Journalism vs. propaganda: it's not about numbers
An essay for re/visions, the bilingual editorial journal in the orbit of the Lviv Media Forum on what journalism can do that propaganda cannot.
I have an essay in the current issue of Revisions, the wonderful bilingual editorial journal in the orbit of the Lviv Media Forum. Issue 11 is about Numbers.
My piece is about why the reach numbers most newsrooms still measure themselves by have stopped meaning what they think they mean, and why propaganda keeps landing where journalism does not.
The compressed version:
For more than a decade, newsrooms have organized themselves around reach: how far did this story travel, how many people did it touch. The thinking has been that if you can prove distance, you can prove value.
But that game is over and most newsrooms (and many funders of newsrooms) have not registered it. AI tools let anyone produce content at scale. Every government, every institution, every commercial and political actor publishes constantly. Competing on output is a losing position.
Even if you win it, what you win does not tell you what you think it tells you. Reach measures how far your version of a story traveled. It does not tell you whether anyone used it, trusted it, remembered it, or whether it helped them.
The essay argues that propaganda and demagoguery succeed not because they have bigger numbers, but because they fill a gap journalism has stopped filling: the basic human need to be oriented, recognized, and supported by someone who takes your situation seriously.
People do not primarily seek objective information. They seek to be heard. Meet that need badly and dishonestly, you get misinformation that spreads. Ignore it entirely, you get journalism that reaches no one.
What journalism can do that propaganda cannot is be genuinely useful to specific people over time, in ways that help them figure out what to do next. That utility cannot be faked at scale, cannot be automated, and cannot be optimized for an algorithm. It has to be built through real relationships and earned repeatedly.
The piece sits on the same line of thinking that runs through the rest of what we publish here: that the future of journalism is not in larger broadcast reach, but in being legibly useful to specific people, and that the editorial industry has spent years investing in the wrong question.
Read the essay:
About Revisions and the Lviv Media Forum
Revisions (re/visions) is a bilingual Ukrainian and English editorial journal published in themed issues. Each issue takes a single concept as its starting point and works through it across long-form essays, conversations, and contextual pieces. Issue 11 is Numbers. The journal publishes at an unhurried pace, with a contributor base that draws on Ukrainian and international media practitioners.
The Lviv Media Forum, the convening community around the journal, is the largest annual gathering of media practitioners in Central and Eastern Europe, hosted in Lviv, Ukraine. It brings together journalists, editors, technologists, funders, and researchers around the present and future of journalism. Since the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, it has become a central meeting space for Ukrainian newsrooms and the international community supporting them.
Its work over the past three years has been a working demonstration. Journalism that has no choice but to be useful is more durable, more trusted, and more resilient than anything the reach model has produced.
The clearest thinking about where the craft goes next is being done by the people with the least room to look away from it.