jason Lee Guthrie

Associate Professor, Clayton State University

Since the invention of the printing press, the advent of each successive news medium from print to broadcast to digital has been touted with optimism about its potential to democratize knowledge.[1] Yet today, democratic life is under siege around the world, and news media’s ability to adequately inform the public has been severely undermined. Whether from erosions to traditional business models, overt disinformation from authoritarian regimes, or collective malaise, in a historical moment when it is desperately needed, the news is struggling to perform its most basic civic functions.

Among the many contributing factors to our current predicament is the inherent ephemerality of mass news media. As access to the means of news production and barriers to entry have been lowered by advances in technology, there is a democratizing effect that is rightly lauded. We can easily access media expressing a far wider diversity of views than ever before.[2] But the sheer volume of media, and the corresponding hypercompetition for audiences, has severely deteriorated public perception of the value of news.[3] Considering how audiences experience the news as an ephemeral phenomenon may help to illuminate ways to repair some of the damage.

Ephemeral comes from the Greek “ephemeros,” meaning to last for only a day. Its original usage was as medical term to describe short fevers. Later in Latin the meaning of “ephemeris” was expanded to refer to insect, plant, and other biologic life that was short-lived.[4] Historians know that “ephemera” refers to documents and archival artifacts that were not necessarily intended for preservation but nonetheless illuminate the daily life of their milieu.

The ephemerality of journalism is inherent in the very idea of daily news. Journalism historians have meticulously preserved a profound amount of printed newspaper records.[5] But the vast majority of news audiences experience journalism as a “here today, gone tomorrow” phenomenon. Broadcast news inspires much nostalgia about the “golden age of journalism,” but is in fact even more ephemeral, with the precious few remaining primary sources disappearing rapidly.[6] Much that gets published to the internet will remain in perpetuity as long as our tech infrastructure can sustain it. But the sheer amount of information is so vast that any single item feels ephemeral and scarcely makes a dent on our collective psyche.

The ephemerality effect touches all media industries in the information age. The music industry was among the first to succumb in the wake of the digital download. What was once a thriving industry built on high margin sales of physical media has been reduced to mere bundled content.[7] Music audiences have come to expect instant access to millions of songs for a few dollars a month or even included with their cell phone plans. The file size of television and film delayed their absorption into the digitized ephemerality flow, but audiences now expect access to all entertainment at the push of a button – and they want it cheap.

Social media is arguably the most ephemeral of the creative industries. Social media’s relationship with news is fraught, complex, and rightly the study of much academic discourse.[8] Though many of social media’s effects upon news content and the perception of news value are objectively negative, there has also been an undeniable crosspollination between the two since the turn of the millennium.[9] Social media’s evolution from a community-driven to an advertising-driven medium mirrors the ad-funded model of American journalism.[10] Many of the strategies that social media has developed to deal with its inherent ephemerality have been adapted by news outlets. Navigating the value paradox of impermanence by leveraging scarcity economics, using content repurposing strategies, paywalled platforms, brand partnerships and product placement—all of these can arguably find pre-digital precedent in news business models and modern-day examples in which digital journalists attempt to mimic successful social media tactics.

Of course, the stakes are far higher with news than with entertainment media. Platforms like Patreon, Kickstarter, and Cameo enable alternative, independent income streams for musicians, photographers, and actors that can keep them afloat. Many journalists have followed suit, building community through email newsletters and social media followings. But if we look at the big picture, these strategies do not appear sufficient to produce the news democracies need to survive. Attempts to champion public media in the United States, though vigorous and impassioned, are drowned in a sea of advertising dollars flowing to privately held media conglomerates.[11] Without systemic change at the policy level that recognizes independent journalism as a public good, and redirects resources accordingly, it is quite likely that our democratic way of life is unsustainable.[12]

Incorporating ephemerality as a variable in the “fixing the news” equation is not suggested here as a magical missing link, but merely another facet to a complex issue. How do we get people to care about the news? How do we make connections that audiences inherently value and are willing to fund? At the national level, outfits like ProPublica that find ways to fund excellent investigative journalism provide some inspiration, particularly in their ethos of partnering with local outlets.[13] But it is at the local level that we really see a true vulnerability to the effects of ephemerality. One of the more innovative examples can be found in university journalism programs taking over struggling local newspapers. Across the U.S., these attempts are providing valuable coverage in what would otherwise be news deserts, and they are having real impact in communities that would otherwise be forgotten.[14]

It is a sad fact that one of the primary ways news transcends ephemerality is in the wake of large-scale tragedies. With the attacks by current authoritarian regimes on our critical infrastructures, coupled with the effects of a changing climate and the instability caused by withdrawing humanitarian aid to poorer nations, we can unfortunately expect such events in the days ahead. If it is true, as David Paul Nord suggested in the Introduction to his seminal Communities of Journalism, that “America began in the quest for community,” then perhaps it will take a large-scale upheaval of our increasingly individualized lives to return us to that community ethos.[15]

Democracy itself is, from a historical perspective, ephemeral. To protect our democratic system, we will have to find the will to value it before it disappears. Of all the media strategies to resist the effects of ephemerality, perhaps the most successful is creating an authentic connection with your audience. Future historical work might consider how journalists have created such connections and how journalism’s inherent ephemerality can be mitigated by building local communities of support.

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[1] See Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 198-214; Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2^nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 313-358.

[2] Edda Humprecht and Frank Esser, “Diversity in Online News: On the Importance of Ownership Types and Media System Types.” Journalism Studies 19, no 12 (2018): 1825-1847, https://doi:10.1080/1461670X.2017.1308229.

[3] C. Ann Hollifield, “News Media Performance in Hyper-Competitive Markets: An Extended Model of Effects,” International Journal on Media Management, 8, no. 2 (2006): 60-69, https://doi.org/10.1207/s14241250ijmm0802_2.

[4] “Etymology of ‘Ephemera,’” Etymonline, https://www.etymonline.com/word/ephemera.

[5] See, for example, “U.S. Newspaper Program,” National Endowment for the Humanities, https://www.neh.gov/us-newspaper-program.

[6] “Preservation Division,” Radio Preservation Task Force, https://radiopreservation.org/preservation/.

[7] Brian J. Hracs and Jack Webster, “From Selling Songs to Engineering Experiences: Exploring the Competitive Strategies of Music Streaming Platforms,” Journal of Cultural Economy 14, no. 2 (2020): 240–257, https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2020.1819374.

[8] Ford Risley and Ashley Walter, How America Gets the News: A History of U.S. Journalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), 169-198.

[9] Jesica Maddox, “Journalists Keep Getting Manipulated by Internet Culture,” Neiman Journalism Lab, December 9, 2022, https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/12/journalists-keep-getting-manipulated-by-internet-culture/.

[10] Christopher Daly, Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 53-75.

[11] Josh Shepperd, Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting (University of Illinois Press, 2023), 4-12.

[12] Victor Pickard, Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society (Oxford University Press, 2020), 136-176.

[13] “ProPublica’s Local Initiatives,” ProPublica, https://www.propublica.org/local-initiatives/.

[14] Mark Caro, “Student Journalists Are Doing the Work Many Newsrooms Can’t afford,” Poynter, April 10, 2025, https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025/student-journalists-local-news-gap/.

[15] David Paul Nord, Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (University of Illinois Press, 2001), 1.