Throughout human history, the control and dissemination of information have been intrinsically linked to power structures and social organization. From ancient scribes to modern social media, the journey of how we share knowledge reflects our evolving society and its power dynamics.
Early Information Sharing and the Rise of Literacy
In ancient civilizations, knowledge was preserved and transmitted through oral traditions and carefully guarded written records. Scribes, often associated with religious institutions, held immense power as the gatekeepers of information. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century marked the first major democratization of knowledge, though literacy remained a privilege of the elite for centuries to come.
The Enlightenment period saw the emergence of scientific societies, coffee houses, and salons as centers of intellectual discourse. London’s coffeehouses became known as penny universities because people could engage in intellectual discussions for the price of a penny coffee. They emerged in England in the 1650s and became crucial venues for sharing news, conducting business, and engaging in political and philosophical debates. Lloyd’s of London, for instance, began as a coffeehouse where merchants gathered.
Similarly, salons (particularly in France) were vital intellectual hubs during the Enlightenment. Salons were regular social gatherings hosted typically by upper-class women (salonnières) like Madame Geoffrin and Madame de Staël, where philosophers, writers, artists, and other intellectuals would gather to exchange ideas. Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau were frequent salon participants. These institutions facilitated the exchange of ideas among scholars and the educated elite, laying the groundwork for modern academic institutions.
The Industrial Revolution brought unprecedented changes to education and knowledge sharing. The need for a skilled workforce established public education systems across Europe and North America. The late 18th and 19th centuries saw the rise of standardized education, with governments increasingly viewing literacy as essential for economic growth and national development.
Universities expanded beyond their traditional religious roots to become research and professional training centers. Academic credentials emerged as a standardized way to validate expertise, creating what would eventually become today’s education industry.
The Fourth Estate: The Golden Age of Journalism
The rise of mass-circulation newspapers in the 19th century created a crucial intermediary between governments and the public. This Fourth Estate served as a vital check on power, with journalists acting as professional truth-seekers and watchdogs of democracy. The separation between government officials and the public meant journalism was essential in informing citizens and holding leadership accountable.
In 1776, newspapers were relatively abundant in the American colonies, though exact numbers require some context:
By 1775, about 40 newspapers were being printed in the colonies
These were typically run by individual printers or small partnerships
Most major colonial cities had 2-3 competing papers
Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were the main publishing centers
Almost all were weekly publications, with very few dailies
Today’s newspaper landscape is radically different:
Over 1,200 daily newspapers remain in the U.S., with approximately 6,500 weekly newspapers
However, ownership is highly concentrated among a few major companies:
Gannett (USA Today + around 200 daily papers)
Alden Global Capital/Digital First Media (owns about 200 publications)
Lee Enterprises (owns around 75 daily newspapers)
McClatchy (owns about 30 papers)
Hearst Communications (owns about 24 daily papers)
The consolidation is stark—where once hundreds of independent printer-publishers operated their papers, now just 5-6 companies control the majority of newspaper circulation in the United States. Not only has the concentration of ownership been consistent for decades, but the concentration of journalists has also disseminated stories from a few sources.
This shift from many independent voices to concentrated corporate ownership has significant implications for local news coverage and editorial diversity. In 1776, while each paper might have had a smaller reach, there were more independent editorial voices per capita than today.
Investigative journalism flourished in the early-to-mid 20th century, with newspapers investing significant resources in long-term investigations and in-depth reporting. This era saw landmark exposés like the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, demonstrating journalism’s crucial role in democratic oversight. The news industry was both respected and revered, bringing truth to power.
The Death of Quality News
The days of newspapers investing in deep investigative work that took months to complete are gone.
The decline of journalism is a suicide, not a murder.
The old model was simple – newspapers made good money from classified ads and local business advertising, which paid for quality journalism. I worked for and with multiple newspapers then… with insane profits that sometimes exceeded 40%. Rather than invest online, newspapers built new printing plants and exorbitant headquarters. They handed out some incredible salaries to its leadership… all while openly watching Craigslist and eBay take that revenue. At the time, I was sounding every alarm I could and was subsequently (and thankfully) fired from the industry.
