The case for optimism

Media shouldn’t talk itself into bad times

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence” – Helen Keller

It is easy to be pessimistic about the future of news media. In the past couple of weeks we have seen buyouts offered at The Washington Post, huge layoffs at Business Insider and the merging of two papers’ newsrooms in Ireland, to name but three events that will have the lugubrious among us tutting and muttering: “It’s only going one way…”

But is it?

In the spirit of the start of the northern hemisphere summer I’m on the look out for green shoots and things to make me feel optimistic.

First up was a post on LinkedIn from Marcela Kunova, who has just stepped up from being the editor to the owner of Journalism.co.uk and the Newsrewired conference. She’s working on a rebrand and reimagining of her output and conferences. This is someone investing her time and money into the future of journalism. That’s something to be optimistic about.

Then came another LinkedIn post – I’m spending a lot more time there than on X these days –  from Joshi Herrmann who this week celebrated five years of his Mill Media local news group. From a lockdown idea to 20 journalists in six cities and 10,000 paying subscribers in a very short time is something to celebrate.

And finally was the announcement from Matt Kelly, the founder of The New European, that having started as a four-week pop-up in 2016, the title was now expanding its purview to become The New World and investing in new, whiter paper, which I didn’t even know was a thing. Now, I hope Matt will forgive me but investing in print in 2025 is almost the definition of optimism. The fact that he’s prepared to do it should inspire us all.

What does this all mean? I think it’s that we are in danger as an industry into talking ourselves into our demise. Collectively, we need to shake off our presumption of hard times ahead and follow the examples above.

Societies still need journalism and journalists have a great head start in the race to provide it in the new AI-infused world. It’s time to stop complaining about how life’s unfair and get creating.