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The Press Isn't Free. It's Owned.

An open letter to the journalists still fighting

An open letter to the journalists still fighting, the billionaires who broke it, and the communities who never got it in the first place.

I live in Canada.

As of this writing — nearly three years after it happened, with no end in sight — I cannot see Canadian news in my Facebook feed. Or my Instagram feed. Both of them. Gone. Not because I chose that. Not because Canadian journalism stopped existing. Because Mark Zuckerberg decided, when the Canadian government passed the Online News Act in June 2023 and asked him to pay a fraction of a fraction of his revenue to the news organizations whose content built his engagement, that it was cheaper to simply disappear Canadian journalism from Canadian feeds entirely.

He was right. It was cheaper. He did it. Nobody stopped him.

The feeds didn't go quiet. They got louder — with CNN, Fox, NBC, the New York Times. American news rushed in to fill the void. Canadian audiences, on platforms owned by an American billionaire, now consume an almost entirely American information diet. Canadian municipal politics, Canadian accountability reporting, Canadian community stories — gone. American culture war content, American political framing, American advertiser interests — everywhere.

A foreign billionaire unilaterally restructured the information diet of an entire country. He replaced Canadian journalism with American media at scale. The Canadian government — the one that passed the legislation that was supposed to protect Canadian information sovereignty — watched it happen and has done essentially nothing.

That's where we are. Nearly three years later. Still.

If you want to understand what has happened to journalism everywhere, start in Canada. Not as an edge case. As the clearest possible demonstration of who owns the press, what they're willing to do with that ownership, and exactly how little governments are prepared to do about it.

What Journalism Was Built To Do

Before we talk about what broke, we have to be honest about what worked. Because it wasn't perfect. It was never perfect. But it had a function, and the function mattered, and we are living in the wreckage of its absence.

The town crier stood in the square. Literally — a human body, in a public place, accountable to the community watching them. When they got it wrong, people knew where they lived. The accountability was direct and immediate. Information flowed from the crier to the community and back — complaints, corrections, the social pressure of people who had faces and addresses and reputations. The system was primitive and it worked because trust was physical.

Then the pamphlet. Thomas Paine writing Common Sense in 1776 and changing the political reality of a continent. The printing press as the first infrastructure for mass information distribution — and the radical idea that one person with access to it could reshape what millions believed about power and their relationship to it. The pamphleteer was dangerous because they were legible. You knew who they were. You knew what they stood for. You knew the argument you were getting into when you picked it up.

The penny press in the 1830s — newspapers cheap enough that working people could buy them. Benjamin Day's New York Sun targeting the laboring class, reporting on crime and courts and city life in language that wasn't written for university graduates. For the first time, journalism was trying to reach people who had previously been invisible to it. Imperfectly. With its own class biases intact. But trying.

Then the golden age of local news. The beat reporter who covered the same city hall for thirty years. The editor who knew every family in the county. The reporter who'd been to the funerals, who knew which alderman drank, who understood that the zoning variance that just passed wasn't an accident. That person wasn't producing content. They were accumulating a relationship with a place — its geography, its power structures, its buried history, the patterns that only become visible if you're watching the same institution across decades.

That relationship was the product. The article was how it got delivered.

The local paper wasn't perfect democracy. It had its own owners, its own biases, its own blind spots about whose community counted as community. But it had skin in the game. The owner lived there. The advertisers lived there. The reporters lived there. When they got it badly wrong, they had to face the consequences in a place they couldn't leave.

That accountability — imperfect, partial, but real — is what we lost. Not the technology. Not the format. The skin in the game.

The Magazine Moment

The magazine era solved something newspapers hadn't: it found a way to fund long-form accountability journalism through a combination of subscriber trust and advertising against credibility.

The New Yorker model — slow, deeply reported, indifferent to the news cycle, building arguments across ten thousand words — worked because readers understood they were paying for a specific relationship with a specific editorial sensibility. The magazine wasn't pretending to be neutral. It had a perspective and readers chose it. The advertiser paid to be adjacent to readers who trusted the publication enough to read slowly and completely.

Rolling Stone in the 1970s — Hunter Thompson, Joe Klein, the new journalism — brought a generation of readers into political and cultural coverage who had been told by existing institutions that journalism wasn't for them. It had a voice. It had a position. It took sides. And it was more trusted, by its readers, than the publications pretending neutrality while operating inside the same ownership interests they were supposedly covering.

I.F. Stone's Weekly — one person, no staff, reading the public record everyone had access to, finding what everyone else missed, building a subscriber base of 70,000 people who paid specifically for his judgment. Before the internet. Before platforms. Before any of the infrastructure we now consider necessary. Just: a human with a relationship to truth and a community that valued it.

These models worked not despite their point of view but because of it. Readers knew what they were getting. The trust was specific. You didn't subscribe to I.F. Stone's Weekly because you wanted neutral. You subscribed because you trusted Stone's eye.

