Then, in 2005, I was hired on fulltime as a reporter for a family of mid-size and weekly newspapers. That was right about the time that online ads started taking bites out of newspaper revenue.

It was annoying but nothing catastrophic.

Catastrophic didn’t arrive until 2007, when the iPhone debuted and everyone started demanding everything online—music, video clips, and news—and they wanted it all for free.

All someone had to do was copy a news story and share it with a few million of their closest friends and there was no need for anyone to pay.

In a frantic move to keep hold of their work product, newspapers around the country hastily threw up websites and started posting their stories online.

Some with paywalls and some without.

Makes total sense, right?

No, it didn’t.

And things only got worse.

Next thing you know, it’s even easier than ever for people steal and share news stories with near total impunity.

But, stealing news is sort of on the level of cheating on your taxes. You figure the SOBs deserve to be swindled because they’re such lowlives.

And you might be half right.

That was also about the time that three of the four largest sources of newspaper revenue—automotive sales, classifieds, and realtors—stampeded online where they could run their advertisements for pennies on the dollar.

It didn’t seem to matter that the majority of people clicked away those ads without ever even glancing at them. A practice which continues to this day.

By law, we were able to maintain paid public notices … but for many newspapers, that simply wasn’t enough.

The double whammy of lost advertising and diminished paid readership was simply too much for many to bear.

According to The State of Local News Project Oct 20, 2025 report, since 2005, “Almost 40% of all local U.S. newspapers have vanished, leaving 50 million Americans with limited or no access to a reliable source of local news.”

Lots of folks, maybe even most, might think those numbers don’t matter.

After all, there are thousands of blogs and TikTok channels, Youtubers and Facebook pages, and Instagram accounts all spewing information around the clock.

So, who needs a stodgy old news company?

Here’s the problem …

While journalism has never been a perfect practice, it has at its roots some pretty high standards.

Well-done journalism has uncovered fraud, freed innocent people from prison, brought ne’er-do-wells to justice, and kept the public informed about all manner of important, dangerous, and heartwarming happenings.

In the old days, way back 20 years ago, we gathered news that mattered to the general public and most of us tried really hard to deliver it free of bias, rich in context, and with as little error as possible.

My first few months on the job, I got the date of an upcoming election wrong and was accused of trying to circumvent democracy. Sometimes, the malice you perceive is plain old incompetence. Not that one is so much better than the other.

To be fair, my editor should have caught the mistake. But, it was a valuable lesson learned in how important it is to take one’s time and do the job right.

So, how did we deliver good news?

We accomplished this by working hand in hand with factcheckers, proofreaders, editors, photographers, and especially the citizenry.

We developed good sources and double-checked our facts, we quoted accurately and provided context. We followed the mantra of, “Right is better than first.”

It wasn’t long after news went digital that people found ways around paywalls and the general consensus went from it being perfectly reasonable that a newspaper charged a dollar for large amounts of news and photos—which required huge amounts of work and great numbers of people to create—to expecting their news for free.

I remember the comments on social media being overwhelmingly indignant that newspapers dared charge money for something so vital as news content.

Many former customers stopped looking at us as a business and instead as a public utility.

Which would have been fine, except we weren’t.

To offset those stunning financial losses, the company I worked for started off by trimming our 401k contributions. Then they limited travel. Office supplies were suddenly under lock and key. And overtime was slashed.

Then came the Friday firings.

Wave after wave.

First, they got rid of the cub reporters.

Then the receptionists were replaced by computerized phone systems.

Some of the older staff saw the impending bloodbath and opted to retire.

So much institutional knowledge suddenly disappeared.

Then they got rid of our factcheckers.

Errors started springing up but factcheckers were no longer in the budget.

Then they got rid of the proofreaders.

People complained about the typos but tired eyes have their limits.

They thinned out the photographers … and reporters were told to take pictures with their phones.

The photos went from enticing professional portraits to blurry badly composed pictures.

We got rid of our fulltime delivery drivers and replaced them with “independent contractors.” From professional uniformed employees to people in cutoff shorts and flipflops who often did not represent our company in the best light.

No matter how much they cut, things never seemed to get better.

Because, as time went on, more and more people decided they didn’t have to pay for their news. And more and more advertisers decided they’d rather put their ads online.

We were told to rush stories to the web so that, by the time our paid readers got their papers, the news was days old.

Someone up top got the brilliant idea for the newspapers to share their stories with each other, so much so that we lost our identity.

More and more unqualified people were put in positions they shouldn’t have been in because they were cheaper to get.

And, as the Wild Wild West of the internet continued to be our guiding light, journalism standards continued to slip further and further from the goal of truth to the yearning for clicks.

Newspapers started crafting headlines that looked more like clickbait.

News articles started resembling opinion pieces.

And straight-up opinion pieces were proffered as real news.

Suddenly, context didn’t matter.

In an age where “your truth” was a concept as flexible as your thoughts on Area 51 …

Truth didn’t matter.

The news business, which had always teetered on the verge of falling victim to the culture war, was now looked upon as its greatest weapon.

Sure, there have always been news agencies with eye-watering slants, but even the worst of the worst managed to maintain certain core journalistic integrities.

By 2008, I actually heard from the mouths of professional newsgatherers that, if you weren’t pushing your political ideology in your articles, you weren’t a real journalist.

