My late cousin Harvey was a journalist—first a newspaper reporter, then a professor of mass communications. He was a beatnik who hung out with Neal Cassidy, and used to party with the cast of Hair. “When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars…” You know what I’m talking about.

In Harvey’s day, newspapers were the most real-time source of news. They had default institutional gravitas, a standard org chart, a set of rigorous practices. Being a reporter was a distinctive profession with very tangible social impact.

For the people who worked in it, the fourth estate also meant something idealistic. Harvey covered state and local politics, race riots, and the culture war skirmishes of the 70s and 80s. For his generation, there was no substitute for the press, and for the publishing industry as a whole. I inherited a shelf full of his books—Ernie Pyle, Michael Herr, E.F. Stone, The Playboy Interview. When I flip the pages of these treasures and inhale their dust I can hear the distant hum of the 20th century, Jimi Hendrix and The Byrds and Carly Simon.

But alas, technology changes. Physical copies of books have literally become relics. Nowadays when you order a new paperback from Amazon, they’re often shockingly low quality in terms of printing and materials. No one is stoking the proverbial fire of the publishing industry anymore. It’s an estate sale. At best, all that’s left is the pilot light.

There’s a Twitter account called 2001 Live, @25YearsAgoLive. All it does is post headlines and little blurbs each day from exactly 25 years ago. Here are some of “today’s” headlines:

At the U.S. Embassy in London, Princes Charles and William sign a sympathy book for the victims of the 11 September attack.

Defense Intelligence Agency senior Cuban analyst Ana Belen Montes is arrested by the FBI and charged with spying for Cuba.

The AZF fertilizer factory in Toulouse, France explodes, killing 31 people and injuring 2,500. Two-thirds of all the windows in the city are shattered, and at least 70 people are blinded. The total cost of damage is estimated to be €1.5 billion. France’s Minister of the Environment, Yves Cochet, says that the explosion “may have been a terrorist attack.”

2001 Live has almost 700K followers, so I see it a lot on the timeline, and the sense of nostalgia it causes is almost overpowering—a real pang that lifts me into an aether of memory flashes. A lot of nostalgia is just a visceral sense of all the things we regret doing or not doing.

2001 was not long ago, in the sense that the veil of time tends to shroud bygone eras and make them more foreign. Memorable references from old media give us a crisper sense of the times that our parents lived through, but anything further back than two generations is kind of lost to us.

In 2001, I was in high school. I got everywhere on a skateboard—an old school Tony Alva deck with Bones wheels. I had a portable cassette player with headphones and I used to listen to a lot of thrash metal, Slayer, Megadeth, Sepultura. I was always downtown, around town, going somewhere. Back then we didn’t have smartphones, so if you wanted the news of the world you had to get it from radio, TV, print, or a desktop monitor.

Throughout the day, making my rounds, I would stop at a coffee shop or a convenience store and there would be four or five racks with different daily newspapers, local weeklies, and college rags. I engaged with them a lot, gobbled up the big international headlines and the current flamewars on the opinion pages. Even the classifieds and the horoscopes and the comics sometimes had literary value. Every international headline and photograph opened up a world for me—Paris, New York, Istanbul. The world felt much bigger back then.

I was also in bookstores a lot. Santa Cruz, California, where I grew up, had a lot of them. The best one was Logos, an aptly-named two story building with a basement full of history and philosophy that I spent a great deal of time in. No one ever looked askance at me or kicked me out. It was a refuge of ideas and possibilities. I still own a lot of the books that I bought there over the years. But Logos closed its doors permanently in 2017, after forty years in business.

In a world where print media has lost its centrality to our estimation of meaning, does journalism still exist? I mean, when a news organization publishes information, is it performing journalism in a way that cousin Harvey would recognize? Forget all the superficial generational changes. Fundamentally, does journalism still exist?

I would submit that it does not. Why not?

Almost from the advent of journalism, the media was not just reflecting reality but was shaping it. At a certain point, we reached oversaturation—meaning that there’s no more reality to report about. The looking glass can only package reality while there’s reality left in stock. If everything is a narrative, then nothing is real.

Relatedly, today we have a hall of mirrors problem where the media cycle is the story. If the media is the story then the inmates are running the asylum and there is no fourth estate.

Then there’s the simple fact of outsourcing. If anyone can harvest information, then a guy on a moped with a selfie stick is going to outperform Maureen Dowd every time. Standards have to be invested in, and the juice must be worth the squeeze.

Then there’s volume. If information can be firehosed directly to the consumer on a constant loop, and there’s demand for this, then no one is going to exercise discretion about what’s newsworthy.

Much has been said about atomization—that we no longer have a monolithic culture, a national fireside, a Walter Cronkite. But that’s not exactly true. Influencers work through major talent agencies, celebrities work with expensive consultants to highly curate their branding, Joe Rogan’s endorsement can sway an election.

The real difference is that consumer preference exercises an outsized determinative influence on content. That’s how we’ve gotten over a decade’s worth of auto-ethnography in the New York Times. Institutions are downstream of Instagram. In the 90s, chomskyite liberals used to lament the concentration of media ownership, but democratization has destroyed the media. People can decide what to hear, so they must be told what they want to hear.

Much has also been said by conservatives about the tendency of media institutions toward ideological enforcement. Indeed, there’s a long list of outrages there, from the doctoring of the George Zimmerman 911 tape to the doxxing of a Salt Lake City firefighter who donated $10 to Kyle Rittenhouse. There’s no question that institutional journalism has expended its credibility, but it needs to be recognized that technology has simply outpaced the capacity of media institutions to enforce ideas of any kind, and that the world was a better place before that happened.

As a defamation attorney, I see the worst of the worst—toxic flamewars, character assassination, doxxing attacks and online flash mobs. I don’t exactly know where we go from here, but the only way out is through.

If you have a defamation matter and would like to speak to an attorney, visit my law practice at latenightlaw.com. We handle online defamation, internet harassment, and First Amendment matters in Washington, Texas and New Mexico.

All text content © Aaron Cress 2025-2026