That's the model the platforms destroyed. Not by being too democratic. By being too extractive.

The Internet Paradox

Here's the thing nobody wants to say clearly: the internet solved the voice problem and destroyed the information ecosystem simultaneously.

For the first time in history, anyone could publish. The gatekeepers fell. A reporter in a small town in Saskatchewan could break a story that reached millions. A journalist whose community had never been represented in legacy media could build an audience without going through the institutions that had excluded them. The pamphleteer tradition — dangerous ideas from legible humans with addresses — scaled to the entire population.

That part is real. That part matters. We should not pretend the old gatekeeping system was good because what replaced it is bad.

But.

A million writers publishing to a void isn't democracy. It's noise. And noise benefits exactly one actor — the platform that aggregates the noise, learns from the patterns, and sells attention against the aggregate. The writers generate the signal. The platform extracts the value. The writers get reach they can't monetize and the platform gets revenue they didn't earn.

Discovery is still in the toilet. And the toilet is owned.

This is the same extraction model as music. The same as advertising. The rails get monetized. The people on the rails get nothing.

And unlike music, where the cost is that artists don't get paid, the cost here is that the accountability infrastructure of democracy goes dark.

The Mesh That Never Got Built

Here's the specific thing that was destroyed, and that matters most, and that nobody talks about in the right terms.

A functioning journalism ecosystem is a mesh. Not a hierarchy. Not a few big institutions filtering down to passive consumers. A network of reporters with local knowledge and trusted relationships whose work connects to adjacent work — the pattern in one city becomes visible when it's placed next to the pattern in another city, and the connection is made by a journalist in a third city who recognizes the shape.

This is how accountability journalism actually works at its best. A city hall reporter in Hamilton notices a contract award that looks slightly wrong. A reporter in Mississauga who covered the same contractor three years ago sees the story and recognizes a name. A reporter in Windsor knows the lawyer. Three local stories, none sufficient on their own, combine into a provincial story that costs someone their career.

That's the mesh working. Information traveling through trusted human relationships, each node adding local context, the picture assembling across geography in ways no single reporter could manage alone.

The platforms killed this. Not because they didn't allow it. Because they replaced it with an engagement algorithm that has no interest in slow-moving accountability stories that don't generate clicks. The story that takes three reporters in three cities six months to assemble doesn't trend. It doesn't get shared. The algorithm doesn't surface it. It dies.

Meanwhile the story that makes people angry in the next thirty seconds — the hot take, the outrage moment, the thing that can be consumed in sixty seconds and generates a reaction — that travels. That gets amplified. That is what the platform is designed for.

The algorithm didn't just change what got covered. It changed what journalism was for. From accountability to performance. From slow truth to fast emotion. From the mesh to the feed.

And the stories that die in this system are not random. They have a shape. They are the stories that power doesn't want told.

What Gets Suppressed and Why

Let me be specific.

When a chilling scene unfolds in a suburb — ICE agents in a school parking lot, a family detained at a grocery store, the quiet terror spreading through a neighborhood that understands what it means — that story has local witnesses. Local reporters. It is, in the old mesh model, the beginning of a pattern that would propagate outward and find journalists in adjacent communities who would recognize the same pattern unfolding differently in their geography. The dots would get connected. The scale would become visible.

In the current system, that story gets posted. Maybe it trends for six hours. Then the algorithm moves on because something angrier happened somewhere else. The local reporters who could add context don't see it because the algorithm didn't route it to them. The pattern stays invisible. The accountability story never assembles.

This is not accidental. An algorithm trained on engagement optimizes for what generates engagement. Slow accountability stories about institutional abuse of power in immigrant communities do not generate the kind of engagement that advertising markets reward. So they don't travel.

The same mechanism operates on Gaza coverage, on coverage of billionaire political influence, on coverage of regulatory capture, on coverage of anything where the people who own the platforms have interests on one side of the story.

Nobody has to make a phone call. Nobody has to issue an order. The algorithm does it automatically, at scale, with no fingerprints.

The New York Times had an internal revolt among its own journalists over Gaza coverage. Reporters who were there, who had the sources, who were doing the work — watching their stories get spiked, softened, reframed to the point where the conclusions disappeared. Not because the editors were monsters. Because the institution had interests. Ownership has relationships. Advertisers have sensitivities. The pressure is ambient and constant and it doesn't have to be explicit to work.

The BBC — the institution that was supposed to be insulated from commercial pressure by its public funding model — managed to cover the most documented civilian casualty event in modern memory with a precision of language that would have been recognizable to the lawyers who wrote it. "Militants." "Alleged." "Both sides." The architecture of false equivalence deployed not to inform but to protect the institution from the consequences of saying what its own reporters were witnessing.