Now, newspapers are forced to chase online advertising, which pays a tiny fraction of what print ads once did. Newspapers could no longer support exorbitant leadership salaries while attracting and keeping talent. As a result, today’s journalists may write multiple stories per day with no time or budget for deep research or investigation. Instead, they’re rewriting press releases, observing social media for trends, or summarizing other outlets’ work. Success is measured in clicks, not impact.
Starting journalists now make around $35,000 – less than many entry-level retail jobs. The experienced investigators who once mentored young reporters? Most were laid off or left for corporate PR jobs paying triple their news salary. The talent drain has been massive. We’ve shifted from respected and unbiased news broadcasters to celebrities, political pundits, and news models on television. A spiral of declining quality has followed:
The same basic stories appear on hundreds of sites, the same scripts on hundreds of television news stations.
Headlines are designed for clicks, not clarity, with snippets taken out of context for virality and outrage.
Complex issues get oversimplified because speed matters more than accuracy.
Wire services provide bulk content that is minimally rewritten but provides more real estate for intrusive, in-your-face ads.
News has become a commodity—cheap, plentiful, and not very good. People needed somewhere to turn, and the Internet provided it.
The Digital Revolution: Search Engines and Direct Access
The advent of the Internet, particularly search engines, in the late 1990s fundamentally transformed how people accessed information. For the first time in history, individuals could bypass traditional gatekeepers and access vast knowledge repositories directly. This shift democratized information access in unprecedented ways.
The rise of blogging platforms in the early 2000s allowed experts, professionals, and organizations to share their knowledge directly with the public. This direct-to-consumer knowledge sharing created new forms of authority and expertise, challenging traditional academic and institutional hierarchies.
As digital transformation accelerated, traditional journalism faced mounting challenges. The shift to online advertising revenue models often prioritized clickbait and sensationalism over substantive reporting. Many newspapers, facing financial pressures, reduced their investigative teams and increasingly relied on wire services like the Associated Press for content.
This centralization of news sources and cost-cutting measures led to declining local journalism and investigative reporting. The focus shifted from public service to engagement metrics, fundamentally altering the quality and depth of news coverage.
In search, established news domains were given automatic authority in results, reflecting their traditional role as trusted information sources. However, many publishers began exploiting this trust by churning out low-quality, SEO-optimized content farms meant to capture search traffic rather than inform readers. Articles were crafted to game algorithms rather than serve readers, with clickbait headlines, shallow content, and aggressive keyword optimization replacing substantive journalism.
Major news sites are now seeing dramatic drops in search visibility. Despite remaining the top-ranked news site, The Guardian lost 36% of its search visibility in a single year. This shift reflects both Google’s evolving effort to reward genuine value over brand authority, and the news industry’s self-inflicted wounds from prioritizing SEO tricks over quality journalism.
The news industry essentially poisoned its own well, treating its privileged position in search as a resource to exploit rather than a trust to maintain.
The Social Media Revolution
The emergence of social media platforms in the late 2000s and their dominance in the 2010s marked another radical shift in information sharing. These platforms democratized content creation and distribution, allowing anyone with an internet connection to become a publisher and influence public discourse. My publication was one of these… I could churn out expertise on my own blog that wouldn’t have been disseminated through traditional outlets for years.
Enter 2024:
This transformation has had profound implications… central to even the latest election results:
Traditional media gatekeepers no longer control what stories receive attention
Information spreads through peer-to-peer networks rather than top-down distribution
Public discourse is increasingly shaped by viral content and user engagement
The line between experts and amateurs has blurred significantly
Real-time, unfiltered communication has become the norm
The CEO of Axios, Jim VandeHeid, pushed back against this, defending the role of professional journalism and its standards, suggesting that merely having a platform to share information doesn’t make someone the media in terms of professional journalism’s role in society. His quote at the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award:
My message to Elon Musk is: ‘Bulls—. You’re not the media.’”
