We return to The Open Thread, our periodic check-in on past stories and a look at what’s ahead. Today we revisit four of them: A.I. safety landed on the diplomatic agenda at the U.S. and China summit, the fight for competitive congressional elections has gotten much harder, local news got a rare break, and college sports' new system governing how student athletes are paid is beginning — albeit shakily — to show its shape. All series (for reading or listening — I narrate each one) are at solvingfor.io.

AI Safety: Reconsidered

When we covered A.I. safety last fall, the central tension was this: the U.S. and China were locked in a race that neither side felt it could slow down, even as the creators of A.I., top CEOs and leading researchers warned of the risks of moving too fast. The prisoner’s dilemma of A.I., where mutual caution is the rational choice but unilateral restraint feels like surrender, seemed nearly impossible to escape.

The solution we highlighted: the U.S. and China sitting down to negotiate ways to manage the risks of A.I., just as the U.S. and Soviet Union did nearly 60 years ago (at the height of the Cold War) to control the growth and spread of nuclear weapons.

Last week, we may have seen the start of it.

Ahead of the summit between Trump and Xi in Beijing, both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported that A.I. safety would be on the agenda. It came as the Trump administration had done an about-face on the need to explore guardrails, as frontier A.I. models by the likes of Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and China’s DeepSeek grow more powerful on both sides of the Pacific.

The previous posture was clear. Vice President J.D. Vance gave a speech last year in Paris declaring that the “A.I. future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety.”

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Why the change? The catalyst is Anthropic’s powerful new model, Claude Mythos, whose advanced hacking capabilities spooked government officials and set off a scramble about what the government’s role should be in managing the release of the most powerful AI systems. The White House has since moved toward considering pre-deployment safety testing — a sharp reversal from its earlier position of prioritizing rapid innovation without any guardrails.

But the fear remains: any slowdown by one side gives the other an advantage. Hence the push for a global framework established by today’s great powers. Not only rules governing the release of ever-more-powerful A.I. models — systems that could pierce financial networks or assist in the development of bioweapons — but procedures to manage a crisis. Proposals include establishing an emergency hotline between the U.S. and China for A.I. matters, modeled on the one the U.S. and Soviet Union created during the Cold War.

“The two A.I. superpowers are going to start talking,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said during the meetings in Beijing. “We’re going to set up a protocol in terms of, how do we go forward with best practices for A.I. to make sure nonstate actors don’t get ahold of these models.”

Following the summit, President Trump was circumspect about specifics, but confirmed the change in approach. “AI is fantastic,” Trump said aboard Air Force One, according to The Hill. But “it’s also got some drawbacks and we’re talking about…we’re going to work together.”

A protocol. A hotline. The echoes of the nuclear age are getting harder to ignore.

If you missed it, you can explore the three-part series, The Control Problem: Solving For AI Safety, here.

Congress: Not a Competition of Ideas — Just Power

Start with the baseline: in 2024, just 37 of 435 House races were decided by five points or less — nine percent. Most Americans now live in districts where the outcome is effectively predetermined long before Election Day. The consequence: rising polarization, a dearth of genuine debate, and a Congress no longer structured to reward solving problems — only holding power.

The House was designed by the Framers to be the chamber closest to the people — directly elected, up for election every two years, meant to mirror public sentiment. It has become the opposite.

When we covered the alarming lack of congressional competition, the core problem was structural: the way districts are drawn drains Congress of the competitive pressure that produces accountability to the entire electorate. Closed primaries compound it, pushing candidates toward the extremes before a general election audience ever weighs in. The solutions we examined — including independent redistricting commissions, open primaries, and ranked-choice voting — were slow and contested, but at least still in play.

In recent weeks, the landscape has gotten dramatically worse — and it is worth being clear about how we got here.

Facing increasingly dire polling numbers last summer, President Trump urged Republican-led states to gerrymander their congressional districts to boost the party’s chances in the upcoming midterms. It was a politician choosing his voters rather than voters choosing their politicians — and an extraordinary departure from tradition: congressional redistricting typically follows the decennial census, not a president’s approval ratings. Texas, North Carolina and Missouri quickly complied. Florida recently did too. It was nakedly political — and it set the stage for what followed.

The legal architecture enabling it came in two steps. In Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering is a political question — federal courts would stay out entirely. Then on April 29th, the Court went further in Louisiana v. Callais, effectively gutting the one remaining constraint: the Voting Rights Act’s protection of minority voters. Justice Kagan, in dissent, warned the majority had rendered Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter.” Together the two decisions form a closed loop — partisan gerrymandering is unreviewable, and race can no longer meaningfully constrain it.

The human cost is concrete. About one-third of Louisiana's population is Black, yet under the new map being advanced, the state would go from two majority-Black congressional districts back to one. The partisan math is equally stark: Louisiana has nearly identical numbers of registered Democrats and Republicans — and will now likely send five Republicans and one Democrat to Congress.