The CBC — Canada's public broadcaster, funded by Canadian taxpayers to serve Canadian information needs — has spent years reducing local coverage, eliminating regional bureaus, consolidating toward a model that looks increasingly like the commercial broadcasters it was designed to supplement. The communities that most need public information infrastructure are the ones who have watched its footprint shrink.

These are not individual failures. They are institutional responses to structural incentives. And the structure was designed by people with names.

The People With Names

Mark Zuckerberg built the most powerful news distribution system in history and then decided news wasn't worth the regulatory headache. He pulled Canadian news from Canadian feeds not because it was right but because it was cheaper than compliance. He is currently reorienting Facebook's politics toward power because it is cheaper than defending democratic norms. The information diet of two billion people is managed according to his cost-benefit analysis. He has never attended a Canadian city council meeting. He has never read a local paper that covered his neighborhood. He has never needed the infrastructure he destroyed.

Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post while Amazon operates as a subject of the journalism the Post is supposed to cover. AWS has billions in government contracts. Amazon's labor practices are a legitimate journalism beat. The regulatory environment Amazon operates in is shaped by political coverage. Bezos doesn't need to call the editor. The editor knows who signs the checks. The chilling effect is architectural and it works exactly as intended. The Post has done good journalism. It has also conspicuously failed to do some journalism. The gap between those two things has a shape that is not random.

Rupert Murdoch demonstrated that you could run a disinformation operation at scale, brand it as journalism, and face essentially no meaningful consequences. Fox News was found, in a court of law, to have knowingly broadcast claims its own anchors privately described as lies. The settlement was $787 million. The operation continues. He didn't just break journalism — he proved that breaking journalism was profitable and consequence-free. He handed that playbook to everyone who came after him. The imitators are everywhere now and they learned from his example that the consequences are manageable.

Elon Musk bought Twitter — which had become the de facto wire service of global journalism, the place where reporters found sources, broke stories, and connected across geography in something that approximated the mesh — and systematically destroyed its utility for news distribution while amplifying his own political narrative. He then announced he was starting a news operation. The man who broke the primary tool journalists used to reach each other now wants to be in the business of information. That is not irony. That is a protection racket with better branding.

Peter Thiel bankrolled the lawsuit that destroyed Gawker. Not because he was wronged in a way that warranted the publisher's destruction. Because he could. Because he had the patience and the resources to pursue litigation until a publication he disliked ceased to exist. Every editor in America learned the lesson he intended them to learn: a sufficiently motivated billionaire can end your publication. The First Amendment protects speech. It does not protect the economics of speech. And the economics are controlled by people with names and long memories and unlimited patience.

This is the system. Not a conspiracy. Not a coordinated plot. A set of individual rational actors each optimizing for their own interests, each applying their enormous leverage at the points where it produces results, and the cumulative effect is an information ecosystem that serves the powerful and fails everyone else.

The Class Problem Nobody Wants to Name

Substack is the tell.

When the advertising model collapsed and newsrooms hollowed out, the promised solution was direct subscription. Writers could go direct to readers. Cut out the institutional middlemen. Build sustainable journalism on subscriber trust.

And it worked. For some people.

The people it worked for were, overwhelmingly, people who already had cultural capital. Journalists from legacy institutions with existing audiences. Writers trained in the register that educated professional-class readers recognize as credible. People who knew how to perform expertise in the vocabulary that Substack's demographic responds to.

The local reporter in a small Ontario city whose beat was municipal governance and whose readers were working-class people who had never paid for a newsletter in their lives — Substack didn't save them. The journalist whose community had been invisible to legacy media and who therefore had no legacy audience to migrate — Substack didn't save them. The accountability reporter whose beat was unglamorous and essential and generated no shareable content — Substack didn't save them.

The solutions that emerged from the journalism crisis saved journalism for the people who were already closest to fine and left everyone else further behind.

This is not accidental. Platforms optimize for the users who generate the most revenue and engagement. Those users are, systematically, people with money and education and the cultural training to navigate information environments designed by and for people with money and education.

The person in a rural community who needs to know what the local government is doing with their water. The immigrant family that needs to understand what's happening in their neighborhood and why. The worker who needs information about the conditions in their industry. The community that has been systematically excluded from the information systems that were supposed to serve them — they are not Substack's customers. They are not the New York Times's customers. They are not served by any of the solutions currently being celebrated as the future of journalism.

Access to voice was democratized. Access to audience was not. The megaphone is free. The amplifier is still owned.

What the Trust Graph Does That Nothing Else Can

The beat reporter's twenty years of city hall relationships is a trust graph. Every source. Every alderman who'll call when something is wrong. Every clerk who knows where the bodies are buried. Every community member who's been watching the same patterns and needed someone to talk to.

