I discovered today that the Newark Star Ledger will cease printing the paper.
This is a newspaper that has been in business continually since 1796.
The Star Ledger joins more than 2,400 other newspapers in the United States that have gone out of business in the last decade.
The legacy media is in trouble. And because the legacy media is in trouble, the nation is in trouble.
The legacy media, The Star Ledger, The New York Times, NBC, CBS, NPR and PBS, amongst others, are rapidly being supplanted by social media. In a recent study by The Pew Charitable Trust, 50% of Americans, and a rather astonishing 83% of people between that ages of 16-25 got their news from social media. This is a problem. It is a problem because social media has no standards for journalism and no standards for truth.
Aeschylus may have said ‘“truth is the first casualty of war,” but in fact, truth is the first casualty of social media.
Mark Zuckerberg has gutted any pretense to fact checking and Elon Musk, when he is not busy gutting any American foreign aid programs, long ago gutted any pretense to truth on X.
On a casual visit to X you can learn that the earth is in fact flat, that no one ever went to the moon, and as of this morning, Musk posted: “”Did you know that USAID, using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including Covid-19, that killed millions of people?”
This would be the same USAID that in fiscal year 2023, disbursed $72bn of assistance worldwide on everything from women’s health in conflict zones to access to clean water, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work. It provided 42% of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations in 2024.
Musk and Zuckerberg (and others) have no interest in journalism and no interest in taking the time and effort to report the truth. They have no standards.
But if you are going to go to all the effort of actually reporting the truth, what good is it if there is no one watching?
NBC Nightly News, which is the top rated evening news program in the country, has 5 million viewers – out of a nation of 340 million which means that 99.5% of the country is not watching. NBC Nightly News’ average viewer is 68 years old. This is a problem. When Walter Cronkite delivered the news for CBS News in the 1960s, he had 40-60 million viewers in a nation of 180 million.
So how to attract and hold viewers in a very competitive media world?
The answer, ironically, is right in front of us, on our screens.
NBC may only have 5 million viewers, and it’s free, but Netflix has 280 million subscribers and they pay. People also binge watch Netflix, hour after hour.
Why do they do that?
Because Netflix plugs into a very basic human instinct – the love of being told stories. Stories that have a character, a plot and an arc of story. This is a fundamental of human beings, this is what has attracted us since the time of Aeschylus – since before Aeschylus.
Know the story of Exodus in the Bible? It’s a pretty simple story and it’s been good for about 3500 years: Moses, a prince kills someone then goes into the desert in hiding. While there, he is confronted with his fate, and returns to Egypt to take on the evil Pharaoh and brings his people into the Holy Land. Ever see The Godfather 2? Same plot: Michael Corleone, a prince of the Corleone family kills someone and then has to go into hiding in Sicily. There, he is confronted with his fate, returns to Las Vegas where takes on the evil Hyman Roth, defeats him and takes his family into the Holy Land… of Las Vegas. Same plot. Likewise Star Wars, Breaking Bad and a thousand other movies and series you have seen.
Joseph Campbell laid it all out in his seminal book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
The trick then is to marry news and journalism to character-driven storytelling. When you do it, it works.
Here’s a great example – done by journalist Itay Hod with KPIX the CBS affiliate in San Francisco – and all done by Itay alone on an iPhone. This is character-driven storytelling married to journalism. In our experience, these things really work – audience engagement is very high. People watch and they come back for more.
