The only four truly immortal qualities of good old journalism

The last virtues of journalism: completeness of the story, panoramic agenda, credentials, and limited edition

(From Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization.)

Sudden praise for old journalism

As social media flooded our screens, journalism suddenly gained credit for virtues like responsibility, trust, professionalism, and commitment to public service. Never before had journalists been granted such honorable titles.

This sudden admiration for professional journalism can be explained by people’s need for authority in navigating and validating news. In an environment of countless self-emerging sources with uncertain reliability, the burden of deciding what’s true or false now falls on the reader, not the source. But it’s hard to sort out reliable news in the endless flow of newsfeeds. It was far easier to follow a trusted authority. So people now idealize old journalism out of nostalgia for the authority and certainty it once provided, inventing characteristics of journalism that would have sounded sarcastic 25 years ago.

Of course, if there were a hypothetical news contest between a journalist and a blogger, the prize would likely go to the journalist. But in reality, it’s not a one-on-one contest. It’s a rivalry between the institution and the networked environment. The network effect isn’t defined by nodes but by the connections between them. The characteristics of individuals matter less when content “improves,” sifted through the networked filters. The issue isn’t whether a blogger is good or bad at producing news but how the entire system gathers and distributes news.

A journalist may beat a blogger, but the blogosphere beats journalism.

Why the Viral Editor beats human editors—and where it cannot beat them

In old media, news was filtered before publication. On the internet, news is filtered after publication, through distribution. Every user interested in a topic contributes time, passion, expertise, and evidence to the collective process of selecting and editing news. I call this collective editing mechanism the Viral Editor.

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With every possible media skill of all people (including the best journalists) at its disposal, the Viral Editor threatens not only mass media but the institution of journalism itself. Old media may improve professional quality as much as they want or can, yet they will share the fate of the phaeton (a metaphor used by McLuhan). The phaeton was the most technologically and aesthetically advanced chariot, but it didn’t matter once transportation shifted to the automobile. As beautiful and advanced as it was, the phaeton didn’t survive; it passed on only certain features to the new medium, such as cushioned seats and spring suspension.

The Viral Editor adopted what was useful from journalism, too, but does the job better, adding its own environmental features and reshaping the entire news environment. Digital media don’t deliver news; they immerse users in an environment where relevant news already awaits them, ready to be served personally.

Are there any real advantages of good old journalism over the Viral Editor? Yes, but not many. And they’re not usually what people praise when they romanticize journalism. So what remains in journalism’s arsenal for its last stand?

1. Completeness of the story

2. Compressed panoramic agenda

3. Professional status of news media

4. The effect of limited edition

1. Completeness of the story

The main advantage of old journalism lies not in writing skills or moral superiority but in the technology of material production. Physical manufacturing requires packaging news by the time of printing or airing—which is why periodicals are periodic. This physically imposed periodicity dictates old journalism’s most important quality: the completeness of each piece.

Since every story must be finished by airtime or printing time, the journalist has to end the narrative whether or not the real story is over. Journalism cuts reality into parcels. A journalist must be able to put a period. Period.

But reality doesn’t come in slices—it streams continuously. Cutting it into parcels is professional violence against the nature of events. Yet this violence creates convenience for readers, who receive a structured picture of the world made of (made up of) complete stories.

The internet destroyed parceling created by writing and printing. Online, news flows as events occur in reality. The way the internet streams its content matches the streaming flow of events but clashes with the literate habit of our parceled perception.

People grow annoyed with this flow. What is a “story” on the internet? Where’s the beginning? The end? What actually happened? There are no cues for where to stop reading. Stories have become “buzzing” and “trending” threads of events and comments. The newsfeed supplies only endless waves of hype and forgetting, with no chance to put in a logical period. Nothing in digital reality is complete. This unsettles—even frightens—those accustomed to written culture and its magical power to cut reality into parcels and turn the flow of events into complete stories.

The completeness of reality in digestible parcels is both the customer service and the social function that a human editor provides but the Viral Editor cannot.