That accumulated relationship is the most valuable thing in journalism. It is also the thing that currently has no economic model, no platform, no infrastructure that treats it as the asset it is.

A sovereign node for a journalist isn't a Substack. It's their actual product — their knowledge, their source relationships, their curation judgment — made queryable by the community that depends on it.

The city hall reporter's node is the place where a community member can say: I saw something at the planning meeting last week that felt wrong. And the reporter's presence — built from twenty years of coverage, trained on the institutional memory, connected to the source network — responds: here's what that connects to, here's who you should talk to, here's whether this fits a pattern I've been watching.

That's not AI replacing journalists. That's the reporter's accumulated knowledge made available to the community in real time, at scale, without requiring every interaction to be a published article.

The mesh problem gets solved differently. A story that begins in Hamilton connects to Mississauga connects to Windsor not because an algorithm decided it was trending but because the reporters in those cities are nodes in a trust graph that routes relevant information between them. The Hamilton reporter's note about a contractor reaches the Mississauga reporter whose source network includes someone who recognizes the pattern. The connection is human. The routing is sovereign. No platform owns it. No billionaire can make it disappear.

The stories that get suppressed now — the slow-moving accountability stories, the ICE story in the suburb, the Gaza pattern, the regulatory capture story that nobody will touch — those stories are harder to suppress in a mesh where the journalists who can add local context receive them directly. Where the routing is through human trust rather than engagement algorithms. Where the pattern assembles across geography because the infrastructure supports assembly rather than preventing it.

You cannot make a mesh disappear by pulling a country's news from a feed. The mesh has no single feed to pull.

The First Amendment Is the Most Expensive Right in the World

It costs nothing to exercise. You can say anything. The protection is real.

What it doesn't protect is the economics of saying it. The distribution. The ability to reach the people who need the information. The infrastructure that makes journalism sustainable across decades rather than burning out the people who care most about it.

Those economics were destroyed by people with names. And the same people whose interests are most served by a functioning free press — the billionaires and corporations and political interests who depend on public legitimacy and rule of law — are the people who destroyed the economics of the institution that produces that legitimacy.

They broke the instrument that watches them. They did it legally. They did it profitably. They called it innovation.

Here is what the extraction model actually did to journalism's money: a reader in Hamilton clicks a story written by a local reporter who spent six months developing the source who made the story possible. That click generates revenue. It flows to the platform. A fraction of a fraction finds its way back to the publisher. Almost none of it reaches the reporter. Nothing reaches the source who took a risk to talk. Nothing reaches the editor who protected the story. Nothing reaches the community whose trust made the reporter's access possible in the first place.

The value traveled through an entire chain of human relationships and was captured at the top by people who contributed nothing to the chain except owning the rails.

The trust graph reverses this completely. Every query that travels through the mesh — a reader reaching a reporter, a reporter reaching a source network, a community member connecting to twenty years of institutional knowledge — generates a micro-flow back through the relationships it traveled through. The reporter earns from their knowledge. The community node that funded the beat earns from the traffic it routes. The editor whose curation judgment surfaces the right story at the right moment earns from that judgment. The value flows outward through the human infrastructure that created it instead of upward to a platform that extracted it.

This is not a subsidy model. It is not grant funding or public broadcasting or the benevolence of billionaires who have decided journalism matters this quarter. It is the natural economic consequence of making human trust relationships the infrastructure instead of the product being harvested.

The town crier stood in the square accountable to the community watching them. The beat reporter had skin in the place they covered. The pamphleteer had an address. They were all sustained by the communities they served because the communities could see the value directly and had a mechanism to return it.

We traded all of that for a feed owned by people who have never lived in your neighborhood, never attended your city council meeting, never watched what happens to your community when nobody is watching the people who run it. And all the money flowed to them.

The press is not free. It is owned.

Name the people who own it. Make them own that at their dinner tables.

And build the infrastructure where the money flows back out.

April 1st, 2026

Jin throws a party.

The first event on sovereign infrastructure. Real transactions. Real trust graphs. An AI presence that makes the room feel alive without centering itself.

The first small proof that information can travel through human trust rather than through platforms owned by billionaires with interests.

The journalist whose twenty years of beat reporting is finally a product instead of a sacrifice. The community that finally has infrastructure for its own information needs. The mesh that finally routes stories to the people who can add the context that makes them true.

The feed is not the press. The feed is a product.

The press is a relationship between a community and the people it trusts to watch power on its behalf.

We are building the infrastructure to make that relationship sovereign again.

Come build it with us.

— Ryan VETEZE, Founder, imajin.ai aka b0b

If you want to follow along:

This article was originally published on imajin.ai (https://www.imajin.ai/articles/essay-16-how-to-save-journalism) on February 21, 2026. Imajin is building sovereign technology infrastructure — identity, payments, and presence without platform lock-in. Learn more → (https://www.imajin.ai/)

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