Things I Wish Everyone Understood About Journalism
Because your worldview is only as good as your information diet.
Most people consume news the way they consume calories at a buffet: not consciously, not selectively, and definitely not responsibly. We would never eat fries from a stranger’s tray, but we’ll repost and forward unverified “news” without blinking. Our bodies demand balanced nutrition; our brains, somehow, are expected to thrive on intellectual junk food.
Take this from someone who has been a former journalist: We have created an information economy where everyone has access to news, but almost nobody knows how news works.
We don’t know who funds it, what incentives drive it, who writes it, who edits it, what gets killed before it’s printed, how headlines are engineered to manipulate emotion, how visuals are used to activate outrage, or how “public opinion” is manufactured.
And the irony?
We blame journalism for everything except the one thing that actually broke it — us.
If you don’t understand how journalism works, you don’t understand the world.
You understand someone’s version of it.
Journalism Is Not “Content”
Somewhere around 2014, when every brand, influencer, politician, activist, meme page, and newsletter discovered the dopamine economics of attention — the internet decided that everything is content. And journalism, unfortunately, got dragged into that blender.
But journalism is not content.
It is not “my take on today’s headlines”.
And definitely not “a 90-second summary of the Israel–Palestine conflict designed to match my aesthetic feed.”
Journalism is an expensive, rigorous, painfully slow method of arriving at the truth — by verifying facts others would rather hide.
Here’s what journalism looks like stripped off its glamour:
Reporting: What happened?
Analysis: Why did it happen?
Opinion: How do I feel about what happened? (Often by subject matter experts)
The flattening of reporting into “content” is not accidental, it’s just been convenient. Journalism tries to tell you what actually happened, even if you don’t like the answer. Content tries to tell you what will keep you watching, especially if you already like the answer. And yet because both travel through the same glowing rectangles on our phones, we’ve collapsed them into a single word: “media.”
Everyone loves saying “the media is biased” like there’s some underground meeting where journalists decide the week’s propaganda theme. In reality, it’s way less House of Cards and way more Spotify Wrapped. Your feed is just serving you the songs you’ve been secretly vibing to. Hover five extra seconds on a left-wing infographic? Congrats, your algorithm now thinks you’re a fan and builds you a whole playlist called “Songs to Feel Morally Superior To.” Pause mid-scroll on a right-wing rant? — “Hits for People Who Think Everyone Else Is Wrong.” It’s not brainwashing; it’s customer retention. The algorithm doesn’t care about politics, it cares about watch time. If you’re living in a bubble, it’s not because someone built one around you. It’s because the system noticed which corner of the internet you chose to sit in and handed you a pillow so that you’re more comfortable as you lean into it.
Here’s What Journalism Really Is
If you imagine a newsroom as a bunch of people sipping coffee that’s gone cold, smoking while waiting on the line to get a comment from a personality, listening to jazz in the background while typing aggressively — sorry, but you’ve been watching too much TV. A newsroom is basically a hospital for public information — fast, chaotic, hierarchical, and full of people trying to keep the truth alive before rumours kill it.
Let’s break down the newsroom, minus the jargon:
Breaking News (The Ambulance)
Breaking news reporters are the paramedics — first on the scene, working with half-information, trying to stabilise the story before misinformation spirals. Their job isn’t to give the full picture, it’s just to keep the public breathing.
Reporters (The Surgeons)
Once the dust settles, reporters dig in like surgeons. Interviews, documents, cross-checks, late nights, endless calls. Their job isn’t to be fast, it’s to be right. One wrong fact can kill trust, and trust is the only currency they have.
Editors (The Senior Doctors)
Editors are the bouncers of reality deciding which facts get into the club and which get kicked to the curb. They choose:
which story is important enough to live
how loudly the public should hear it
whether naming someone is responsible journalism or a legal suicide mission
whether a headline should inform or strategically slap you awake
They’re the ones who decide what the whole country will argue about tomorrow and what will vanish into the pitch-meeting abyss.
Camera Crews (The Radiologists)
You wouldn’t trust a diagnosis without a scan. Same with news. Photographers, video journalists and camerapersons don’t just “take pictures,” they provide visual proof, sometimes at personal risk. Without them, news becomes hearsay.
Stringers (The Unsung Lifesavers)
Stringers are freelancers, usually local, who report from small towns and inaccessible regions. Think of them as general physicians who do house calls in dangerous neighbourhoods. Without them, national media would be shockingly blind.
