The Media Is No Longer Working for the People

The media is no longer working for the people. News consumption has splintered across polarized lines, and it feels as if Americans living in their own news silos are now speaking entirely different languages. The 2024 election laid bare just how deep the rot goes. Most people on one side of the political aisle can no longer explain how the other thinks. They exist in parallel realities, each one shaped by algorithms feeding them stories they already agree with, surrounded by ads tuned precisely to their tastes.

This model of algorithmic news and polarization has been forming for years, but only recently have we begun to grasp its consequences. Americans trust one another less than at any time in living memory: just 34 percent of U.S. adults today say most people can be trusted, down from 46 percent in 1972 (Pew Research Center, May 2025). Meanwhile, trust in national news organizations has dropped sharply—only 56 percent of Americans say they have “a lot” or “some” trust in national news, down 20 points since 2016 (Pew Research Center, Oct 2025).

The polarization isn’t just cultural, it’s structural. It’s the result of two failures: first, the inability of legacy news organizations to innovate their business models; and second, investors chasing engagement metrics by catering ever more narrowly to emotional and political narratives. The result is a feedback loop that rewards outrage and confirmation bias. Instead of informing citizens, it trains them to seek validation.

Even storied institutions, former or onetime paragons of trust like The New York Times or The Washington Post, have drifted toward the same gravity well, adopting partisan and corporate tendencies. At the same time, local news is collapsing: nearly 40 percent of U.S. newspapers have closed since 2005, leaving about 50 million Americans with little or no access to reliable local journalism (Northwestern Medill Local News Initiative, 2025 Report). These “news deserts” weaken our democracy, lower civic engagement, and cause deeper polarization (American Journalism Project, 2024).

It doesn’t have to be this way.

At Protocol Media Labs, I set out to reimagine the economic foundation of journalism itself and to build a system that produces quality reporting through aligned incentives, not ideological filters. The goal is simple but ambitious: to use market dynamics to make hard-news production more efficient while giving journalists unprecedented control and ownership over their work.

I also wanted to unite two worlds that rarely meet: the open-source community, which excels at collaboration but struggles with monetization, and investigative journalism, which excels at truth-telling but struggles with sustainability. Together, they can produce the kind of revelations that crack open corruption, expose wrongdoing, and restore accountability where it’s been lost.

How are we doing it? By using blockchain infrastructure to create interconnected information markets that generate verified, high-quality news. Protocol Media Labs is building a publishing platform where journalists can source collaborators, crowdfund major stories, commission deep research, and access newsroom services like copy-editing and design - all within a transparent, incentive-driven system.

We’re pairing that with a prediction market focused on our most-read stories, and a completely new approach to monetizing news itself. Add to that the best of Web3, including decentralized storage, seamless international payments, and token-based utility and governance, and you get a news organization built to withstand political interference, corporate pressure, or even the collapse of traditional hosting infrastructure.

A news organization that can’t be censored. That can’t be bought. That never goes offline.

That’s Protocol Media Labs.