Journalism faces its Kobayashi Maru moment

This article was original published as part of Nieman Lab's Predictions for Journalism, 2025.

2025 presents journalism with its Kobayashi Maru moment — an impossible scenario created by two converging forces. First, the 2024 U.S. election exposed how traditional media has lost its position as the primary information source for many Americans. While mainstream news invested heavily in conventional election coverage, audiences turned to alternative sources — from subject-matter-expert podcasts to community-driven platforms — for their election information.

Simultaneously, the rapid advancement of AI has fundamentally altered how people expect to receive and process information. Companies like OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic are delivering personalized, problem-solving experiences that make traditional journalism’s one-size-fits-all approach feel obsolete.

These concurrent challenges create a seemingly impossible situation: News organizations must simultaneously rebuild trust and authority while completely reimagining how they serve and engage their audiences.

The situation resembles Star Trek’s infamous <Kobayashi Maru scenario — a training exercise where conventional solutions prove inadequate and success requires fundamentally reimagining the rules of engagement. This metaphor perfectly captures the news industry’s current predicament — an industry facing multiple existential threats where traditional approaches appear increasingly futile, yet the stakes for democracy and public discourse remain critically high.

Traditional industries offer instructive examples of successful transformation in the face of disruption. For example, Delta Airlines has evolved beyond its origins as a traditional carrier to become a sophisticated loyalty company that happens to fly planes, generating $6 billion in revenue in 2023 from credit card partnerships alone.

In the news and information space, we’re seeing similar transformations from outside the industry players. For example, independent content creators like Aaron Parnas are explaining the news of the day and achieving remarkable reach. Parnas, a lawyer and an activist, has built an audience of 1.1 million followers on TikTok — nearly matching The New York Times’ 1.3 million followers on the platform — by positioning himself as a direct, accessible news source. This demonstrates how people who are passionate about news can successfully reimagine how to use news to inform the public and engage their audience.

The compound challenge of eroding audience relevance and AI disruption requires a foundational transformation for the news industry. In the words of Jeff Bezos, “In today’s era of volatility, there is no other way but to re-invent. The only sustainable advantage you can have over others is agility, that’s it. Because nothing else is sustainable, everything else you create, somebody else will replicate.”

The barriers to change for the news industry are:

• The traditional organizational models, built around the assumption of institutional authority, actively resist the kind of community-centered, problem-solving approach that modern information consumption demands won’t work anymore.
• The newsroom-business divide, while intended to protect editorial integrity, is preventing the kind of integrated solution development that companies like Google or American Express have used to transform their value proposition.
• Traditional metrics focused on reach and pageviews are running counter to the personalized, high-impact services that both audiences and communities are increasingly demanding.

However, some news organizations are finding innovative ways past these barriers. The San Francisco Standard, a for-profit digital startup, is experimenting with its membership structure to function more like a social club, offering not just traditional journalism events but also gym memberships and food tastings through partnerships with local businesses that seek community engagement beyond traditional advertising.

Meanwhile, Initium Media has transformed its approach to serving the Chinese-speaking diaspora by rebuilding its entire editorial and product strategy around community needs. During the U.S. election, Initium demonstrated how news organizations can bridge cultural and linguistic gaps, delivering timely analysis and explanatory coverage that helped their audience navigate between their homeland and adopted society. Both organizations show how rethinking traditional news products and audience relationships can create more sustainable models for journalism.

At Hacks/Hackers, we’re demonstrating how reimagining journalism’s relationship with technology and audience can be fun and innovative. Rather than pursuing superficial applications like AI-generated summaries or yet another newsletter format, participants at our events envision transformative solutions that address fundamental challenges in modern information needs. Here are some of the ideas that emerged from our Poynter, ONA, Baltimore, and UC Berkeley events.

While these are just concepts emerged from scenario planning exercises, they illustrate the kind of bold thinking required to move the news industry forward. This is the level of ambition and innovation that will be required to ensure journalism’s continued relevance and sustainability in the digital age.

The path forward requires us to:

• Treat journalism as a tool for community problem-solving rather than an end in itself.
• Build authentic partnerships with communities to co-create new frameworks for information sharing.
• Break down traditional barriers between editorial, business, and technology functions to create truly integrated solutions.
• Develop new impact metrics that capture real community outcomes, not just engagement statistics.

The choice facing the news industry isn’t whether to change, but whether to proactively reimagine their role. Those news organizations that thrive will be those that recognize this moment as an opportunity to build something new — something that combines journalism’s core values with feedback from your audience and AI’s capability to deliver personalized, problem-solving experiences at scale.

This transformation isn’t just about survival — it’s about fulfilling journalism’s essential role in democracy. As the 2024 election showed us, we can either evolve to meet our communities’ changing information needs, or watch as those communities find alternatives that do.