What Is “News”?

January 10, 2025

Leyendecker Executive Search

Welcome to This Week’s Leyendecker View

Few people want to be saints nowadays, but everyone is trying to lose weight.
–René Girard

THINKING OUT LOUD

What Is “News”?

It’s what journalists have to find every day, often multiple times a day, to keep their jobs.
It’s what news companies seek to find or create that will hold people’s attention in order to make more advertising revenue.
It’s what governments want us to believe so they can stay in and/or expand power.
It’s what big business wants us to believe so they can stay relevant and grow profits.

From journalists to governments to big business, news is the tool used to convince us to support an agenda. Today, the news seems less about improving our lives and more about increasing power and economic reward to the business, media, government and political elite.

How did we get here?

Arguably, modern “news” roots back to Gutenberg’s printing press. Prior to the printing press, news was disseminated from one person to another person. In short order, Martin Luther used Gutenberg’s new technology to inform a whole lot of people that the Catholic Church was not the pious and benevolent institution they wanted the masses to believe.

For a good while, that was the purpose of news people—protecting the common man and exposing power that sought to manipulate and control people and agendas. This remained their raison d’être for quite some time.

If you have not seen the 1962 film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, you should. It’s a John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart classic. Its story is about a newspaper man fighting power. That newspaper man represented what the news aspired to be—the effort to ensure power and corruption were exposed.

Print was the primary medium of news, until radio came along and then television. Television quickly encroached on radio and print news, eventually becoming the dominant medium in American households. Watching a trusted newscaster like Walter Cronkite was much easier, maybe even more comforting, than reading or listening to the news, after all.

For a couple of decades, newspapers and television maintained a reasonably balanced view, but something seems to have happened when President Nixon was impeached. All of a sudden, news (The Washington Post) had the power to take down a president.

Print and TV journalists became king slayers, which likely gave them the notion they could become king makers. Woodward and Bernstein’s Washington Post expose, book and then the movie, All the President’s Men, turned journalists into celebrities. Now many (most?) journalists aspire to be celebrities, and, as we know, celebrities consider themselves superior to the common man. Celebrities are part of the elite.

Newspaper subscriptions peaked out at around 65MM in the 1980s. Today, newspapers only have about 20MM subscribers. Although television news viewing naturally spikes and then drops off in an election year, television news viewing is on the decline—not just because of the loss of trust in the media but also because the new technology—the internet and social media in particular—is naturally replacing it.

This is yet one more example of technology causing massive disruption that forces an industry into step change. The printing press, radio, television, cable television, the internet and social media—each of these technologies turned the status quote that preceded it upside down. Each broke the revenue model and left the status quo institutions to scramble for revenue. Each increased competition for legacy purveyors of news. And this says nothing of how AI will change the news.

The ever expanding and evolving competition in the news industry naturally threatens legacy providers. This is a classic step change. In order to maintain viewers, legacy news providers recently pushed sensationalism, soap opera narratives and a divide-and-conquer polarization to maintain and hopefully grow their profitability. All the while, journalists continued to aspire to be king slayers that could turn them into very rich celebrities. “Who can I bring down? Whose power coattails can I ride?”

Today, the legacy news media considers itself above the fray of the common man. It holds celebrity status. It has aligned itself with the other elites in business, education, politics and government, all of which naturally resist step change.

But now a new news ecosystem is developing in social media. Just this week, Meta decided to follow X’s lead in letting users fact check each other via community notes. Now the news is your responsibility, our responsibility. Will this make news clearer or cloudier? Will it help or hurt our ability to understand what’s happening in the world?

Step change is upon the world of news, but it’s also upon each of us. As individuals, we now have to navigate the news in order to try to understand the world around us. We now have to think more and expect less from the news. In a way, this step change looks like it may just make each of us more personally responsible. Now that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, would it?

THE RANDOMS

Tariffs, trade wars, real wars, horrific LA fires, DOGE, AI…2025 is off to a “fun” start.

Did the focus on DEI, ESG, LBGTQ+ and all the other politically correct agendas distract California’s politicians from managing their natural environment with more responsibility?

What are we supposed to think when members of congress consistently outperform the stock market?

What should we fear more—what AI will do to our lives, or the people who control AI?

I hate to see yet more government agencies. But given the offshore wind story linked in this week’s Energy Transition section, we desperately need an Agency of Unintended Consequences to research and report on every government policy effort. What are all the various unintended consequences of policy out of Washington?

What would you think if doggy sunglasses were an economic indicator?

If things get better economically in the US, would it benefit the rest of the world, or would the rest of the world struggle? Which country today is actually on cloud nine?

It may be healthy to question conventional wisdom so that we all don’t get sucked into mass psychosis. When has wisdom ever been conventional?

ECONOMIC NEWS

Economy
Is the economy weakening or ready to MAGA rumble?

Jobs report blows by expectations
Corporate bankruptcies at 14-year high
ISM says services economy looks strong
Consumer confidence at near-recession level

Labor
Is AI replacing white-collar jobs already?

Bridgewater hedge fund cuts staff for AI
White-collar workers struggle to find jobs
How the mis-managerial class destroys companies
A generational view on the secret to success

Inflation, deflation, whatever
Inflation and deflation are upon us.

How high are home insurance rates about to go?
Home insurance has a $1 TRILLION hole
Falling rent rates will push down inflation

BUSINESS

Globalization challenges MAGA

Finance
Let’s not forget, it takes money to make money.

Wall Street bonuses up big
Citi CEO not up to the task?
A $600MM PE loss, whoa!
Wealth managers flock to Uruguay
Will 2025 bring an IPO parade?