Well, we made it through another year of media chaos. Pour yourself something strong and let’s talk about what just happened.

2025 was supposed to be the year the media industry figured things out. Publishers had supposedly learned from their mistakes. AI was going to save journalism, not destroy it. People would start paying for quality content. Everything would be fine.

Instead, we got more chaos. Just different flavors of it.

The AI Slop Explosion

Remember when we were worried about AI replacing journalists? Turns out the real threat wasn’t replacement—it was augmentation in the worst possible way.

Hundreds of fly-by-night content farms started pumping out AI-generated articles at scale, flooding search results with plausible-sounding nonsense. Google’s algorithm struggled to distinguish between real journalism and synthetic imitations. Readers couldn’t tell the difference half the time either.

Meanwhile, legitimate news organizations started using AI to stretch thin reporting further, and you could feel the quality degrading in real-time. The articles weren’t wrong, exactly. Just hollow. Like reading something written by a very well-informed bot that had never experienced curiosity.

Some outlets handled it better than others. The ones that used AI for grunt work—transcription, initial research, data analysis—while keeping humans firmly in charge of reporting and writing? They mostly came out okay. The ones that tried to replace journalists with machines? They produced garbage, and readers noticed.

The Great Unbundling Continues

More journalists left traditional media to launch Substacks, and the results were mixed.

Some found genuine success and independence. They built audiences, made decent livings, and produced better work than they could’ve under institutional constraints. That’s the dream scenario, and it happened often enough to keep the exodus going.

But for every success story, there were a dozen journalists who discovered that being a one-person media operation meant you’re also a one-person business, marketing department, tech support team, and accountant. Turns out the institutional support that felt stifling also handled a lot of essential functions.

The unbundling is creating a barbell effect: superstar independent journalists at one end, institutional journalism at the other, and a missing middle where mid-tier journalists used to make reliable livings.

The Trust Metrics Keep Falling

Public trust in media hit new lows this year, which is impressive given how low it already was.

Partisan outlets got more partisan. Mainstream outlets got more cautious and both-sides-y, which satisfied nobody. Misinformation continued flowing freely while corrections reached almost nobody.

The structural problem hasn’t changed: the media environment rewards speed and provocation over accuracy and nuance. Until those incentives shift, the trust problem won’t improve.

But hey, at least we’re all aware of the problem now. That counts for something, right? Right?

The Streaming Documentary Wars

Every streaming platform decided documentaries were the answer to subscriber retention, which led to a documentary arms race.

We got more high-quality investigative documentaries than ever before. We also got a lot of over-dramatized true crime content that probably didn’t need to exist. The line between serious documentary work and exploitation got blurrier.

On balance, probably positive? More resources flowing into documentary journalism is good, even if some of it gets used badly. And several documentaries this year actually led to policy changes or renewed investigations, so the format’s influence is real.

The Platform Chaos

Twitter continued its slow-motion collapse into whatever it is now. Threads tried to be Twitter but nice, which worked for about two weeks before devolving into the same dynamics as every other platform.

Meanwhile, TikTok remained the way teenagers consume news, which is terrifying but unstoppable. And YouTube continued being weirdly underrated as a news source despite being where millions of people actually get their information.

The dream of decentralized social media made zero progress. Mastodon remained the place where people say they’re moving to but never actually do. And the fediverse stayed confusing to anyone who isn’t already deeply committed to the concept.

The Newsletter Boom Continued

Somehow, email newsletters remained the most viable form of independent media. That’s wild when you think about it—in an era of algorithmic feeds and short-form video, the thing that works is the same technology we’ve had since the 1990s.

But it makes sense. Email’s the one channel where you reach your audience directly without platform intermediation. No algorithm deciding what percentage of your subscribers see your content. Just you and their inbox.

The downside is everyone’s inbox is now stuffed with newsletters, which means open rates are declining and competition is intense. The newsletter bubble probably can’t expand forever, but it hasn’t popped yet.

The Layoff Carousel

Major media organizations continued cutting staff while their executives talked about “digital transformation” and “right-sizing operations.”

Translation: we don’t know how to make money in the current environment, so we’re going to keep cutting until either we figure it out or the company dies. Usually the latter.

The human cost of these layoffs is enormous. Experienced journalists losing jobs they’ve had for decades. Entire beats disappearing because nobody’s left to cover them. Institutional knowledge evaporating.

And the executives making these decisions will land fine. They always do.

The Regional News Desert Expands

More local newspapers closed or reduced publication frequency to weekly. More communities lost their only source of local journalism.

This isn’t new, but it’s accelerating. And the supposed solutions—nonprofit local news, community-supported journalism, philanthropic funding—aren’t scaling fast enough to fill the gaps.

So we’re creating an information inequality that maps onto existing inequalities. Major metros get over-served with news. Rural and suburban communities get under-served or not served at all.

Democracy requires informed citizens, and informed citizens require local journalism. We’re failing at providing that, and nobody with power seems especially concerned.

The AI Journalism Tools Actually Got Better

Okay, not everything was bad. The AI tools designed specifically for journalists—the ones for transcription, research assistance, fact-checking support—actually improved noticeably.

These aren’t replacing journalists; they’re making journalism faster and more efficient. A reporter can now transcribe an hour-long interview in minutes, search through thousands of documents for relevant passages, or get preliminary analysis of complex datasets.

Used properly, these tools mean individual journalists can do more investigative work with less grunt labor. That’s genuinely positive, assuming newsrooms use the efficiency gains to do more journalism rather than to justify more layoffs.

What 2026 Might Bring

We’re probably getting more of the same. More consolidation, more AI experimentation, more trust erosion, more attempts at new business models.

The fundamental tension hasn’t resolved: quality journalism is expensive, but people expect content for free, and advertising revenue can’t support the journalism we need.

Something’s got to give. Either we’ll figure out sustainable models for funding serious journalism, or we’ll continue the slow collapse into a media landscape dominated by propaganda, entertainment, and AI-generated filler.

I’d like to be optimistic, but 2025 didn’t give me much reason for optimism.

The Bright Spots

There were bright spots though. Individual journalists doing exceptional work despite institutional constraints. Smaller outlets finding sustainable niches. Audiences actually paying for content they value. Tools and technologies that genuinely help rather than hinder.

Good journalism happened this year. Important stories got told. Accountability reporting led to change. The craft isn’t dead; it’s just struggling in an inhospitable environment.

Maybe 2026 will be the year we figure out how to make that environment less inhospitable. Or maybe it’ll just be more of the same chaos.

Either way, we’ll keep watching, writing, and occasionally screaming into the void about how it could all be better.

Happy new year. Try not to think about media economics too hard while you’re celebrating.