Era, and the rise of muckraking journalism. It’s useful to remember that it wasn’t only government and business that were plagued with misdeeds. This was also the era of so-called “yellow journalism,” when jingoistic propaganda routinely masqueraded as news. The sensationalism and toxicity of Fox News and its ongoing line of imitators isn’t a modern invention. Recall that our industry’s highest award is named after a publisher who embodied both the worst impulses and the possibility of course correction.

The pendulum can swing so far in the wrong direction that reversal becomes inevitable, either through rupture, reform, or both. That’s one path forward. Another is deliberate, open collaboration: joining hands across newsrooms and disciplines to build tools, standards, and practices we actually control, instead of outsourcing the fate of our work to companies that treat journalism as expendable. It also facilitates the collective defense of our profession and its practitioners. I hope and expect to see more of this in 2026, as the initial shock of the current administration’s all-out assault on the press wears off, and we realize both our collective power and the limits of their supposed invulnerability.

At the risk of oversimplification, it’s also worth acknowledging that forces far larger than journalism shape our fate. We keep trying to “fix” the news, but we’re up against an equally deep societal crisis in education and other civic institutions that shape how people understand the world and our work. All the staggering facts we report and all the misdeeds we shove towards the light are useless if society can’t distinguish evidence from preference or think beyond its conditioned biases. If you want a better future for journalism, you want a better educated public. You want broad respect for a well funded, well maintained public education system. Without that, nothing we build holds.

We still have a role, of course. Journalism can jolt the system awake, sometimes with a single revelation, but more often through the steady drumbeat of accountability. But we reach people late, and long after their habits of perception, reasoning, and civic imagination have been set. Our industry can help push those in a better direction, but they form far more resiliently when the systems around people support them constructively from the start.

Journalism can be a candle in the dark. But its power endures only when the world around it chooses not to live in the shadows.