The rise of decentralised media platforms has transformed the landscape of journalism, not in a slow, evolutionary sense, but in a way that breaks fundamentally from the norms and expectations of legacy media. In a recent episode of Beyond Gender, filmmaker Michael Nayna joined Stella O’Malley and Mia Hughes to discuss his journey as a documentary maker who inadvertently captured the early warning signs of a systemic media breakdown. The discussion was more than a personal account—it became a vital reflection on what journalism is becoming, and what society loses when empirically sound, investigative journalism is no longer valued or viable.
As Nayna notes, decentralised media is not simply a proliferation of voices; it marks a cultural and cognitive rupture. In many ways, it parallels the introduction of the printing press in Europe. That technological innovation, as Marshall McLuhan argued in The Gutenberg Galaxy, restructured the way people thought, communicated, governed, and understood themselves. McLuhan insisted that we “march backwards into the future,” making sense of new technologies through the rear-view mirror of our existing habits and assumptions. The result, then and now, is profound confusion and displacement.
I taught media technology between 1998 and 2018 in a UK university, during the very years when blogs, wikis, forums, and social media were emerging as significant platforms of public communication. I tried to frame these as not merely adjuncts to journalism or PR, but as signs of a deeper transformation. I developed an integrated curriculum that encouraged students to critically engage with distributed media ecosystems. But the overwhelming reaction from undergraduates was one of indifference or discomfort. Their priority was not to engage with the civic or epistemological challenges of new media, but to secure a foothold in the shrinking world of traditional broadcasting, publishing, and agency work.
The conceptual break never came. And in the UK, I believe it still hasn’t. As Nayna observes of Australia, there’s a cultural tendency to disavow change, to treat ambition and imagination as suspect. I felt a strong resonance with this critique. The UK too has become a ‘can’t-do’ culture when it comes to media transformation. The issue isn’t one of talent or capacity—we have that in abundance—but of imagination. Of the willingness to step outside inherited frameworks and build something new.
The challenges of navigating a post-institutional media environment are immense. There is no central gatekeeper anymore; trust is relational, contingent, and often manufactured. We cannot rely on old codes of professionalism or accreditation alone. What we need instead is a deliberate, coordinated effort to build media ecosystems that are rooted in place, accountable to communities, and supportive of a plural public sphere.
This is the foundational challenge: how do we ensure that our new communications infrastructure is aligned with the lived needs of people in the places they inhabit, rather than the extractive logic of globalised platforms?
The danger, if we fail, is that malign and corrupting forces—ideological, corporate, or state-driven—will exploit the vacuum. They already are. The mechanisms of trust, truth, and verification are frayed, and without intentional, publicly accountable interventions, we risk a media economy that is entirely unmoored from civic responsibility.
Which raises the question: is the current ministerial team at DCMS—Lisa Nandy, Stephanie Peacock, and Chris Bryant—ready to take on this challenge? Are they equipped, politically and intellectually, to confront entrenched interests and build a media economy based on foundational principles that prioritise civic cohesion, social value, and democratic renewal?
Or will they, like so many before them, chase after the hollow promises of the globalised digital economy, believing that platform growth is the same thing as public good? This is not a theoretical debate. It is a matter of cultural survival.