🔴 Objectivity is dead. What's next?

The creator economy is built on opinions. On unique points of view. There’s not much room for anything like objective truth. How are journalists adapting to this? What’s lost when a journalist goes solo and loses access to editors and fact checkers?

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

ElevenLabs is the all-in-one AI creative platform built to bring your content to life.
A single platform to generate, edit, and localize premium audio and video content in minutes, powering millions of creators, marketing teams, and media companies worldwide.

Companies like Disney, Meta, Duolingo and Mozart AI use ElevenLabs to power expressive audio dubbing, multilingual marketing content, character voices and song creation.

Get started for free with 10,000 monthly credits on the Free Plan.

This is an advertisement.

By Natalia Pérez-González

Objectivity is a process. It’s a discipline of filtration. Before digital media disrupted everything, those filters were sacred, stone-etched, institutional.

Any given week, Diti Kohli, a reporter on the Boston Globe's higher education beat, files at least one story to her editor, setting a chain in motion.

Before a single reader sees the story, her editor, a journalist around 20 years her senior, goes over every detail. He might restructure a few paragraphs, question her facts and framing. Eventually, he sends it to Diti for another pass. Then, a top-line editor reads it. If it's headed for the Sunday paper, a third. Then it goes to the copy team.

Three to four days later — by the time it hits the page — her work has passed through editors with a combined 60-plus years of experience in journalism.

A few miles away, Rahim Jessani, creator-journalist and founder of Bottom Up Media, edits a video on his phone. He's been at this craft for five years — reporting, producing, fact-checking, all of it — and works mostly alone.

Both of these outline a process, an adherence to a filtration system.

Every newsroom has filters. Every independent journalist has them, too, whether they've written them down or not. The difference is in who builds them, who enforces them, and whether the audience can see them.

Rahim's audience, largely 18 to 25 years old, constantly tells him they love his unbiased approach. He’s constantly correcting them: "There is no such thing," he says. "Nobody is [unbiased]. It's scientifically not possible."

What his audience responds to, he believes, is his transparency, a legible and visible process. They know how Rahim chooses his coverage, how his stories are produced, and where his editorial judgement centers — vital ingredients in a time where trust erosion in the media is at an all time low, with only 31% of adults expressing confidence in the media to report the news accurately.

The internet didn't invent partisan media, but it’s created the ideal conditions for it to thrive. Legibly partisan content incites provocation, provocation begets engagement, and engagement is the law of the algorithm.

A few weeks ago, we spoke to Tara Palmeri, who left a $260,000 salary at Puck last year to launch her own YouTube show and newsletter. A political journalist with almost 20 years of experience, including at Politico and ABC, she describes her work as not taking sides; as non-partisan.

“It's harder to have fans," she told us, describing partisan creators as “building a fan-based community based on their shared beliefs. And I'm not doing that in the same way." Fans — not readers, not subscribers. Her word choice here stood out to me because it reveals something crucial about the competitive landscape she's navigating.

She's making journalism, but the creators outpacing her on the algorithm are building, from her perspective, something closer to fandom — partisan communities organized around shared belief, where the content is less about what happened today than about how we feel about what happened today.

Though Tara shared that she was profitable in her first year — subscriptions, YouTube AdSense, brand partnerships, podcast ads, speaking gigs — she'll tell you plainly that the partisan playbook grows an audience faster. People want their worldviews affirmed, and that's what drives ad dollars. The incentive structure of the internet bends toward confirmation.

"Liquid content," a term gaining traction in newsroom strategy circles, describes a world where content is no longer presented as a complete package — like an article with a byline, accompanying photos and video, and an institutional stamp.

Instead, based on a reader's context, preferences, and behavior, information becomes modular and the consumer reshapes it into:

The consumer, in this world, is entirely in the driver's seat; they won’t steer towards friction voluntarily.

"Publishers will go from sellers of documents to sellers of information," David Caswell, founder of the news production consultancy StoryFlow, recently told DigiDay. As that happens, the relevance of a fully reported package dissolves, and with it the built-in context of who produced the information, how it was filtered, and why.

Today’s audience has a proliferation of information vendors to choose from, and the ability to curate a media diet that confirms what they already believe, served in the exact format they prefer, at the exact moment they want it.

This form of alignment is addictive — a self-constructed echo chamber can make anyone feel well-informed when they’re really just being affirmed.

Transparency and visibility are an ethical upgrade over the old model of objectivity, but in today’s attention economy, they're also a vital survival strategy. And the journalists who genuinely wish to present balanced, well-filtered reporting have had to learn, sometimes painfully, that how you present matters as much as what you present.

If opinion — personal spin — is necessary to effectively distribute information online, what are journalists and others who prize objectivity to do?

Isaac Saul’s Tangle is a prime example of this visible editorial scaffolding in practice. As a political reporter for over a decade, he’s honed the tools, sources, and experience to analyze our political landscape with nuance.

Tangle is a daily political newsletter. Each day, they pick one topic and summarize perspectives from the left and right, followed by a section called “My Take” where someone from their staff — typically Isaac, sometimes another staff writer — writes their own analysis.

When Isaac first designed the newsletter, it didn’t have "My Take.” Each issue ended right after the political summaries. But early readers felt something was missing, and told him as much. They were curious about what he thought. Now, according to their reader surveys, “My Take” is the most popular section of the newsletter.

Isaac describes the section as an act of transparency. "It's me sharing exactly what I'm thinking, trying to call some balls and strikes, and hoping it helps you make better sense of things," he wrote in a recent mission statement. "You can take it or leave it, but I don't want you to ever feel that I'm dishonest about what I think."

For every issue, there’s a clear distinction between where the reporting ends and where the interpretation begins, and you're invited to disagree with both.

Today’s audiences are skeptical of anyone claiming objectivity. They know you're biased, and they just ask that you explain how.

Do you want to advertise an open role in Creator Spotlight? Reply to this email.