We need to redesign the news to provide more signal — and less ‘noise’ — in turbulent times

It’s a strange time for me to find myself outside a newsroom. Within days of landing in the Bay Area to begin my John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, I began seeing reports that the Trump administration was planning to send military troops to my hometown of Chicago as part of an immigration crackdown.

Eight years ago, I was a local journalist covering Chicago during Donald Trump’s first term as president. Back then, I had a front row seat to massive protests that enveloped parts of our city in the early days of the administration — as well as Trump’s protracted legal battles and war of words with local officials.

This year, I’ve been watching from afar as viral eyewitness videos circulate of masked officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol, patrolling Chicago armed in combat gear and grabbing people off the street — at times detaining children and entire families. “I love the smell of deportations in the morning…” Trump posted on Truth Social ahead of the deployment, officially rebranding the Department of Defense as “the Department of WAR.”

In national news however, the unprecedented operations quickly gave way to new dramatic headlines about other moves by the Trump administration to slash healthcare and food benefits, an ensuing government shutdown, plans to send federal troops to more cities, rolling back vaccine guidance, and deadly missile attacks on purportedly drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean — just to name a few.

I can’t help but wonder what the journalism industry might have learned from years of covering a government that has long had an open strategy to “flood the zone” with shocking measures and statements at breakneck speed to intentionally overwhelm and disorient media scrutiny and opposition. It’s become a common tactic of authoritarian populists around the world — a cacophony of “noise” that 2024 JSK Fellow Natalia Antelava described as “the new censorship.”

And more importantly, I worry: What does this trend mean for news consumers and communities directly affected by this information overload?

Rather than augmenting the “noise” of this political environment and feeding the frenzy, I believe that journalists can provide a signal that feeds civic engagement. In my year as a 2026 JSK Fellow, I’m exploring all that it’ll take to get there.

Pivoting to oblivion

For most, modern-day news consumption is largely shaped by tech giants. Smartphones have become the leading device for accessing news in the U.S. over the last decade, and the use of mobile news alerts has multiplied significantly, reflecting a global shift. As the Internet fractured the news industry’s prevailing business models, media outlets have spent the last three decades reshaping our distribution systems and tailoring our content to keep up with rapidly evolving digital publishing trends.

I was one of legions of social media editors, among a number of new newsroom roles, enlisted to earnestly execute a strategy to ‘meet audiences where they are’ — sometimes to great success. But we were trapped in a constant guessing game with opaque algorithms, trying to stay on top of fickle new features, and even fake metrics, to chase eyeballs, speed and virality in an ever-changing digital information landscape.

By embracing platforms controlled by tech giants, we were inadvertently embracing a business logic that prizes constant consumption — and a user experience that incentivizes polarization, engenders context collapse, and increases anxiety and isolation. Since news outlets got hooked on Big Tech’s distribution, much of the work journalists produce now meets our audiences in the form of isolated and incremental information blips on their phones and feeds, fragmented across apps among myriad other alerts and notifications.

We bought into a dissemination system that’s been all too easy for the likes of Trump, and other media manipulators, to exploit. In taking the bait to continually flood audiences with individual bits of news in real time, journalists have become unwitting accomplices to the “flood the zone” strategy.

Undeterred audiences turn to creator economy — under same control

But for all the headlines, sound bites, viral videos, horror stories and more bombarding audiences, the onslaught of news from the Trump administration has not necessarily deterred local civic action. Rapid response networks and whistlemania events have proliferated across neighborhoods in Chicago and Los Angeles, New York City’s mayoral election saw its highest voter turnout in half a century, and nationwide “No Kings” demonstrations reportedly became one of the largest single-day protests in U.S. history.

So in this turbulent environment, where are people finding information that’s useful, engaging, clarifying and actionable — not overwhelming, confusing and paralyzing?

Increasingly, chances are that it’s not mainly from traditional news sources. This year, the proportion of people in the U.S. accessing news via social media and video networks overtook that of both TV news and news websites and apps for the first time, according to the latest Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute, a trend that played out across age groups. And version 2.0 of the so-called Trump bump mainly benefited social and video networks, not traditional news sources. This is all further evidence that mainstream journalism outlets are losing ground — in terms of reach, influence and credibility — to the creator economy of online personalities, commentators and content makers as sources of news and in shaping public discourse. AI chatbots and interfaces are also rising as news sources, further complicating the landscape.

People may not be avoiding news per se, but are increasingly getting their information wants and needs on current events met elsewhere.

But this alternative news information sector is also largely controlled by tech giants, whose platforms, policies, and algorithms can evidently be wielded to serve or censor political interests, voices or activism.

For example, a couple weeks ago, Meta fulfilled the U.S. Department of Justice’s request to remove ICE Sighting-Chicagoland, a Facebook group of 80,000 members used to track the presence of immigration enforcement agents in Chicago, which authorities alleged was being used to “dox and target” the officers. The week prior, Apple and Google removed apps that did the same, including ICEBlock, a free app that enabled its hundreds of thousands of users to anonymously share the location of nearby ICE agents, following legal threats by Trump administration officials.

Meta has also been found to censor pro-Palestine content on Facebook and Instagram in analyses by Human Rights Watch and the BBC, while thousands of users of Bluesky, a social media platform touted for its decentralized setup, have signed open letters urging the site to stop suspending the accounts of Palestinians in Gaza. In the U.S., lawmakers vocally supported the ban on TikTok by citing “anti-Israel” content on the fast-growing platform — now in the midst of a Trump-brokered deal to be taken over by American investors that reportedly include conservative media giants. (Both the BBC and TikTok have themselves been publicly accused of bias and censorship in their treatment of content about Israel’s war on Gaza.) In Russia, instead of outright banning YouTube, a major venue of dissident voices in the country, the Kremlin throttled the speed of the platform, rendering it practically unusable without a VPN.

So whether the “news” is being produced by traditional journalists or online personalities and conveners, we’ve all learned the hard way that the distribution of our content can quickly be upended by the whims and prerogatives of those who control the platforms and algorithms powering our information streams. It all begs the question: How independent can media be when it’s dependent on Big Tech to reach audiences?

Reclaiming the keys to redesign the news

The good news is that we don’t each have to figure this all out on our own, and there’s already plenty to learn from one another. For example, in Chicago, France and Canada (where Meta infamously blocked news from its platforms after being ordered to pay media outlets for their content), some news organizations have been joining forces to build shared infrastructure, independent from big tech platforms.

The media crackdown and consolidation currently playing out in the U.S. echoes an anti-press playbook that journalists around the world have been contending with for years. And many journalism innovators in my own JSK cohort are grappling with inquiries related to the ones I’m exploring in my fellowship.

I want to know: What can we do to encourage people to tune into trustworthy sources and responsible reporting, instead of opting out? How do we design news formats and user experiences with more empathy for our followers? What kinds of interventions would enable us to produce coverage that is vetted, thorough and timely — but also more synthesized, clarifying, and contextual? How can we make social media less anti-social?

And whatever type of news content you might produce or follow, how do we satisfy the imperative to ‘meet audiences where they are’ without giving away the keys for our virtual communities and distribution tools to the tech sector?

These are the questions I’m tackling with the same urgency required to cover the rapid and relentless political machinations of our times. For me, the stakes have never been more clear.