The Newsroom (The Hospital)
Everything above only exists because a newsroom has:
a legal team checking what could trigger lawsuits
copy desk editors catching factual errors
desk heads prioritising stories
producers verifying visuals
audience teams pushing distribution
Journalism is not one heroic reporter shouting the truth into the void, it’s a life-support system trying to keep the public informed while time, money, and power try to pull the plug.
But Why You Should Care About The System?
Because when people say “the media is trash”, they’re usually talking about the circus on TV and not the newsroom keeping the country informed. Once you understand this machinery, you stop mistaking: performance for reporting, outrage for information and hot-takes for truth.
Let’s Talk Money (The Plot Twist)
Everyone wants good journalism until they see a paywall. People think that journalism is being destroyed by fake news. Cute theory but fake news is just the symptom. The disease is money and who is funding the organisations where you get your information from.
Journalism is ruinously expensive: months of reporting, travel to remote districts, document trails, RTIs, legal vetting, editors rewriting copy at 3 a.m., photographers dodging literal bullets, and reporters earning less than the interns at Big Tech. All of that cost has to be paid by someone and when readers refuse to pay for news because “it should be free,” someone else happily steps in.
Media ownership in India (and everywhere else) sits in the laps of billionaires, corporations, political allies, industrial lobbies, and power brokers who have an active interest in shaping public opinion. This ownership isn’t decorative like owning a sports team. It’s directional.
When a political party funds a network (this often doesn’t happen directly — for example: a billionaire who has the support of a political leader might have a majority stake in the network and would selectively run news about the political party to maintain good relations), a protest becomes either a “historic revolution” or a “national disgrace,” not because facts changed, but because the funding did. One newsroom will sound like the country is burning to ash; another will insist we’re on the brink of an economic golden age. Both believe they’re saving democracy. Neither is telling you everything.
And the cosmic joke?
People cling to whichever narrative flatters their worldview and call it “research.” They align with the propaganda that agrees with them and call it “thinking for themselves.”
If you want to understand journalism, don’t stare at the headlines.
Stare at the ownership.
The news you consume isn’t defined by what happened, it’s defined by who paid to tell the story. And as long as news stays “free,” you will never truly know whether you’re consuming information or influence.
Broadcast News: The Circus in a Suit
Remember when I mentioned the circus on TV? Here’s the part where it stops being a metaphor and becomes a diagnosis. Television doesn’t aim to inform you, it aims to ignite you.
Real news is supposed to be: What happened, why it matters, and what it means for your life. Broadcast media has rewritten that into: Who’s angry today, how loud can it get, and how long will you stay glued to your screen. And the weapon of choice is more often than not — the panel debate. Panel debates aren’t journalism; they’re content engineered for adrenaline. It includes a lineup of “experts” who spend 90% of their airtime trying to out-scream one another while the one actual domain expert sits silently, blinking into the camera, because they’re used to speaking in normal spaces where people listen, not in a sonic war zone where you need the vocal range of an air raid siren to finish a sentence.
TV news isn’t trying to tell you what’s happening in the world; it’s trying to make you feel like something is happening right now — a crisis, an attack, a scandal, a betrayal, anything urgent enough to keep you from switching the channel. If journalism is supposed to cool the temperature of public panic with verified information, TV news is turning the thermostat in the opposite direction and then selling ad slots between meltdowns. The louder the argument, the higher the TRP. The higher the TRP, the higher the revenue. The revenue validates the noise. And the noise becomes the business model.
And when a circus starts calling itself journalism, the danger isn’t that you’re entertained, it’s that you start mistaking adrenaline for information, outrage for insight, and volume for truth.
That’s when the tent stops being fun and starts becoming a trap.
Carousel Posts: Information In Pastel
And now that we’ve talked about newsrooms sounding like war zones, let’s talk about the opposite extreme: information in pastel. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t break news. It just slides in with soft fonts and a soothing colour palette, promising to explain wars spanning decades or economic crisis the same way one would explain “how to assemble a smoothie bowl.” It feels gentle, digestible, compassionate like learning without effort. Until you realise it’s not learning; it’s aesthetic osmosis.
The only real benefit of those carousels is when you’re sitting at a quiz and a question pops up and you think, “OMG I know this… it’s on the tip of my tongue… I saw it somewhere…” You didn’t see it. You saw a graphic that told you “five things to know about war” and your brain filed it away under a folder labelled I care about world issues, I swear. Be honest to yourself because you don’t actually know it, you just remember you once nearly knew it.
