Imagine celebrities in the future starting their own news portal online about a particular ethnic conflict that they care deeply about. Perhaps they believe that the mainstream media isn’t doing enough to publicize it or that it has gotten the narrative wrong. They decide to cut out the traditional middlemen and deliver stories directly to the public; let’s call it Brangelina news. They hire their own people to work in the conflict zone, and they provide daily reports that their staff at home form into news articles to publish on their platform. Their overhead would be low, certainly lower than major news outlets, and they might not even need to compensate reporters and stringers, some of whom would work for free in exchange for the visibility. In short order, they become the ultimate source of information and news on the conflict because they both are highly visible and have built up enough credibility in their work that they can be taken seriously.
Mainstream media outlets will find such new serious competitors in the future—not just tweeters and amateur onsite observers—and that will complicate the media environment in this period. As we said, many will still favor and support the established news organizations, out of loyalty and trust in the institutions, and the serious work of journalism—the investigative reporting, the high-level interviews, the prescient contextualization of complicated events—will remain in the domain of the mainstream media. But for others, the diversification of content sources will represent a choice between a serious outlet and a “celebrity” outlet, and the seemingly insatiable appetite for tabloid-like content (in the United States, the U.K. and elsewhere) suggests that many consumers will probably choose the celebrity one. Visibility, not consistency or strength of content, will drive the popularity of such publishers.
Just as they do today with charities and business ventures, celebrities will look to starting their own media outlet as a logical extension of their “brand.” (We are using as broad a definition of “celebrity” as possible here: We mean all highly visible public figures, which today could mean anyone from reality-TV stars to famous evangelical preachers.) To be sure, some of these new outlets will be solid attempts to contribute to public discourse, but many will be vapid and nearly content free, merely exercises in self-promotion and commercialized fame.
We will see a period in which people flock to these new celebrity outlets for their novelty value and to be part of a trend. Those that stay won’t mind that the content and professionalism are a few notches below those of established media organizations. Media critics will decry these changes and lament the death of journalism, but this will be premature, because once the audience shifts, so too will the burden of reporting. If a celebrity outlet doesn’t provide enough news, or consistently makes errors that are publicly exposed, the audience will leave. Loyalties are fickle when it comes to media, and this will only become truer as the field grows more crowded. If enough celebrity outlets lose the faith and trust of their audience, the resulting exodus will lead back to the professional media outlets, which will have undergone their own transformations (more aggregation, wider scope, faster response time) in the interim. Not all who left will return, just as not all who take issue with the mainstream media will jettison familiar information sources for new and trendy ones. Ultimately, it remains to be seen just how much impact these new celebrity competitors will have on the media landscape in the long term, but their emergence as players in the game of accruing viewers, readers and advertisers will undoubtedly cause a stir.
Expanded connectivity promises more than just challenges for media outlets; it offers new possibilities for the role of media more generally, particularly in countries where the press is not free. One reason that corrupt officials, powerful criminals and other malevolent forces in a society can continue to operate without fear of prosecution is that they control local information sources, either directly as owners and publishers or indirectly through harassment, bribery, intimidation or violence. This is as true in countries with largely state-owned media, like Russia, as it is in those where criminal syndicates hold enormous power and territory, like Mexico. The result—the lack of an independent press—reduces both accountability and the risk that public knowledge of misdeeds will lead to pressure and the political will to prosecute.
Connectivity can help upend such a power imbalance in a number of ways, and one of the most interesting ones concerns digital encryption and what it will enable underground or at-risk media organizations to do. Imagine an international NGO whose mission is to facilitate confidential reporting from places where it is difficult or dangerous to be a journalist. What differentiates this organization from others today, like watchdog groups and nonprofit media patrons, is the encrypted platform it builds and deploys to be used by media inside these countries. The platform’s design is novel yet surprisingly simple. In order to protect the identities of journalists (who are the most exposed in the chain of reporting), every reporter for a given outlet is registered in the system with a unique code. Their names, mobile numbers and other identifiable details are encrypted behind this code, and the only people able to de-encrypt that information are key individuals at the NGO headquarters (not anyone at the news outlet), which, crucially, is based outside of the country. Inside the country, reporters are known only by this unique code—they use it to file stories and interact with their sources and local editors. As a result, if, for example, a journalist reports on an election irregularity in Venezuela (as many did during the October 2012 presidential election, although not anonymously), those charged with carrying out the president’s dirty work have no way of knowing whom to target because they can’t access the reporter’s information, nor does anyone the reporter dealt with know who he or she really is. Media outlets don’t maintain formal physical offices, since those could be targeted. Outlets necessarily have to vet their reporters initially, but after a journalist is introduced into the system, he is switched to a new editor (who has not met him) and his personal details evaporate into the platform.
The NGO outside of the country operates this platform from a safe distance, allowing the various participants to interact safely through a veil of encryption. Treating reporters in the same ways as confidential sources (protecting identities, preserving content) is not itself a new idea, but the ability to encrypt that identifiable data, and use an online platform to facilitate anonymous news-gathering, is only becoming possible now. The stories and other sensitive materials that journalists uncover can easily be stored in servers outside the country (someplace where there are strong legal protections around data), further limiting the exposure of those inside. Initially, perhaps this NGO would release its platform as a free product and operate it for different news outlets, financed by third-party donations. Eventually the NGO might take all of the working platforms and federate them, building a super-platform comprised of unidentifiable journalists from countries around the world. While we certainly do not advocate a popular shift toward anonymity, we assume in this case that the security situation is so dire and the society so repressive that the move is an act of desperation and necessity. An editor in New York would be able to log in, search for a reporter in Ukraine and find someone with a track record of published stories and even snippets from former colleagues. Without even knowing the journalist’s name, the editor could rely on the available stories and the trust he has in this platform to decide whether to work with him. He could request an encrypted call with the reporter, also possible through the platform, to begin building a relationship.