As is the case with, I imagine, most people reading these words, I’ve dedicated most of my career to the idea of “journalism.” I still identify as a “journalist,” even if the actual days I spent navigating sources are so far away, I’ve almost forgotten how damn difficult the work is.

I know plenty about the practice of journalism to conclude that it never belonged on a pedestal. Obviously, as in all fields, there are outliers in quality. There are visionaries amongst its practitioners. But as a whole, journalism is a messy set of ideals, practices, and processes that are difficult to pin down, let alone wall in, except by pointing to institutions of bygone eras with arbitrary definitions.

Let me point to a concept that will undoubtedly move closer to center stage in 2026: the newsfluencer. What is the difference between an online personality who unpacks current affairs using research-based methods on TikTok or YouTube and a journalist? Is it style? Is it where the content is published? Is it membership of the right union? Is it the intent or the method or the person or the quality of the result? I challenge all of us from the more traditional end of the industry to think deeply about the answer. It is a difficult one. One group exploring possible answers will most definitely grow in 2026: “journalist personalities” freeing themselves from the format constraints of old-school news without abandoning its mission.

I’m not advocating abolishing journalism as a concept. Getting journalism off its pedestal is a starting point for an honest exploration of journalism’s underlying value. Please, not for “society,” but for the living, breathing citizens that we hope to be relevant for. That we hope will rely on us in their attempt to understand their society and world.

Luckily, Julia Angwin from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard recently created a framework for those of us hoping to answer some of these difficult questions. It has received far too little attention. Borrowing from social science, she defined the building blocks of trust in journalists and other content creators as: integrity, competency, and benevolence. She also concluded that traditional formats of capital-J Journalism — the kind of news stories we put on a pedestal — rarely convey the three. Your neighborhood newsfluencer, on the other hand … let’s just say that we journalists should maybe approach their content with a little more humility.

Holding a politician to account in a combative, critical interview takes mastery, absolutely. But without articulated intentions, the result can still come off as rude to those unfamiliar with the cultural codes of the 20th century.

So. By the end of 2026, the most trusted “news brands” for under-35-year-olds will be individuals, not institutions. Their success will be traceable to how convincingly they embody integrity, competence, and benevolence.

Accepting that journalism is a messy practice, one that probably needs radical reinvention, is the main benefit of abolishing our defensive stand when discussing our field. But it is also the starting point of another difficult realization. Which has to do with the shadow that will loom larger than any other in 2026: the indistinguishability of human and machine-made content.

It is a fact that “slop” did not arrive with large language models and free AI image generators. We, in journalism, have produced endless amounts of slop since the internet opened up around us. Breaking-news-slop. Clickbait-slop. Repurposed-stories-from-other-media-so-hey-don’t-ask-for-factchecking-slop.

As an industry, we made ourselves disruptible by AI long before it arrived. Let’s look our mistakes and weaknesses straight in the eye and find out how to make ourselves indispensable. Because there are problems in the world that will only be solved with the tools of journalism — provided we have the courage to remake those tools.