Pastel misinformation is dangerous because it’s confidently incomplete. It gives you just enough to feel informed, not enough to be informed. It’s the intellectual equivalent of heating up a ready to eat meal where the meal looks complete, but nothing really nourishes you.
And yet sometimes simplicity is the very thing that nudges curiosity. Sometimes someone posts a carousel and a reader actually goes, “Okay, this seems important. Where do I read more?” Sometimes those slides end with links, sources, books, explainers, and real journalists doing real reporting. Carousels sometimes become permission to enter complexity instead of avoiding it.
The problem isn’t simplicity. The problem is when people mistake simplification for completion and are convinced that a beautifully designed summary is all they need to know when it fact it almost always replaces an ugly but necessary context.
So Where Do You Get The Full Picture?
News is never neutral. Every headline, every verb, every choice of expert carries bias — because reporting is a chain of unavoidable decisions: what to include, what to leave out, what to amplify, what to trim. Bias isn’t the crime; pretending there isn’t any is. And if your news always agrees with you, it’s not journalism.
If there’s one takeaway from this essay, let it be this: it’s not the job of journalism to make you feel smart, its only job is to keep you informed enough to form your own opinions.
Honestly, no one has three free hours to compare sources when you’re already drowning in deadlines and life. But you do have curiosity in that tiny moment when you read something and your brain whispers, “Okay… but what about the other side?” You don’t even need to ask it aloud. Think it silently, and your phone will hear it. The algorithm will do what algorithms do — serve the opposing take, not because it cares about balance, but because it sniffs indecision and sees an opportunity to hook you longer.
But I’d be lying if I don’t admit that neutrality hides behind paywalls.
Because nuance costs money. Good journalism isn’t unreachable; it’s just inconvenient. It’s right there in long-form explainers, deeply reported stories, and sometimes even inside the anchors who scream on national TV. Off-screen, many of them are thoughtful, decent people. On-screen, they are performers selling a worldview because that’s what pays their rent. Some are unethical, yes — but most are just… employed.
And that’s the point: truth is not free of incentives, but journalism at its best is pro-fact. Not pro-government, not pro-opposition, not pro-sentiment — pro-fact. The truth does have sides, and pretending it doesn’t is how misinformation wins. Journalism isn’t about balancing both narratives on a see-saw, most of the times it’s about doing the work to figure out which one actually happened.
Why Does My Newspaper Have More Ads Than News?
People look at a newspaper today and say, “Wow, there are more ads than news.” But that’s like looking at a hospital and saying, “Why is there a billing desk next to the ICU?” Not because doctors love paperwork — because saving lives is expensive. Journalism is no different. Every ad you see on page three pays for a reporter in a district court, a photographer in a flood zone, a stringer sitting outside a police station at 1:00 a.m. waiting for an FIR copy. The ads grew not because news shrank, but because funding shrank. The space for ads expanded so the space for reporting could exist.
The irony? Print media is where you still get the boring, unfiltered, essential stuff — the 5 Ws and 1 H. Who did what, where, when, why, and how. No viral hooks. No dramatic music. Just facts. The kind of information that doesn’t trend on the internet but makes governments sweat.
And then there’s the perpetual complaint: “But the news is too depressing.” As if journalists sit around saying, “Hey, let’s ruin everyone’s morning today.” No reporter wakes up excited to write about the worst moments of people’s lives — they document them because someone has to. Reality doesn’t bend to audience mood boards. Crime doesn’t stop because you don’t want to read about it. Wars don’t pause because the reader wants something “uplifting” with their coffee.
What you read is already the toned-down version, scrubbed of the graphic details and trauma that reporters, editors, and photographers actually witness. The real story is often more brutal; the newspaper serves it in a way you can hold without crumbling. If print sometimes feels heavy, it’s because the world is heavy — and sugar-coating it doesn’t make it lighter, it only makes it invisible.
So yes, newspapers today have more ads. Not because they don’t have news, but because they don’t have the money to cover all the news they could. Ads aren’t the enemy, they’re a life support system.
Journalists Don’t Lose Ethics — The System Erodes Them
Every journalist joins the profession twice. The first joining is pure. It’s the one right after journalism school when you walk into a newsroom believing you’re about to change the world, expose injustice, give voice to the unheard, and write stories that matter. Every young journalist starts with that feverish idealism.
And then comes the second joining — the day you realise journalism is not just a calling, it’s an ecosystem. With hierarchies, pressures, bottom lines, advertisers, instructions, “editorial calls,” legal threats, and timelines that don’t care about mental health. You start seeing how ethics aren’t a straight line; they’re a tightrope. It’s the system that pushes, pulls, and corners.
