There have been exactly five posts I’ve been meaning to write over the past several weeks, as I trickle out this stream of consciousness. Somewhere between now and 10 years ago, we’ve seem to lost the script on how we think of journalism. Not everything is false or misleading and not everything is fake and subjective. And yet, here we are in 2021, droning on about everything has changed, myself included.

I’d like to draw a hard line into the sand that separates print journalism from news(y) entertainment. It’s much easier to stay objective when the characters landing on the screen don’t have anywhere to go rather than a TV personality fumbling the latest breaking news. Even worse, tech assists in building online ecosystems siloing information in such a way that it trains us to go down the echo chamber rabbit hole. It’s sad to see that such great potential in the convergence between journalism and technology has yielded a net-negative, in some respects.

Enter the re-introduction of low-/no-tech approach to journalism. When I started building a media network that provoked the ultimate question of, “is all news fake news?” I had a hunch that the answer was no. With a one-year backlog of data to support that hypothesis, I’ve been tinkering with the idea of moving forward to strip as much assistive technology away as possible. News readers are quite inquisitive and intellectual folk, so it’d behoove me to use that to my advantage in having them do the heavy, manual lifting of sifting through the news until they find something worthwhile reading. It’s not sexy. It’s not tech-y and, perhaps, a big bore. But, as of late, bringing back boring seems to get traction.