As a lifelong journalist, including 33 years at The Washington Post, I have long been grieving the slashing of newsrooms, even before The Post‘s major layoffs of 300 people last month. And as a citizen, I’ve been increasingly fearful that suppressing honest, reliable reporting threatens the very future of democracy and decency.
This declining, fragmented media landscape also has huge implications for the world of health care public relations because the firing of experienced reporters and editors limits our ability to reach broad audiences with quality information. Our jobs will require new, smarter strategies.
Recently, I read a particularly insightful piece in Axios (founded by two of my former Post colleagues) that carefully examined the declining influence of mainstream media. Their insights were simultaneously frightening and encouraging, changing my outlook on the future of news.
We have entered a once-in-a-generation shift that Axios founders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen call the “post-news era.” The large common window through which we all received our news and information from newspapers and TV networks has been forever shattered, they say, into hundreds and thousands of shards of glass. The result: we now have countless smaller “information bubbles” run by Podcasters, YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagramers, Influencers, Substackers, and a wide variety of other characters with widely varying ability and integrity.
For decades, the largest news-gathering organizations such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Post and the major TV networks set the agenda for national news. But now, VandeHei and Allen emphasize, our society is losing its grip on a shared, common reality and is devolving into a world where millions of people are creating their own personal realities through their choices of niche news bubbles.
The 2024 presidential election vividly illustrated how political campaigns embraced this change: Donald Trump went on “The Joe Rogan Experience” seeking to reach young, white males, and received 33 million views in one weekend, more than he could have reached in multiple appearances on Fox, CNN and MSNBC combined. Similarly, Vice President Kamala Harris targeted young female voters by going on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, reaching up to 10 million women, far more than she’d reach by appearing on ABC’s “The View.” Harris also appeared on two sites with large black audiences: the sports podcast “All the Smoke,” which boasts a mostly male audience of 20 million across multiple platforms, and the entertainment-celebrity-politics site “The Shade Room,” which claims 40 million mostly female followers.
Axios quoted a top Harris advisor who advocated her targeting nontraditional media: “You gotta fish where the fish are,” he said. “They’re not on cable and they’re not on broadcast. They’re not watching and not listening.” Even though their audience has shrunk, the major legacy news outlets still set the agenda for the big stories at “the top of the waterfall” of news, the advisor said. Mainstream media remains influential by creating “context and relevance and focus and priority—and then the tidal wave happens” thanks to the virality of new media.
The health care media landscape is forever changed. The Post, for example, had an award-winning health and science team of 14 journalists— and now only has five. This cut means that pitching stories will be harder and important stories may not get told.
But there are also more options than ever to spread the news. Dozens of new and growing health care websites provide trusted and comprehensive coverage, including Healthline, WebMD, Medical News Today, STAT News, MedPage Today, and KFF Health Care among many others.
Public relations practitioners now face the challenge of figuring out how to create and maintain effective contacts within this fragmented media landscape. In this new world, there are actually more options than ever to reach substantial audiences. But we cannot afford to give up on the major legacy media that remain at the top of the waterfall.
