Journalism 2050

It may be hard to believe now, but there was a time, in the early 2000s, when many felt that social media would revitalize the public sphere and herald a new age of democratic participation. Two decades later, each week seems to bring fresh evidence of how tech platforms enable, amplify, and even encourage racist and misogynistic abuse. The coordinated campaign against Jane Doe, the woman at the center of the Cornell Seven case, is only the latest example in the headlines.
Julie Posetti, an award-winning journalist and a leading researcher of online misogyny, has watched this worrying reality unfold in real time. Two decades ago, she was optimistic that social media would help women in public life. More recently, she has overseen two major studies for UN Women, in 2020 and 2025, that reveal, based on surveys with women human rights defenders, activists, and journalists, a shocking escalation in attacks against women in public life. “When we surveyed this group in 2020, one-fifth of them reported offline attacks, abuse, and harassment connected to the online violence they had experienced,” Posetti wrote, summarizing the report’s findings. “But when we repeated the survey five years later, that alarming statistic had more than doubled—to 42 percent.”
In this episode of Journalism 2050, recorded live at Zeg, a storytelling festival held this past June in Tbilisi, Posetti joins cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to discuss the stakes for women reporters on the internet and how we got here. “The licensing of networked misogyny is explicit,” Posetti says. “There’s a global rollback of women’s rights happening before our eyes.”

Credits:
Producer: Sarah Myles
Research: Samuel Earle
Production assistant: Hana Joy
Art: Katie Kosma
Music: Henry Crooks

When The Atlas, a digital newspaper, launched earlier this year, it billed itself as “the new samizdat.” The term recalls the dissident networks that distributed forbidden news and literature in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and ’60s, evading the censors. According to The Atlas, today’s samizdat—which roughly translates as “self-publishing”—must evade a different threat: big tech platforms, which wield their own form of imperious control over the flow of information. “For me, the parallel seemed very obvious,” Natalia Antelava, who was born in then-Soviet Georgia and cofounded The Atlas, says. 
The Atlas is published monthly via PDF—“the least sexy technological application imaginable,” as Simon Allison, fellow cofounder of The Atlas, admits—and distributed over Signal. “That lets us bypass digital censorship, of both the authoritarian and algorithmic varieties,” the paper explains in its latest edition. Aiming to provide a truly global perspective, the project grew out of a collaboration between Antelava’s Coda Story, a nonprofit news organization established in 2016, and Allison’s The Continent, an Africa-wide digital newspaper that publishes stories via PDF “for Africans and by Africans.”
In this episode of Journalism 2050, recorded live at Zeg, a storytelling festival held this past June in Tbilisi, Antelava and Allison discuss what inspired The Atlas with cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin. “Right now, we’re all making bets on the future of journalism. No one knows exactly where we’re going,” Allison says. “But any bet that is predicated on a big tech company’s platform is going to fail.”

Credits: 
Producer: Sarah Myles
Research: Samuel Earle
Production assistant: Hana Joy
Art: Katie Kosma
Music: Henry Crooks

In 1990, a chance encounter in the office elevator changed the trajectory of Razia Iqbal’s career. She was then a subeditor at the BBC on a six-month contract. Days later, she was on a flight to Pakistan as the BBC’s foreign correspondent, after the position had been vacated at short notice. It was supposed to be a quiet stint. But shortly after she arrived, Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s prime minister, was dismissed from office, prompting a political crisis, and Iqbal, who had no experience as a broadcaster, found herself providing rolling coverage on television and radio for the BBC World Service’s global audience.
Iqbal never looked back. Across the next thirty years, she became one of the BBC’s most ubiquitous and successful journalists. She worked as a foreign correspondent in Sri Lanka during the civil war in the 1990s; as the anchor for BBC Newshour, the channel’s flagship radio show on current affairs; and as an arts journalist. She left the BBC in 2023 and is now a visiting professor at Princeton University; she also serves on the editorial board of The Nation. 
In this episode of Journalism 2050, recorded live at Zeg, a storytelling festival held this past June in Tbilisi, Iqbal reflects on her career and the state of journalism in conversation with cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin. Since the 1990s, Iqbal has had a front-row seat not just to world events but also to the transformation of the journalism industry. “I feel like we are in a clarifying moment where you need to take a stand, if you believe in journalism,” she says. “I still only just believe in journalism.”
Credits: 
Producer: Sarah Myles
Research: Samuel Earle
Production assistant: Hana Joy
Art: Katie Kosma
Music: Henry Crooks

In Georgia, since a new party took power in 2024, founded by a billionaire oligarch with links to Russia, journalists are facing unprecedented attacks. All sorts of repression have become more common: physical assaults, arrests, arbitrary fines, suspensions of accreditation, and more. But perhaps the most devastating blow was less direct. After the government clamped down on all foreign funding and grants to Georgian organizations, citing them as examples of malign foreign interference, many independent media outlets lost as much as 90 percent of their budgets.
Now journalists in Georgia are fighting back. In August of 2025, more than twenty online media outlets launched The Lights Must Stay On, a campaign to raise awareness of their collective struggle against authoritarianism. The effort gave rise to a new network, Sinatle Media, with a simple objective: to keep independent media in Georgia alive. It is based on the recognition that this can only happen when journalists work together. 
In this episode of Journalism 2050, recorded live at Zeg, a storytelling festival in Tbilisi, cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin speak with two members of Sinatle Media: Lika Antadze, an executive director of Chai Khana, which gives a voice to underrepresented groups in the region; and Nino Bakradze, the editor and cofounder of iFact, an investigative media collective. What have they learned from their shared fight against a despotic regime? How do the precarious economics of journalism today make it more vulnerable to political attacks? And why did a flea market, of all things, fill them with hope? 

Producer: Sarah Myles
Research: Samuel Earle
Production Assistant: Hana Joy 
Art: Katie Kosma
Music: Henry Crooks

When Ronald Reagan won the presidency, in 1980, it was a victory long in the making. For almost half a century, conservatives had plotted ways to cut taxes and undo workers’ rights. Their playbook for political influence went something like this: create a think tank, publish reputable reports, build relationships with journalists and politicians, and disseminate free-market ideas to the public, creating a new common sense. 
Today, the art of political influence is rather different. Think tanks no longer claim the power they once did and, since the rise of social media, newspapers and traditional journalists have lost their grip on public opinion. Perhaps this new state of affairs was best captured by Elon Musk when, shortly after taking over Twitter, in 2023, he declared that all press inquiries would receive an automated reply with the poop emoji. That is not the move of someone who believes the press is an essential tool in influencing public opinion.
In this episode of the Journalism 2050 podcast, cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin are joined by two guests: Kim Phillips Fein is a renowned historian of American conservatism and capitalism and the author of Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan, among other books. Samuel Earle is the author of Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party and a PhD candidate at Columbia Journalism School. Together, they ask: How has the nature of political influence changed? What are the implications for journalism? And what, if anything, can the left learn from the right’s success?

Producer: Amanda Darrach
Research: Samuel Earle
Production Assistant: Riddhi Setty
Art Director: Katie Kosma
Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez
Music: Henry Crooks