By Aarón Cantú — 23 Apr 2026

A quivering mass of adversarial brains, eyes, guts

Between working full time, co-raising an infant-to-toddler and caring for two geriatric dogs I've had no time or energy to update this newsletter. Sorry!

I've published a whole lot since the last time I sent it out. I've also focused on improving my data analysis and mapping skills, and generally exploring new areas within my beat. A few I'm proud of...

I've also been reading about, what else, AI and the ways it might upend our industry. (Know your enemy, right?)

One of the bleaker but insightful things I've read is a 31 page thesis called, "Who Will Monetize the Truth?" by entrepreneur Francesco Macroni. It's an analysis of money-making in the news business. Macroni says that the news producing business is splitting into three tiers: Intelligence Business; Attention Aggregators; and Public Good.

The first one has come about somewhat organically and looks like Bloomberg, Axios, Semafor, Dow Jones, etc. They make most of their money selling information to executives, traders and other money-class people who use it as an advantage or leverage over other competitors. Their reporters have human sources who can help them contextualize data quickly and prioritize what matters in a sea of noise. "If the company creates the data, through proprietary monitoring, original methodology, or network-generated signals, it is the market," Macroni writes.

He doesn't spend much time on Attention Aggregators but he seems to be referencing 2010s-era clicky businesses (we all know them). Those are continuing to die out especially as AI summaries make traffic an irrelevant metric. He spends even less time on Public Good, but it's this realm, obviously, in which I have dedicated my life's work. "Local accountability, investigative work, foreign correspondence," he writes, will "never generate sufficient market returns, although it is the most critical for society. Pretending it's a viable business is what killed local news. Recognizing it as infrastructure, funded through grants, philanthropy, and public investment the way we fund libraries, public broadcasting, and courts, is the only path to sustaining it."

This gets to a difficult matter: What is the public good? Does it still exist, and if so, where? In the past, newspapers and broadcast television reached hundreds of millions of people. That distribution infrastructure formed a material basis for a public commons. But the way we get our news now is an individualized mess of algorithms, screens, and increasingly bot-mediated interpretation. If young people increasingly turn to AIs to find and learn information, we introduce the issue of people having the on-demand ability to digest information in whatever form they want: My 1,200-word feature I spent lots of time curating for who I think my audience is might get boiled down to a few bullet points. Or it could get put into NotebookLLM and made it a podcast (even though you have to endure the extremely corny robot "hosts" imitating the beltway/NPR voice). And I don't have much of a say in its presentation anymore, but the information was still mine.

I was intrigued by Semafor executive editor Gina Chua's mediations on the value of information itself within the news ecosystem. In a conversation with the podcast Media Copilot, she describes an example of a local newsroom deeply embedded in a community delivering vital information about school board meetings and other going-ons for a local audience of parents. In this example, the extremely local nature of the information is where the value comes from, and is arguably more valuable than a general news story from CNN summarizing Trump's State of the Union address. The catch, and I say this as a former hyperlocal alt-weekly reporter, is that those jobs are difficult to grow in. That doesn't matter if you are anchored to your community with no intentions of leaving, but it does matter if you're a young ambitious person who will feel strained against your job's limits. And to be honest, it's not hard to imagine in the near future, or even now, a team of AI agents reviewing all local school board transcripts, contracts, and other information, forming the first line of editorial output, with a couple humans overseeing final publication.

What's the solution for dwindling value in editorial output and the political crisis that has few-to-no solutions for sustaining any kinds of public infrastructure, particularly reporting for the public good? One wild idea I've had, which has come through free-wheeling conversations with friends, is you need many, many more reporters at all levels: Local, state, and federal. Not everybody needs to be covering the State of the Union, but if money and talent were in abundance, you could easily have 10,000 reporters just looking at the Pentagon. You could have thousands more focused on Los Angeles County. Perhaps, in fact, we should have some kind of ratio: 10-to-1 reporters-to-politicians. And that's just for a city council member. For a member of congress it could be 100-to-1. If you know any journalists or are one, this may not sound outlandish. You've probably been struck with terror at all the secrets, lying, and transgressions happening far away from prying eyes and ears. If a tree falls in a forest...if a bureaucrat skims off the top...

In this way, reporters themselves – as a giant quivering mass of adversarial brains, eyes, and guts – would replace the material basis of the Public Good that used to be located in the paper and antennae that formed the distribution of news. We long ago ceded the distribution side to the tech industry. What else do we have but ourselves to re-generate the atrophied idea of a public domain? In what other ways can it be rebuilt?

Now clearly there's no money for any of this. You never hear of hiring sprees in the media industry, and if you do, you know it's only a few years or even months until the layoffs. So this would also have to be nothing less than a political project: A New Deal, Public Works Administration level investment in reporters. We could perhaps rebrand them as corruption hunters, or public good generators. 10 million reporters, at a median salary of $150,000 each. It would cost $1.5 trillion per year, roughly half the federal budget, and trillions more to sustain it in perpetuity. Unrealistic, of course. But that's how much Trump asked Congress to give him for the military for this year alone. Which would you rather have?

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