It may be the last thing a journalist wants to report on, but it’s time to start asking whether our profession still means anything. What’s left of the fourth estate? Spoiler: perhaps only nostalgia.
The Golden Age of journalism is long gone. More than 7,400 influencers have applied for White House press credentials following the announcement that the administration would open its press briefings to content creators. In the United States, 37% of people under 30 get their news from influencers, according to the latest Pew Research study. Democrats and Republicans have given unprecedented prominence to influencers in their latest election campaign. Donald Trump’s team, moreover, acknowledged that content creators played a key role in his victory, and even organised a party for influencers after winning the election; a massive party made famous by the manipulative article “The Cruel Kids’ Table” in New York Magazine, which tried to paint them as white supremacists, ignoring the fact that even the organiser himself, CJ Pearson, is black. The story is paradigmatic of the depressing decline of traditional journalism in the face of the burgeoning new-new journalism.
The content creator is what would have been considered, in the old newsrooms, a bad journalist. Most of them are too young and unqualified, they do not follow the journalist’s code of ethics, they do not usually follow internal rules for handling information or checking sources, immediacy and precariousness prevent them from taking the time to inform themselves properly, and they almost never separate information from opinion, focusing mainly on the latter. And yet, a single influencer impacts a larger audience than old-school investigative journalists could hope to reach in a lifetime.
The numbers don’t speak, they scream. On X, The New York Times has 55 million followers, The Washington Post, 20 million, and CNN, 22 million. However, YouTuber MrBeast, alone, has 357 million subscribers, podcaster Joe Rogan has 19 million followers on Instagram and a podcast with audiences in the millions, and influencer Logan Paul boasts 27 million fans on Instagram alone.
Is it better or worse than conventional journalism? From a technical point of view, based on a famous manual such as David Randall’s, we would have to say it is worse, even dramatically so. But reality is more complex. With the big media groups in the hands of only a few, and often serving spurious interests, free journalism has ceased to be a risky activity and has become an activity at risk of extinction. In both Europe and the United States, the vast mainstream media, including left and centre-right media, had completely surrendered to the single progressive mindset, exemplified in both Agenda 2030 and the woke culture. Stepping out of that lane led to pressures, dismissals, and cancellations. So much closed-mindedness and arrogance, when on the other side there are millions of YouTubers completely free to choose.
On the other hand, as is the case in many European newspapers, large media corporations had become overly dependent on institutional advertising after a succession of crises in the sector. In other words, the fourth estate that was supposed to watch over politicians had ended up in the hands of the politicians themselves.
Against this backdrop, freedom has more to gain than lose from the emergence of influencers—people who don’t depend on anyone—and the rise of social media as the preferred source of information. However, the mainstream media has tried to cling desperately to their one-way thinking, exemplified by the ridiculous campaign to abandon X/Twitter by media giants such as The Guardian, after Elon Musk restored the freedom that had been stolen from the platform’s users. They were too well-accustomed to being the sole masters of the ball. And along came Uncle Elon and punctured it.
Another interesting aspect here is that there are far more conservative YouTubers, with more followers, than progressive ones—exactly the opposite of how the overall picture of the mainstream in the West had looked during the first half of the 21st century. Without social media, it is likely that no major media would ever have given them a voice.
Content creators depend on themselves, as well as their advertisers and subscribers. This allows them to use their freedom for good or evil, but the reader or follower has the power to choose who they want to trust, without being subjected to a constant barrage of targeted and overlapping opinions and information, as was often the case in much of the mainstream media.
The drift is unstoppable. Global data shows that we spend an average of two hours and 30 minutes a day consulting social networks, a percentage that drops slightly in the UK—1 hour and 46 minutes—and rises in Latin American countries, where it is well over three hours. According to the Pew Research Center, the average reading time per online visitor in the hundred or so major U.S. newspapers is less than two minutes. The fourth estate has, on balance, less influence than a Daffy Duck meme.
If you’re still in doubt about the direction things have taken, follow the money. In 2025, the average annual salary for a journalist in the US is between $55,000 and $75,000, while any influencer with as few as 100,000 followers can earn between $1,000 and $5,000 for a single sponsored post, and 1 million followers can earn an influencer between $100,000 and $500,000 a year, depending on the niche topic and platforms they work on.
Perhaps because of the desperation these figures produce, mainstream media has ended up copying the worst aspects of content creators: obsession with ‘clickbait’ and cheap traffic. So newspapers that we once thought were serious are relentlessly launching pseudo-informative headlines on their social networks such as “you’ve been opening kiwis wrong all your life”, “how to get your girl to orgasm in a minute,” or “the world will go up in flames this summer because of climate change (Episode LXXIV),” mixed with great political investigative reporting or thoughtful opinion columns on economics. In other words, many media outlets are betting on competing against the tide of content creators by devaluing their own product even further.
We’ve passed the point of no return. Big media will eventually go bankrupt or disappear, or become small media, and niche digital magazines will house what little journalistic talent survives the bonfire. Journalism schools will empty, and young journalists will no longer want to be news anchors or investigative journalists, but celebrity content creators and YouTubers.
Then, the fourth estate, as we once knew it, will be gone forever. Political power and the elites will concentrate their efforts on subjugating, regulating, and buying off content creators. But that will be another chapter. For the moment, many of the most important ones have moved to tax havens such as Puerto Rico, Andorra, Monaco, Panama, or Luxembourg to avoid the first witch hunts, or at least to avoid being thrown to the tax dog by politicians tempted to thus silence them. After all, unlike traditional newsrooms, they only need somewhere to sit, a mobile phone and an internet connection. They don’t even need to take swigs from a flask of whisky while they work.
