Legacy Media Bites Legacy Media

Stop the presses... at least the ones that are left.

©2025 Kenneth Jarecke / Contact Press Images

I went through the old-school checkout line at the grocery store today. I had a bunch of produce that needed to be weighed. Figured it would be easier, maybe even quicker. I was wrong on both counts.

The first gal had a stack of coupons thicker than a phonebook. Whoops, sorry about that. A phonebook is how people once looked up phone numbers so that they could call a certain person or find a particular business. Anyway, these "phonebooks" tended to be thick, meaning the gal buying groceries had a lot of coupons. Good for her. We should all be so diligent. Slow to be sure and a bit annoying for me, but diligent for her.

The second fellow, God bless him, was older and single. He had a premade sandwich (made fresh that day!), a single barley-based beverage, a half gallon of black walnut ice cream (store brand), and a newspaper. Whoops again. A newspaper is how the vast majority of us got our news back in the day.

He paid in cash. That's how old he was.

Phonebooks aren't coming back. We've got a local one, in that one kitchen drawer, that was printed about fifteen years ago. For the most part, it still works, as many of our neighbors either don't have cell phones or have kept their landlines.

Newspapers (and by "newspapers" I mean the legacy media) aren't coming back either. They've passed that threshold between this world and the next. It's a kind thing to say, "passed" instead of suicide. Suicide is a harsh word. Maybe too harsh. To be fair, they didn't want to die, but they also didn't care enough about living to change their bad habits.

Regardless, phonebooks and newspapers are history.

Newspapers are like the guy burning through a pack of unfiltered Camels while hooked up to an oxygen tank, and to be clear, the legacy journalists working for these outlets are the unfiltered Camels.

Cigarettes come in packs, just like legacy journalists. They like being tightly stacked in next to one another. There's safety in that. Agreeing with one another. Not making waves. Mutual job insurance. The idea that legacy journalists are competing to scoop one another is more a Hollywood cliché than a reality. Not unlike the revolver that never needs to be reloaded.

There are two main ways that legacy journalists in Washington, DC, "scoop" the competition. The first is to work behind the scenes to limit the access of other journalists. The second is to make ugly, unholy little alliances with people in power, a one-hand-washes-the-other scenario.

Outside of J-school, serving the public interests and the needs of their readers doesn't make the list.

Legacy media is crony capitalism, but when you aren't selling newspapers or getting viewers, the capitalism side falls apart. It's all about getting eyeballs. That's what they really sell, always has been, and the people behind those eyeballs no longer buy what they're saying. They simply don't believe them. They've been burned too many times. Name the story that turned out to be false and then was never corrected. There are too many to count. They also wonder about what stories were never written because they'd make an advertiser uncomfortable—also too many to count.

Authenticity: lose it and there's no getting it back, and there's no audience without it.

One can't mention capitalism without also mentioning the free market. That's why cronyism is so important, whether it's licensing hair salons or accrediting journalists. When the legacy players lose that ability to limit their competition’s access, they also lose their artificial monopoly on the marketplace.

That's why X and Substack are such a problem. It's outside of their control, and the one thing they lack, the thing they can’t get back (authenticity), is important here.

The Associated Press wasn't the only mean girls running the high school lunchroom, but for a long time, they were the most powerful. Those days are over. Worse yet for the legacies, the AP filed an unwise lawsuit against the White House over their privileged access and lost. In doing so, they got the White House Correspondents' Association defanged as well.

The mavericks, the ones who thrive on authenticity and serve at the pleasure of their readers, rather than through the power of bureaucracy, have won today. Let's hope the rest of us who depend on good journalism to make important decisions, both personal and communal, win as well.