Journalism

Three glimpses into the future of journalism

Three stories worth your time, in the shifting sands of modern publishing

Adam Tinworth

25 Sep 2025 — 4 min read

Still in the midst of a fiendishly busy week, so here are three quick links for your edification…

Casey Newton marks five years of going solo with a thoughtful retrospective:

At the same time, my media diet feels as rich and varied as it ever has, thanks to the rise of the newsletter economy and the resurgence in amateur blogging that it has inspired. Core members of the Motherboard team launched the incredible 404 Media, and now deliver scoops at a forbidding pace. Oliver Darcy left CNN barely a year ago, started with nothing, and now his media newsletter Status is a four-person operation and similarly dominant in its field. Publishers have never known how to make profitable journalism about video games, despite their cultural dominance; longtime gaming reporter Stephen Totilo left Axios and now has a stable, profitable, scoopy publication called Game File that he can do for as long as he wants, and on his own terms.

And:

Sometimes, you just want to know what happened. More often, though, what’s more interesting is what prominent people are saying about what happened. The death of Twitter and fragmenting of the media ecosystem across a half-dozen major social platforms has made following those conversations much more difficult. Part of Platformer’s future is figuring out how to bring that to you in ways that make you smarter. Look for two experiments in this vein in coming weeks.

And, possibly most interesting to me:

The one place where I feel like Platformer has failed on basically every level is in cultivating a community. Our audience of tech executives and rank-and-file employees has never felt safe posting comments or interacting with each other in our Discord. For the most part, people who work on tech policy would rather gather in spaces where they can talk off the record. And for my part, I haven’t invested enough energy in cultivating a community among those of you who would be willing to share your thoughts. In the coming weeks, we’re going to overhaul our Discord to create dedicated forums for submitting questions to a mailbag. We’re also going to experiment with a live ask-me-anything session on Discord based on your questions.

Community is back, baby, it's back.

The SEO apocalypse explodes

Less cheerily, Mark Sweney, for The Guardian, rounds up the escalating crisis in Google traffic:

“It is a two-pronged attack on publishers, a sort of pincer movement,” says Chris Duncan, a former News UK and Bauer Media senior executive who now runs a media consultancy, Seedelta. “Content is disappearing into AI products without serious remuneration, while AI summaries are being integrated into products so there is no need to click through, effectively taking money from both ends. It is an existential crisis.”

I do wonder if the day will come where I think teaching SEO is no longer useful. But I also wonder if people might start seeking other search engines, if Google continues to force AI on us, whatever our preferences.

US business publications withdraw from Europe

I was extensively quoted (alongside friend of the blog Nic Newman) in this Media Operator piece about some of the key digital business news sites pulling out of Europe:

Newman speculates that another reason U.S. business publications might have struggled to break into Europe and the UK is the strong existing B2B presence across niche industries in the region. Tinworth predicts niching down is likely the way forward for business and tech coverage while keeping costs “razor thin.”
“If we were having this conversation 10 years ago, you would have talked about those three titles really as the example of the new wave of tech journalism because they were doing it off a lower cost base,” Tinworth said.
“What I suspect we’re seeing is the burn down of the Web 2.0 generation of tech and B2B sites, and what we’re seeing is the rise of the newsletter-era tech sites,” he said, noting how these platforms, like Substack and Ghost, offer low overheads.