We are not influencers

I didn’t learn how to corner an evasive and shifty politician or dissect a local government budget just to optimize my headlines for an algorithm designed to sell a food supplement or another crypto scam.

Yet, here we are.

The line between a news feed and a digital carnival has been completely blurred, if not deleted altogether.

We are competing for attention with conspiracy theorists, viral stunts, and an endless stream of pure, unadulterated fluff.

If journalism wants to survive this era of algorithmic noise, our superpower cannot be going viral. Our superpower has to be the unapologetic, often unglamorous pursuit of the facts — because when the spectacle ends, the people still need to know who pocketed the city’s budget for infrastructure projects.

Let’s be the adults in the room.

Somehow, newsrooms decided the best way to stay relevant was to act like desperate influencers. We are trading shoe-leather reporting for desk-bound aggregation, regurgitating trending topics, and slapping sensationalist, clickbait headlines on absolute non-stories just to keep our daily metrics from flatlining

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But let’s be brutally honest: trying to out-entertain the entertainment industry doesn't make the press look hip.

It makes us look like a desperate uncle doing a TikTok dance at a wake. Trying to beat social media algorithms at their own game is a fool’s errand that degrades the profession and turns the Fourth Estate into a cheap circus act.

The tech billionaires have designed their platforms so that form is king. Everything must be bite-sized, visually stimulating, and immediately enraging. But look where it has gotten us.

If form is king in their digital fiefdoms, then substance and context must be queen in ours. And historically speaking, queens outlast kings.

Form can never truly defeat substance.

You cannot simply shove flowers into an asshole and start calling it a vase. A polished, highly-produced viral reel of a press conference doesn’t change the underlying fact that the official at the podium is lying through their teeth.

The antidote to this industry-wide brain rot isn’t a savvier social media manager or a better hashtag strategy; it’s a return to gritty, old-fashioned investigative reporting.

It’s time we put the human rights lens back on the camera. Social media ignores the actual marginalized stories because systemic rot and the daily survival of those in the city’s margins don’t naturally trend.

They require reading comprehension and a modicum of empathy — two things the algorithm actively suppresses.

The public doesn’t need another 15-second video summarizing a politician’s idiotic tweet.

They need dogged reporters digging into why city hall’s record-keeping is suspiciously deficient, or why the exact same communities are left to drown every time a storm hits.

We are here to document the real-world body count of bad governance, not to serve up cheap internet brownie points. We are here to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, not to be the internet’s court jesters.

Trust is the only currency journalism actually owns. If we trade it for cheap clicks and fleeting engagement, we will bankrupt ourselves.

Propaganda and fake news thrive in an environment where everything is treated as light entertainment and all information is equally worthless.

If journalism wants to survive, we have to draw a hard line in the sand.

Let the content creators have their ring lights, their viral dances, and their engagement bait. We’ll take the public records, the hard questions, and the unvarnished truth.

Veritas Liberabit Vos.