It is now conventional wisdom that the 2024 election put the final nail in the legacy media’s coffin.
“If half the country thought Donald Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media,” said an anonymous TV executive, as quoted on X by Brian Stelter.
“This is the podcast election” said Scott Galloway, on his podcast.
“You are the media now,” Elon Musk has tweeted to his 206 million followers.
Well, yes and no.
The legacy news media are in a phase of managed decline, but probably not towards extinction. In some form, they will likely take their place alongside other institutions preserved by philanthropy, endowments, and subscriptions.
The New York Times of the future may be like the Metropolitan Opera of the present, not irrelevant, but never again what it was in the days of its mass appeal. For anybody despondent about journalism’s future, this should be a hopeful prospect.
Even in their diminished state, our legacy media still matter. YouTube and X outpace readership of traditional media, in YouTube’s case by orders of magnitude, but newspapers still reach and are trusted by tens of millions of influential Americans.
The richer someone is, the likelier they are to get news from a legacy brand. Americans with more education are likelier to trust the legacy media. Like a taste for the fine arts, those who read and trust legacy media are likely to pass such habits on to their children.
It is true that its audiences are contracting, but there are signs that the long decline in the legacy media’s relevance and economics is stabilizing.
Digital readership of newspapers is holding steady and may even have increased in the years since the COVID lockdowns. Tallies vary, but the number of people reading newspapers on screens in the US is anywhere from 25 to 45 million.
When I began studying the economics of journalism in 2012, the number of reporters in America had fallen to 50,000. More than a decade later, that number is about the same.
Print circulation of major newspapers is in free fall, which should surprise no one. But even newsprint will likely never go away. As I once heard an editor at Newsweek say when it resumed a small print run in big cities, “The ink-and-paper magazine is now a luxury item. Plus, you can’t talk about what is on the cover of Newsweek unless there is a cover.”
Readers will always need somewhere to verify what they’ve read on social media. And however powerful a viral post is, a byline at a legacy publication will remain powerful in a different way.
So it is with music. Pop and classical co-exist. Everybody listens to pop, but an aria on the stage of The Met in New York or the Royal Opera House in London is an achievement with no real equivalent.
And for such a supposedly arcane art form, opera’s economics are robust. In North America, opera is a $1 billion industry that employs 40,000 people across 203 companies, with a total audience of about 7 million. Orchestral music has a bigger footprint. The industry is $2.1 billion in size, with 1,600 orchestras employing 160,000 musicians.
And this is after a century of decline, spanning two pandemics, two world wars, and competition from records, radio, Hollywood, and the internet.
If legacy media’s economics stabilize at similar numbers, it would be cause for celebration.
There is one important difference to reckon with if journalism comes to resemble the fine performing arts. For newspapers, mixing in philanthropy and government support risks fundamentally altering the product. Fragmented by the biases of a balkanized readership and overshadowed by a few rich donors, journalism’s objectivity risks being compromised.
But such has it ever been.
The media environment known to the founders of the U.S. was more like the wild west of X and Substack than the newsrooms of the 20th Century. At the end of the 18th Century, fake news was rampant, and rancorous partisanship and hackery existed alongside brilliant writing.
It is true that a few rich donors have outsized influence at operas and orchestras. I once heard the director of a great opera house quip: “Do I make programming choices based on the tastes of my audience? Of course I do, about three or four of them in particular.”
Choosing Wagner over Verdi is one thing, but surely—you might say—newspapers will lose objectivity if their editorial boards defer to a few rich people?
Consider that during the age of American journalism’s biggest influence the opinions of a few imperial owners like William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce swayed what their editors deemed fit to print. Jeff Bezos’s influence as owner of The Washington Post is tame by comparison. And that of a major donor, not even an owner, would be even tamer.
But in the future our legacy news outlets may never need megadonors even if they need donations. The only news outlets already supported by philanthropy, public radio and TV, don’t depend on elite donors. What they get from foundations, rich individuals, and federal grants is less than what they get from small donations, as low as $10-$20, that come from millions of average Americans.
The 2024 election will likely stick in everybody’s memory as the final victory of new media over old. Kamala Harris not going on Joe Rogan may become a fable, like Nixon’s loss to John F. Kennedy in the first televised presidential debate. Realizing he had fumbled the new medium, Nixon is said to have grumbled: “If it’s not on TV, it doesn’t exist.”
But Nixon in his dejection overstated the case.
Our shared reality has always come from a mix of media, and once a medium (or any technology) has been instantiated, it never really goes away.
Anybody who wants an audience that matters in 2024 needs legacy media. Anybody who wants a mass audience has to find sway on social media. And anybody forming a point of view or disseminating one can’t afford to exclude any medium. As Marshall McLuhan said of the future of media, for better or for worse, “Here comes everybody.” That includes our great, legacy newsrooms as much as any upstart medium.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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