A major publication drops a headline about a foreign conflict, something horrifying, something urgent. You click. The piece is elegant. The lede is tight. The sources are real. And yet, an hour later, you can’t remember a thing it said. It dissolves. Worse, it competes for space in your head with a TikTok of a golden retriever being spoon-fed ice cream.

Who wins?

This is not an isolated issue of attention. It is not reducible to "kids these days and their short attention spans." What we are looking at is a systemic failure mode of traditional media distribution. The distribution engine is rusting through. Not because journalism has gotten worse (though in many places, it has). But because the mechanism for delivering it—for embedding it in culture, for making it matter—has gone senile.

To understand how we got here, we need to look at what traditional media distribution assumed, and how those assumptions broke down.

Broadcast Logic in a Narrowcast World

The first assumption was that if you built it, they would come.

Traditional media was built on broadcast logic. You create content centrally, distribute it broadly, and assume reach equals relevance. TV news at 6. The front page above the fold. National syndication. The entire infrastructure was predicated on scarcity. Limited channels. Limited airtime. Limited columns. And within that scarcity, gravity.

But gravity is contextual. Once the internet introduced infinite shelf space and peer-to-peer virality, gravity became fluid. A teenager with a YouTube channel had the same distribution capacity as CNN, and eventually more trust. Relevance was no longer bestowed from above; it was conferred by networks.

Old media never really adjusted. It tried to translate its prestige into pixels, but prestige doesn’t scale. It doesn’t get boosted by the algorithm. It doesn't hit the dopamine loop like partisan memes or influencer tears.

So the broadcast model stumbled into a narrowcast world, where audiences fragment, filter, and self-select. The result? Legacy media pushing generalist content to an audience that no longer exists.

The Trust Recession

The second failure mode is trust—or more accurately, the evaporation of it.

For decades, newspapers and networks were able to trade on institutional authority. You trusted The Times because it was The Times. But this authority was brittle, propped up by its monopoly on printing presses, editorial access, and capital-intensive newsrooms. Once those barriers fell, the press had to defend its legitimacy in a competitive arena it was never built for.

And it failed. Not completely, not everywhere, but enough.

Trust today is deeply tribal. It's distributed laterally, not vertically. People trust individual voices, not institutions. Substack newsletters outperform traditional op-eds not because they’re better written, but because they’re written by someone you feel like you know. The parasocial bond is the delivery vehicle.

Traditional media can’t form parasocial bonds. Its form is too formal. Its tone is too detached. Its rituals—bylines, corrections, editorial voice—signal objectivity, but read as distance. And in the trust economy, distance looks like condescension.

The Algorithm Eats the Editor

Editors once acted as filters: what to run, what to kill, what to bury below the fold. But filters imply curation, taste, values.

Platforms don’t filter; they optimize. Not for truth. Not even for coherence. Just for engagement. The headline that incites outrage beats the one that explains nuance. A thread of screenshots can outpace a 3,000-word feature. An AI-generated deepfake will outcompete a sourced exposé because it hits faster, spreads further, and demands less cognition.

And the platforms now are the distribution. Most people don’t visit homepages. They get their news from Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube—if you’re lucky. If you’re not, they get it secondhand, distorted, decontextualized, repackaged by some mid-tier influencer or YouTuber with an axe to grind.

The old media's response has largely been to chase the algorithm. This is the "pivot to video" disaster. This is listicles, clickbait, and the slow BuzzFeedification of even once-serious outlets. But you can’t win that game. Because the platform will always change the rules. The algo giveth, the algo shadowbanneth.

Traditional media ceded its gatekeeping role. It surrendered the distribution stack to companies that do not care whether what they distribute is true, only whether it is sticky.

Geographic Authority, Local Collapse

The media used to map to geography. You read the local paper. You watched your city’s news. You knew the reporters by name. When they reported on city hall, they knew the mayor. When they covered corruption, they had context. Local was not a niche. It was the interface between the global and the lived.

Now? Local news is gutted. Media conglomerates bought up the outlets, slashed staff, and syndicated national content. What remains is often wire-service filler with the occasional high school sports update.

This matters. Because without local authority, national outlets become abstractions. They report on places they don’t understand, from perspectives they don’t inhabit. And audiences feel that. They feel spoken to by strangers.

When you lose the local interface, you lose the relational bridge. And when all news comes from 30,000 feet, it’s easy to believe it’s fake. Or at least, irrelevant.

Speed vs. Signal

The final failure mode is velocity.

In the old model, speed was expensive. Breaking news meant satellites, helicopters, a physical presence. Now, speed is cheap. Everyone’s breaking news. Everyone’s first. But when everyone’s first, no one checks the facts.

Traditional media tried to compete on speed. But it lost its advantage the minute Twitter existed. A guy on the street with a phone can outpace a newsroom. So what did newsrooms do? They tried to keep up. They cut verification steps. They ran half-checked stories. They live-blogged. They published first and corrected later.

And every time they did, they trained readers not to trust them.

Because speed and accuracy are not friends. Signal takes time. Truth takes legwork. The trade-off is real. You can either be fast or be right, but not both consistently.

The tragedy? (Yes, I’m using it.) By chasing speed, traditional media abandoned its greatest value: depth.

What Now?

Is there a fix? Do we salvage the distribution system, or do we let it burn and build something new?

We don’t have a choice. The audience has already moved. The culture has already fragmented. Distribution is now personalized, viralized, tribalized. The platforms are the pipes, and unless something radically changes, they will remain so.

So what does that imply?

It implies that traditional media must rethink what it is distributing for. If the goal is reach, you lose. If the goal is virality, you lose. If the goal is meaning? There may be hope.

That means:

• Stop chasing the general audience. Serve a specific one.

• Stop mimicking the platforms. Become an alternative to them.

• Stop chasing scoops. Chase signal.

• Stop performing objectivity. Earn trust through voice, consistency, transparency.

Let me leave you with a question:

If a story is true, well-sourced, vital to the public interest—but it doesn't make the feed, doesn't go viral, doesn't reach the audience—was it ever really journalism?

Or was it just a tree falling in a digital forest, unheard?