At one meeting, where the bean counters were detailing yet another round of financial bleeding, one publisher actually touted the idea of utilizing “citizen journalists” to help cut costs on reporters.

To which some anonymous editor in the wayback shouted, “Citizen journalism? Is that anything like citizen surgery?”

Everyone but the publisher laughed.

I don’t think he got it.

Fast-forward twenty years and things have only gotten worse.

The idea that anyone would pay for news is received with scorn.

Every time I dip into the comment section on a news story, there are throngs of users helping each other get around the paywall or pointing them to the places which have already pirated the content.

The argument hasn’t changed.

The same people who wouldn’t dare walk into McDonald’s or Walmart and demand free stuff have no shame declaring news agencies have no right to charge for their product.

The problem is, the news business has become so crooked and untrustworthy, I have great difficulty defending it.

It’s a strange business where most of your customers hate you while simultaneously demanding your product.

While smaller news agencies were initially hit hardest by this change in technology and culture, no one has been immune.

Just a month ago, The Washington Post cut more than 300 jobs—that’s nearly a third of its employees. And those are never coming back.

Which means that space has opened up for even more unqualified Citizen Journalists to regurgitate what little news there is being generated and pad it with their personal opinions and pure speculation and deliver it to their followers as if it were truth.

I refuse to set foot on X or TikTok, but not a day goes by that I’m not forced to listen to my wife’s doomscrolling and hear dozens of know-nothings spouting their opinions on news stories with a level of faux authority that makes my skin crawl.

And every time, I mutter the same thing: “This is what’s replaced journalism.”

We’ve gone from Tom Brokaw to Perez Hilton.

And no one seems to care.

We moved to the outskirts of the state capital a few years ago to a medium-sized town which has no newspaper.

I begrudgingly started following the local Facebook page to keep up on happenings the best I could. And right away I noticed shenanigans with the city operations and how meetings are being handled.

Having covered local government for nearly twenty years, you get to notice red flags pretty quickly.

And all I could think was, if there was a dedicated newspaper here, they wouldn’t be getting away with this.

But, since there’s not, the only real “news” coverage you get is a whole lot of second- and third-hand misinformation from angry residents.

I’ve been tempted more than a few times to dive in and straighten this mess out but I left the news business in July 2020 to pursue a totally different career.

The idea of working long hours for no pay to serve a clientele that’s both entitled and rude just doesn’t have the same appeal it once did.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love journalism. I think it’s up there with the most important pillars of healthy democracy and honest governance.

But the standards have gotten so low, and so many of its practitioners no longer seem to care about codes of ethics, the end user has no choice but to distrust and dislike the business, let alone be convinced to pay the amount necessary for the quality operation of a news organization to properly operate.

So, who can you trust?

Good question.

There was a time when I believed organizations like New York Times and Washington Post, NBC, and CNN.

But, over the years, I’ve seen too many ill-informed, misleading, and downright crazy perspectives pushed to support their various agendas to seek them with any sense of seriousness.

I’ve actually seen so-called legitimate news agencies run pieces which were based soley off other articles. That’s not just bad reporting, it’s downright illegal.

Nowadays, when a big story breaks, I find myself going to half a dozen sources in an attempt to piece together what occurred. And even then, the wife and I just look at each other and say, “We’re never going to know what really happened.”

It makes me sad.

It makes me angry.

It makes me want to run out and teach a journalism class to tomorrow’s reporters.

But I know I’d immediately be cancelled for violencing them with my rules and expectations. “Whatta ya mean Wikipedia isn’t an official source!?”

I can’t tell you how many thousands of hours I spent sitting through meetings of city councils, planning commissions, county boards, township boards, and school boards—quite often where I was the only person in the audience—and then spent an equal amount of time poring over hundreds and hundreds of pages of reports so I could distill vital information into a brief and easy-to-read format for the community.

And never once did I feel the need to infuse it with my own perspective.

The thing is, unbiased journalism is possible.

Hell, it’s not even difficult.

I did it for years.

I saved my opinions for the opinion page.

But, like any other bad behavior, it’s a choice people make because it feels good.

Some folks just can’t seem to tell a story without spinning it.

And they have no business in the news business.

So, what can be done?

I don’t have a lot of hope for the future of honest and thorough journalism free of some political or cultural slant.

The fix?

To accomplish it would require an overhaul of the entire system.

It would mean sending everyone back to the fundamentals of newsgathering.

It would mean checking your opinions at the office door.

You’d have to prize the public’s right to know over your own selfish motivations.

You’d have to act like an adult, rather than a petulant child.

You’d have to read and write and print things you disagreed with.

And the end users would have to stop stealing your work.

The customer would have to actually pay a reasonable price for a quality product.

Because doing good journalism isn’t merely reprinting press releases—it takes a lot of time and a tremendous amount of work.

I get it, with all that’s going wrong with the world, most people have neither the time nor inclination to spend on the issue of badly processed information.

It’s been painful, watching journalism die over the last twenty-plus years.

But, until we make some serious changes to how the news is gathered and disseminated, those in power will continue to find it easier to abuse, innocent people will be at the mercy of injustice, the environment will be sacrificed on the altar of corporate greed, secret wars will be waged, laws broken, and mass hysterias will be given the freedom to spread—because all of man’s worst impulses are freer to dance in the dark.