Future generations will likely adapt to flow. With this shift, the transition from detached, logocentric thinking to the amplification of intensities people live through will be complete. Consumers of content flow must be more reactive than consumers of textual parcels. But this is a view from the past; for digital natives, emotional engagement will be the only mode of news consumption they know. For generations accustomed to complete stories, though, this new immersion in the ever-streaming environment is emotionally exhausting.

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2. Compressed panoramic agenda

Every media outlet packs a picture of the world into a compressed panoramic agenda: “Breaking/Top Stories, Politics, Business, Lifestyle, Sports.” Different outlets use variations of this pattern, but what matters is the regulative power of the pattern itself.

Even more important (and less noticed) is the editor’s obligation to find news and fill every section with something significant, even when nothing significant has happened in that area. This obligation to fill the pre-structured agenda creates an all-in-one panoramic view of the world—an essential effect of this historical medium, the newspaper.

There is no such thing as a compressed panoramic agenda beyond journalism. To get a similar panorama from the newsfeed would require reading the entire newsfeed. The Viral Editor filters reality but focuses only on the news with the highest potential of virality, remaining indifferent to the rest of the panoramic agenda. The Viral Editor sees only the high peaks; the valleys remain hidden in haze.

Meanwhile, flipping through a newspaper or watching a 15-minute newscast is enough to get a compressed agenda. It was precisely the structural pattern of newspapers—shaped by the physical limits of the newspaper format—that enabled journalism to compress the world into a panoramic view. (That compression also enables manipulation, but that’s another issue.) This service will never be provided by the free-flowing stream of social media’s guerrilla journalism.

3. The professional status of the news media

Journalists’ skills matter: while others are still learning how to be media, we journalists already know how. Yet the quality of the Viral Editor’s product is defined not by the skills of each node but by interactions between them. Investigative reporting, watchdog functions, entertainment, style—all emerge in the online crowd, too, through the collective efforts of the Viral Editor. As all experts and witnesses engage for the sake of recognition, the Viral Editor supplies everything and selects the best.

The professional status of journalists matters not because of their skills but for another reason: it serves as a marker. When a story is told by a journalist in a media outlet, the reader understands it as a product of a profession and an institution sanctioned to supply news on society’s behalf. This status entitles journalists and media to shape and validate the agenda.

In fact, as the function of news media shifts from informing to validating, the professional status of journalists, authorized by society, remains the last viable—and still somewhat demanded—function of mass media. As news media have become not suppliers but notaries of news, the label “made by a journalist” affirms the status of the news notary—just as real notaries must hold a license to operate.

Given the huge volume and variety of digital content, even this small effect of professional status becomes an effective psychological factor in preserving journalism’s significance. This is the real meaning behind people’s belief in journalistic professionalism: professional status is simply a signal of news-validation credentials.

4. The effect of limited edition

Physical limits make it impossible to print endlessly on paper or to broadcast without limit on TV or radio. These physical constraints determine what can be published—which is why editorial policy emerged in the first place. In fact, it was precisely the technical limits of media production that created journalism’s most useful yet underrated features: selection, parceling, completeness, compression, and the panoramic view. The effect of limited edition is one of them.

The value of “limited edition” is well known in marketing: a product is valued more if its supply is limited (or promoted as limited). In media, this factor produces a “wow” effect. When a newspaper prints news about someone (or a TV program airs it), it still elicits a “wow!” Nobody says “wow” when someone’s name appears on the internet—it’s no big deal, unless the name is propelled to fame or shame through distribution (“significance by dissemination”).

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Everyone knows the internet is notoriously permissive, allowing people to post whatever they want. By contrast, to appear in a newspaper, on TV, or on radio, one must pass a threshold of selection—must deserve to be featured. By default, everything published on a limited carrier is more valuable than whatever appears on an unlimited one. This is another intrinsic advantage of old media that the internet cannot replicate or eliminate.

All other features of journalism, however romantically praised, can be reproduced and appropriated by the internet.

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See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)