It's pretty obvious that there's a huge shift in journalism today. I like to call it "scale" and it's inverting. People no longer trust media outlets but they still trust individual journalists. It's a kind of unbundling based on reputation. That means some reporters on social media have greater reach than entire newspapers.

For example, USA Today newspaper in 2019 had about 178,000 individual subscribers. (That's not counting hotel subscriptions.) Quite a few journalists have bigger reach than that now.

In 2020, a New York Times reporter admitted that the Babylon Bee (a satirical outlet) had as large an audience on Facebook as CNN and the New York Times!

It's become a major problem for corporate media outlets & corporate journalists because social media like Twitter and Facebook have exposed the fact that many supposedly popular establishment journalists (especially TV anchors) actually have small audiences.

What could the big corporate media outlets do about this glaring fact? It's obvious that one way they hid the unpopularity of their top people was by padding their social media accounts with fake followers.

Just look at these follower numbers for some "major" figures:

Andrea Mitchell: 1.8M
Chuck Todd: 2M
Ezra Klein: 2.7M
Paul Krugman: 4.6M
Nick Kristof: 2M

The problem was that (at least through much of 2019 and 2020) these corporate journalists couldn't attract 200 likes on most tweets. The media outlets had bought followers but no interaction: likes, retweets, comments.

This is a fact that a lot of corporate media empires are anxious to hide.