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The ruling immediately opened a new front. Tennessee drew a new map intended to eliminate the state's last Democratic House seat. South Carolina's governor called the legislature into special session to pursue a redraw. In Alabama, the attorney general was candid about his goal: a congressional map that "favors Republicans seven-to-zero." In a state where 27% of the population is Black — and where Black voters overwhelmingly vote Democratic — eliminating Black representation and maximizing Republican advantage are a single goal.

Democrats have tried to fight back. California voters passed a new map adding five Democratic-leaning districts. Virginia voters approved a redistricting referendum, only to have the Virginia Supreme Court strike it down 4-3, leaving the state's current maps in place through the midterms.

The point is this: the effort to make Congress more competitive, more representative, and more accountable has not stalled — it has been deliberately dismantled.

The remedies we explored still exist on paper: a federal ban on partisan gerrymandering, independent redistricting commissions, open primaries, multi-member districts, and ranked-choice voting all remain possibilities. But the wheels for reform have completely come off. What’s left is the rawest version of the problem we identified — not a competition of ideas, but a competition for power, with the maps drawn accordingly.

If you missed it, you can explore the three-part series, The Democracy Deficit: Solving For Competition in the People’s House, here.

Local News: A Model Worth Watching

When we covered the collapse of local news, the story was grim: newsrooms gutted, communities left without watchdogs, and no sustainable business model emerging to fill the void at scale.

Here’s a piece of good news.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a 240-year-old newspaper set to close, was purchased by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism — the nonprofit parent of The Baltimore Banner — which took ownership May 4th and pledged $30 million over five years to keep it running. The Venetoulis Institute was established by Baltimore billionaire Stewart Bainum after he failed to acquire The Baltimore Sun. Instead, he launched the Baltimore Banner from scratch in 2022 — a digital-only nonprofit that won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. This isn’t a philanthropic rescue with no model behind it. It’s an organization that has already proven nonprofit journalism can produce serious work.

The Post-Gazette would become only the second major metro daily to fully convert to nonprofit, following The Salt Lake Tribune. One rescue does not reverse a national crisis. But Pittsburgh — which had been on the verge of becoming the largest American city without a daily newspaper — now has a model worth watching.

If you missed it, you can explore the three-part series, The Community Gap: Solving For Local News, here.

Paying College Athletes: Still Taking Shape

When we covered the end of amateurism in college sports, the headline was simple: the old system was dead. What remained was the harder question — how do you fairly compensate athletes who generate billions while preserving the traditions and educational mission that give college sports its meaning; and fund the non-revenue Olympic sports like track and field that football and basketball have historically bankrolled?

The system is a work in progress. But it has structure now, and that structure recently faced its first real test.

At the center of it is the House settlement, reached last year, which established a $20.5 million per-school pool for direct revenue sharing between schools and athletes — policed by a newly created body called the College Sports Commission. But the richest programs have been spending well beyond that cap. An ESPN report said the most competitive college football programs spend between $30 to $40 million to assemble their rosters. The mechanism: name, image and likeness — NIL — deals structured through third-party marketing firms, which sit outside the cap entirely. The CSC’s position is that those deals have to represent genuine commercial value — a company paying for specific, identifiable use of a player’s likeness — not a backdoor salary payment in disguise.

Last week, an arbitrator upheld the CSC’s decision to deny NIL deals involving 18 Nebraska football players and Playfly Sports, Nebraska’s multimedia rights partner, which had pledged more than $8 million to athletes through arrangements ruled to be “warehousing” — purchasing NIL rights without specifying how they’d actually be used. The ruling signals the new system has teeth. But it is less an ending than a first skirmish: a federal court hearing is scheduled for May 27 to review the CSC’s authority over exactly these kinds of deals, and Nebraska’s attorney general has signaled he may intervene.

A system taking shape. The tests are just beginning.

If you missed it, you can explore the three-part series, The Amateur Myth: Solving For College Athlete Pay, here.

Next up

For our next series, we turn to the U.S. federal debt. The numbers alone are stark: the debt now exceeds the entire U.S. gross domestic product — a milestone that is casting a harsh new light on how the government taxes, spends, and borrows. We’ll unpack the problem, trace how we got here, and examine what might actually be done about it.

Note: Prefer to listen? I narrate each story myself. Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For is a deep-dive series that takes on one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like.

Previous series have examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, and a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens. Learn more at solvingfor.io.

