Episode Details

For decades, a handful of legacy media outlets decided what counted as news, how to frame it, and who got to report it. Now trust has collapsed, The New York Times is selling cooking apps to stay alive, and there is no consensus regarding what's real or what the truth is anymore. 

So what comes next?

Adam Penenberg has spent his career inside the journalism industry and inside the classroom training the young journalists who'll inherit it. He's a professor at New York University’s journalism school, the author of Blood Highways (2003) and Viral Loop (2009), among other books. Adam has also been a contributor to Fast Company, Forbes, Wired, The Economist, and more. In the late '90s, Adam famously broke the Stephen Glass scandal, the journalistic fabrication story later made into the film Shattered Glass.

In this latest BCB epsiode, Adam joins us to talk about what he's seeing: the new generation of aspiring journalists navigating a world of news influencers, fractured media ecosystems, and the death of "objectivity.” We discuss how media consumption has shifted dramatically from traditional outlets to digital platforms, fragmenting audiences and feeding a sharp decline in public trust of the media. Journalism education, he says, is adapting to the new world order: students are entering journalism school from non-traditional backgrounds – some are already social media influencers while others aspire to be – and are seeking skills to succeed on diverse platforms, not just what it takes to break into and rise within traditional media outlets. 

Our conversation dives into the hard structural trade-offs facing anyone still trying to report honestly and fairly in 2026, and what ethical, fact-based journalism looks like now. The future of media is uncertain, Adam says, but adaptability, ethical journalism and critical thinking remain essential. 

And that is in increasingly short supply. There has been a breakdown in our educational systems more fundamentally, Penenberg argues, one that is spilling over to impact the aspiring new entrants into the profession. “We’ve been getting to the point where most of the people coming out of major schools… can’t write an essay. They can’t write an essay that is structured like an essay, where you have a thesis statement and then you back it up with facts," Penenberg tells us. "If you’re talking about a crisis in journalism it’s a crisis in the public as well as it is journalism, the business."

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

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