Catch Up on the Journalism 2050 Podcast

A series that talks to the smartest people in media about the future.

Last month, Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin launched the Journalism 2050 podcast as part of a CJR special issue on the monumental shifts in journalism that have brought us to this very uncertain moment, and where we might all be headed in the next twenty-five years.

Bell is the founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and Chaplin is the director of Journalism + Design at the New School. Together, they talk with the smartest minds in media, including, in episode one, Douglas Rushkoff: an author, media critic, and futurist (though he prefers “presentist” these days) who has chronicled Silicon Valley’s effects on culture and communications since the nineties. Bell and Chaplin ask Rushkoff about what lessons we can draw from the anarchic free-spirited origins of Web publishing that can be applied to our present moment of techno-authoritarianism and Silicon Valley dominance. He foresees the emergence of a stratified media ecosystem, with a number of large global players and a vibrant network of smaller local and niche outlets. (If the media exists at all, that is.)

The Journalism 2050 podcast’s second episode was recorded before a live audience in the CJR office. In it, Bell and Chaplin are joined by Azmat Khan, the director of Columbia’s Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism, and Anya Schiffrin, a professor at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, to discuss the consequences of the war on Gaza for journalism. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, it took only ten weeks at the end of 2022 for Israel to kill more journalists in Gaza than had previously been killed in any one country over an entire year, and the attacks have not relented in the three years since. These attacks, and the limp response from the US and other powerful countries, set a dangerous precedent for the future. Khan and Schiffrin discuss how journalists and media organizations can take the defense of their principles and values into their own hands.