To see the full roster of deep dives, take a look below —

The 21st Century’s Oil: Solving For China’s Rare Earth Dominance

• Part 1, Rare Earths: The Invisible Backbone

• Part 2, Rare Earths: The Middle Kingdom’s Monopoly

• Part 3, Rare Earths: The Race to Reinvent

The Control Problem: Solving For AI Safety

• Part 1, AI: The Race and the Reckoning

• Part 2, AI: The Prisoner’s Dilemma

• Part 3, AI: The New Nuclear Moment

The Democracy Deficit: Solving For Competition in the People’s House

• Part 1, Congress: The Vanishing Competition

• Part 2, Congress: How We Got Stuck

• Part 3, Congress: Making Democracy Competitive Again

The Amateur Myth: Solving For College Athlete Pay

• Part 1, College Sports: How It Was Broken By a $60 Video Game

• Part 2, College Sports: How the NCAA was Born of Death and Money — Death was the Easy Part

• Part 3, College Sports: The Fork in the Road

The 80-Year Peace: Solving For a Rearming World

• Part 1, War & Peace: The World Rearms

• Part 2, War & Peace: From 1989’s Hope to Rearmament

• Part 3, War & Peace: Rebuilding the Global Order

The Community Gap: Solving For Local News

• Part 1, Local News: The Civic Unraveling

• Part 2, Local News: The Internet Was the First Disruption. AI Is the Next.

• Part 3, Local News: The Bet That Wasn’t Made, But Could Still Be

Engineered Addiction: Solving for Teen Mental Health

• Part 1, Teen Crisis: How Facebook Targeted Tweens

• Part 2, Teen Crisis: The Twenty-Six Words that Shielded Social Media

• Part 3, Teen Crisis: Three Ways Forward

In Part Three of our series on social media’s impact on teen mental health, we turn to solutions. How accountability is being pursued on two fronts at once — through more than a thousand cases working their way through the courts in the opening created by the KGM v. Meta verdict, and through efforts like forty state attorneys general pushing Congress to write a duty of care into law. How Australia raised the minimum age to have a social media account and a growing number of countries are following. How parents, schools, and kids themselves stopped waiting for Washington and went phone-free. And how the question of whether the next generation grows up under different terms is now being answered.

Missed Part One? Go here to unpack the epidemic of depression, anxiety, and, tragically, suicide among a generation of teenagers — and social media’s role in it. Missed Part Two? Go here for how a 1996 law shielded the industry, how the platforms engineered the harm behind that shield, and how lawyers built a legal theory to get around that shield. All series (for reading or listening) are at solvingfor.io.

By the time Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price walked onto The Daily Show set on the night of February 25, 2026, the cultural movement they had helped build was at its most visible. They were in midtown Manhattan to explain to Desi Lydic and her studio audience what had happened to American childhood — and what was, finally, beginning to happen in response.

Haidt had written The Anxious Generation, the 2024 book that crystallized a global conversation about the effects of smartphones and social media on young people's development. Price was the author of How to Break Up With Your Phone. Together they had written a new book for kids called The Amazing Generation. Haidt was on the show to talk about both — but mostly to talk about what had happened in the nearly two years since The Anxious Generation had landed.

A great deal had happened.

“In the first year, we got 40 US states to put limits on phones,” Haidt told Lydic. “Twenty did it right, phone-free for the whole day. Australia is the first country in the world to raise the age to 16 for social media.” The audience cheered. “And just in the last four weeks, a dozen countries have said they're going to follow. So we are at a global turning point.”

The cultural movement Haidt had helped launch — parents organizing in PTA meetings and statehouses, schools rewriting their phone policies, governments passing laws that would have been unthinkable two years earlier — was, by any measure, ascendant.

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Then Lydic asked the question the entire movement had been built around.

"How much of the onus falls on the parent and the teachers," she said, "and how much falls on these tech companies and our leaders to do the right thing?"

Haidt's answer is worth quoting, because everything that follows in this installment is, in one way or another, a response to it.

“In any rational world where you had a consumer product that was used by 95% of all children, that had killed thousands of them, that had gotten to the point where 25% of the girls say that it has damaged their mental health…it would have been sued out of existence or at least made an adult-only product.”

“Of course, we don’t live in that world,” Haidt continued. “We live in a world where wealthy industries can just pay not even that much money to buy huge amounts of influence in Congress and block anything.”

But, he said, the states were acting. The rest of the world was acting too. “I think we're going to win on this eventually, and the companies are going to have to bear some responsibility. Of course, in Los Angeles right now, they're on trial for the first time. They're facing a jury. Thousands of kids are dead and they've never had an answer for it.”

“So I think justice will come,” he concluded.

Twenty-eight days later, it did.

On March 25, 2026, in downtown Los Angeles, the jury in KGM v. Meta et al. found that Meta — owner of Facebook and Instagram — and YouTube had breached a duty of care to the minors who used their products. The verdict was the first of its kind: an American jury had held a major social media company liable, on a product-design theory, for harm to a child.

The legal architecture that had shielded the platforms for nearly thirty years had cracked. The rational world Haidt had described had begun to arrive.

