In a 2015 talk at The New School, I began with a simple claim: “The story is broken.” I argued that technology had hijacked the story, that most news was coded for retelling rather than receiving, and that journalism must function in people’s lives (a slow burn that can be traced back to the 1970s and the rise of infotainment). Those were an early diagnosis of a structural problem, delivered before Donald Trump’s election, when social media norms were still forming and deepfakes were only a distant worry. That call for practical fixes now stands against a decade of evidence that turns the warning into proof.