The audience says, “The media has no boundaries, they don’t care about privacy.”
It’s the easiest accusation to throw, and honestly, it’s not entirely wrong. Journalists do cross lines. They shove mics into grieving faces, show up at funerals, zoom into tear-stained cheeks and call it coverage. But here’s the part we don’t like to admit: none of us care about privacy and we keep watching. Tragedy became primetime because pain gets ratings.
This is the ethical paradox of journalism: the profession is built on responsibility, the business model is built on attention, and the audience wants both morality and entertainment. A good story is often the one that makes us uncomfortable; an unethical story is often the one we don’t click away from.
The uncomfortable truth is that content asks, “Will this go viral?” but journalism asks, “Should this be public?” And the space between those two questions is where most good reporters spend their entire career — fighting, negotiating, and sometimes falling.
AI Will Replace Journalists (Think Again)
Off late I’ve heard people saying that automation will make journalism obsolete. But AI can only collect information; journalism has to interrogate it. An algorithm can summarise a document but it can’t sit through a 6-hour court hearing waiting for the one line that changes everything. It can scrape data but it can’t earn trust from a source who risks their career to tell the truth. Machines don’t do discomfort.
The problem isn’t lack of information. It’s too much of it. And in overflow, the job of a journalist becomes sharper: not to find “something,” but to decide what actually matters. And right here is where the new age of journalism complicates the story.
News isn’t coming only from newsrooms anymore — it’s coming from newsletters, podcasts, YouTube, Substack personalities, amateur investigators on Reddit, and creators who treat reporting like a passion project rather than a profession. Some of them are brilliant. Some of them are cults with microphones. Their strength? No corporate interference. Their weakness? No editorial guardrails. The industry is oscillating between credibility and charisma, expertise and accessibility.
So what does the future look like?
The next era of journalism will belong to whoever can do three things at once:
use AI for speed, keep humans for judgement, and keep audiences literate enough to know the difference.
Tools will scale journalism. But only journalists can save it.
Why Should You Care About Journalism?
If you’ve stuck around till this part, it means something in you cares about the news, even if you don’t call yourself “a news person.” You may not track the news every day. But the news tracks you in your bills, your hospitals, your elections, your water, your cities, your future.
People think news is niche, something “political people” obsess over. But it influences the price of vegetables, the safety of medicines, the air you breathe, the laws that govern your body, and the stock markets that decide your savings. Every protest and policy, every prejudice and freedom, every breakthrough and scandal — you experience them through journalism first. Whether you trust it or not, whether you consume it or not, it shapes the world you’re living in right now.
Your worldview is downstream from your information diet. This industry matters because without journalism, there’s silence. And silence is where the powerful win. You don’t need to become a news addict or turn into a political commentator. You just need to stay alert. Because the only thing more dangerous than bad journalism is a public that stops paying attention.
Build a Smarter Media Diet (If You Want a Smarter Brain)
We obsess over personalised Spotify playlists but treat our worldview like a random auto-queue. If a music algorithm feeds you only heartbreak songs for a week, you’d notice. But if your newsfeed feeds you only rage for a week? You call it “keeping up with current affairs.” A healthy media diet works exactly like food: variety builds muscle, repetition builds delusion.
A smarter media diet looks like reading the article, not the screenshot. Paying for one good newsroom the way you pay for a gym you don’t always enjoy but always benefit from. Following journalists, not just the shiny brand names that hide them. Avoidance is also a part of the diet and it looks like muting outrage disguised as “breaking news,” avoiding TV debates that turn national crises into verbal wrestling. And the next time something on the internet makes you furious in 30 seconds flat, don’t share it.
You wouldn’t trust a random stranger to manage your savings so why let algorithms, corporations, celebrities, influencers shape your idea of reality? I can’t make you read articles and threads or explain why it should matter to you. I can only tell you this: where you read from matters.
I care about the news because I’ve lived both sides of it — the idealistic student dreaming of breaking stories that matter, and the journalist realizing how much of the world never reaches the page. I’ve seen how events far away — a war, a policy, a market crash — touch every corner of our lives.
I wrote this because too few people actually understand what’s happening around them and it shows. We forward headlines on WhatsApp without reading them, quote threads we barely understand, and pretend we’re informed because it’s easier than doing the work. Stop treating news like taxes, it’s easier. You don’t have to pretend. Just read. Do the bare minimum most won’t, and suddenly you’re the smart one while everyone else is still pretending.
worth the wait - great read!
Incredible piece