Jim VandeHeid, CEO of Axios
The irony of VandeHei’s outburst is that he’s defending a position his industry abandoned. The media’s privileged position wasn’t earned through credentials or titles – it was built on a commitment to deep investigative reporting, fact-based journalism, and speaking truth to power regardless of partisan interests.
But today’s media companies, including digital-first outlets like Axios, have primarily abandoned these principles in favor of quick-hit stories, partisan narratives, and advertiser-friendly content. The industry systematically dismantled its authority by choosing profit over purpose, replacing investigative teams with content mills, and allowing editorial standards to erode in the chase for clicks.
I’m not in complete agreement with Musk, either. Musk isn’t wrong because journalists are somehow special – Musk is wrong because nobody is effectively filling the investigative void left by journalism’s abdication of its core mission. What we’re seeing isn’t the death of traditional media at the hands of social platforms; it’s the self-inflicted collapse of an industry that forgot why people trusted it in the first place.
Looking Forward
We stand at the dawn of a new era in information sharing, where artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping how we validate and consume knowledge. While the traditional guardians of information – journalists, academics, and institutions – have lost their gatekeeper status, emerging technologies are creating something potentially more powerful: a real-time, democratic system of knowledge sharing with built-in verification.
Of course, as with most technological advancements, our earliest accomplishments were catastrophic failures. AI blurted out tokens that were often bizarre and far off base. Even now, we see hallucinations in the results. But that’s largely because the models were forward-moving, and humans were used to validate or report the errors. The future of AI will be far more complex, with distributed intelligence systems comparing, contrasting, and battling one another to provide finite outputs that can be properly weighed and provide transparent outputs where the decision is explained.
AI-powered fact-checking systems are evolving to validate claims instantly, cross-reference sources automatically, and provide context at scale. This technological leap means that readers won’t have to choose between speed and accuracy soon – they’ll have both. Every claim, statistic, and statement can be automatically traced to its origin, with AI systems assessing credibility across multiple dimensions in milliseconds.
The democratization of verification matches the democratization of knowledge creation. Blockchain and AI technologies will enable new forms of distributed trust, where information can be verified by centralized authorities and by transparent, algorithmic consensus. This means that while anyone can publish, the truth has never been more traceable.
Communities are forming around specific knowledge domains, where experts and enthusiasts collaborate directly with AI systems to curate and verify information. These knowledge networks combine human expertise with machine learning (ML) to create a living, breathing repositories of verified information that update in real-time.
The future of information sharing isn’t about rebuilding walls or reinstating gatekeepers—it’s about creating an ecosystem where truth can scale as quickly as information itself. In this new world, traditional media is evolving from being arbiters of truth to facilitators of discovery, helping people navigate and understand the vast landscape of available knowledge.
As AI advances, we’re moving toward a world where misinformation becomes more challenging to spread because verification happens automatically and transparently. Every piece of content carries a visible trail of evidence, allowing readers to make informed decisions about what to trust.
This transformation suggests a future where knowledge isn’t just democratized but also self-correcting, where the wisdom of crowds meets the precision of machines, and where the speed of social media combines with the rigor of academic review. In this new paradigm, everyone becomes both a potential creator and curator of knowledge, supported by AI systems that help separate signals from noise.
The death of traditional gatekeepers hasn’t led to chaos – instead, it’s giving birth to a more resilient, transparent, and accessible system of knowledge sharing. We’re building a world where information flows freely, but truth has never been more straightforward to verify.
The future of knowledge isn’t about control – it’s about connection, verification, and collective wisdom enhanced by artificial intelligence.
©2024 DK New Media, LLC, All rights reserved | Disclosure
Originally Published on Martech Zone: Did Information Access Really Kill the News Industry?