The biggest problem with the press (and why the internet and technology is &#x27;eating&#x27; it) is that their business model is based in a world that doesn&#x27;t really exist any more.  The old school media offered a quick barrage of articles on a wide variety of topics. They didn&#x27;t cover any one particularly well (just look at a newspaper article about a topic you&#x27;re in a expert in if you want proof of that), but they did decently enough at informing people in an age where information was inconvenient or costly to otherwise get.<p>The internet changed that.  For any important news, you can find better sources on social media, since people at the scene will probably now be posting photos and opinions about the goings on as they&#x27;re happening, no reporter required. For timely news, social media and aggregator sites simply do better than journalists, since they don&#x27;t have to worry about editors or proofing and there&#x27;s a large crowd of people looking for stories at the same time (usually many times larger than the team in a professional newspaper).<p>And for more informative pieces, you can just go straight to the experts now.  Whereas before you&#x27;d have a journalist approach an expert on say, information security, you can now just find an expert&#x27;s blog or a relevant forum or subreddit instead.  Bonus points for their words likely not being censored or altered or anything else.<p>And the fourth estate thing? Well, for better or worse, now that seems to be the legions of bloggers and amateur journalists online instead.  The traditional media kind of gave up on that when most of the papers and news channels were bought by large companies.<p>You can try paywalls and subscriptions and patreon type systems all you like, I just suspect the old way of doing news simply cannot work in the internet era, and the traditional journalist is simply becoming obsolete.<p>For the article&#x27;s question about how the relationship is supposed to work and what media built on newer platforms will be like... it&#x27;ll be amateurs and companies reporting the news on their own.