It should be obvious that we need a path back to good journalism – journalism that sheds light on facts, connects the dots, and lets people trace those dots back to sources. This is what allows us to share, question, and discuss within our own trusted communities, and then spread that knowledge outward through federation, always linking back to the source.
Right now, the #mainstreaming path is broken. It’s sometimes hard for people to see this because the decline has been slow, a gradual death of journalism. Since the early days of the internet, we’ve been told the same story: “People expect news for free, so quality journalism is no longer economically viable.” There’s truth in that. Good journalism is expensive. It takes time, skill, trust, and institutional memory.
But that’s only half the story. What actually happened is this: people kept consuming familiar “news brands,” and those brands were bought, consolidated, and financialised until shareholder value replaced any sense of public value. Slowly, investigative journalists were cut and sidelined, editorial independence eroded, and content shifted toward ads, PR, and narrative management. What we now call “news” is marketing, agenda-setting, and reputation management – a distraction. Journalism, as a public good, has been hollowed out, in part through our own passive acceptance of this shift.
Today, we can see more clearly that if you do real journalism – the kind that challenges power – you have no real career path and face risks: #dotcons blocking, right-wing co-option, and at worst, isolation, exile, prison, or worse. The result is a broken landscape: corporate media that won’t tell the truth, and under-resourced independent media that carries high risk for little or no reward. In that situation, who chooses journalism as a life path?
The deeper problem is articulation and power. The world is complex, most people don’t have the time, energy, or tools to fully articulate what they see, feel, and experience. Into that gap step politicians, corporations, and #fashernista influencers. They have the resources – especially through the #dotcons – to articulate reality, but in ways that divide people, flatten complexity into conflict, and steer perception to serve power and profit. This isn’t just misinformation. It’s structured narrative control.
Why the old models won’t come back, we can’t simply “fix” legacy media. It is structurally tied to advertising, concentrated ownership, and political influence. And we can’t rely on heroic individuals either, that path is too fragile, too dangerous, and too easy to suppress. If journalism is going to survive, it won’t look like the past.
A different path: journalism as networked commons. At #OMN, we’re outlining a different approach decentralised, collective path. Think of it as a second coming of #Indymedia, but more resilient, more sustainable, and better integrated with current networks.
This is where the #openweb and the #Fediverse matter. With protocols like ActivityPub, we already have the foundations for distributed publishing, shared visibility, and cross-community discussion. But tech alone isn’t enough, the missing layer is trust and flow. To rebuild journalism, we need to focus on how information flows socially, not just how it’s published.
This is where #OMN comes in:
- Content flows between communities
- Trust is applied locally, not imposed globally
- Metadata (tags, context, sources, warnings) travels with stories
- People can trace information back through the flow
Instead of one “authoritative source,” we get many sources, with visible relationships between them, shaped through community trust and discussion. This is journalism people can actually use to follow a story back to its sources, add context and local knowledge and share and challenge it within trusted spaces.
That’s how we rebuild public understanding – not just publish articles – but from product to process. Journalism should not be a product to consume, it needs to be a process we participate in. When it’s treated as a product it’s optimised for clicks, shaped by incentives and in the end controlled by owners. When it becomes a process it becomes collective, accountable and thus resilient.
So composting the mess, we’re not starting from nothing, we have the ruins of legacy media, the lessons of projects like #Indymedia and the living infrastructure of the #Fediverse. This is compost, from it, we can grow something new – grounded in the #4opens, simple enough to understand (#KISS), and social at its core, not just technical.
The real question isn’t “How do we save journalism?” It’s: How do we rebuild the social systems that make truth-telling possible? Because without those paths, journalism doesn’t just struggle –
it disappears.