For Part Three, we turn to solutions. Since adolescent depression, loneliness, and suicide began their rise after the smartphone and the always-on social platform reshaped American childhood, the work of finding a fix has been underway. It has broadly coalesced around three approaches.

Fix the product. Hold the platforms accountable for the design of what they sell — through litigation like KGM, through legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act, and through regulation requiring age-appropriate design codes.

Raise the age. Restrict access until children are older. Australia's age-sixteen law took effect in December 2025. A growing number of countries are following.

Change what’s normal. Cultural change among parents, schools, and kids themselves. Phone-free school days. Parents organizing in PTA meetings to break the collective action trap that keeps individual families from saying no. Norms about when children get smartphones and when they get social media. Helping kids make their own good decisions.

“This all makes so much more sense if you stop focusing on the phones and you focus instead on childhood,” Haidt said on The Daily Show. “What is a healthy human childhood?”

Fix The Product

The most direct response to the harms documented in this series is the one the KGM jury delivered: hold the platforms accountable for the design choices that caused the harm. This is the project of taking that verdict and making it the rule rather than the exception.

There are two ways to do this: civil litigation and legislation.

Civil litigation rests on a single legal doctrine: duty of care. It's the long-standing principle that anyone who designs and sells a consumer product owes its users a basic obligation not to design it in ways that foreseeably injure them.

For thirty years, platforms operated outside this framework, because Section 230 was read to immunize them from claims arising out of the content their users posted. The KGM verdict did not overturn Section 230. It established something narrower but consequential: that design-defect claims targeting the platform’s own conduct — its recommender systems, its notification engineering, its retention features — survive Section 230 because they are not about user content. They are about the product.

The path applies duty of care case by case. The cases are piling up. Behind the KGM jury verdict sits a docket that increasingly resembles the early years of tobacco litigation: more than a thousand personal injury cases against Meta, YouTube, Snap, and TikTok consolidated in California state court, and more than two thousand coordinated in federal court.

The social media companies have begun settling some cases and fighting others, the same posture Big Tobacco took in the early 1990s before the cumulative weight of verdicts and disclosures produced the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement. Whether the same arc holds for social media remains an open question. What is clear is that the legal wall that protected the industry for thirty years has cracked, and the litigation is moving through the opening.

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Legislation takes a different route: write the duty of care into statute. This approach is illustrated by the proposed Kids Online Safety Act, which would set the standard in federal law and let the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general enforce it across the industry. KOSA passed the Senate 91-3 in July 2024. The House version, advanced by Republican leadership, stripped the duty of care entirely. Forty state attorneys general wrote in February 2026 backing the Senate version, but the legislation is stuck.

In the absence of federal action, states have moved. Age-appropriate design codes have been enacted in California, Maryland, Nebraska, Vermont, and South Carolina, imposing requirements like privacy by default, no targeted advertising to minors, and a ban on dark patterns such as infinite scroll, autoplay, and streak counters.

Several of these laws are now under First Amendment challenge. In NetChoice v. Bonta, the Ninth Circuit affirmed a preliminary injunction against parts of California's law. Civil liberties groups argue that a duty of care covering the content kids see — not just how the platform is built — chills lawful speech, particularly speech about mental health, sexual orientation, and reproductive care that vulnerable teens often most need to find.

But even if every mechanism outlined here succeeded — if KOSA passed with the duty intact, if the design codes survived constitutional challenge, if KGM became the leading edge of a thousand similar verdicts — the question of whether children should be encountering these products at all would remain.

Fixing the product makes the product safer. It does not answer when, or whether, a child should be using it.

Raise The Age

The second approach starts from a different premise: until the product is safer, keep children away from it.

Australia’s age-sixteen law took effect on December 10, 2025. It applies to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, and X — the platforms most American teenagers use, the platforms named in the KGM litigation, the platforms a generation of parents has watched their children disappear into. Within the first six weeks Australia’s eSafety Commissioner reported that 4.7 million accounts belonging to under-sixteens had been removed, with non-compliant platforms facing fines of up to AUD$49.5 million. Greece has announced that a ban at 15 will start in 2027. France is debating a similar law. Indonesia, Brazil, Austria, Denmark, Malaysia, Ecuador, and others have moved or are moving in the same direction.

The cultural and political logic is straightforward. Individual families could not keep their children off the platforms because the platforms were where their children’s friends were — the collective action trap that Haidt and others have spent two years documenting. A government restriction breaks the trap by making the platform legally inaccessible to everyone at once.

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On this question, at a time of deep political polarization in the U.S., the usual partisan map is not holding. Congress has not moved, but states have, and the alignments are unfamiliar. Republican and Democratic attorneys general have filed the same suits. Red-state governors and blue-state senators have backed the same restrictions. Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who signed a law banning Floridians under 14 from holding social media accounts, said, “Being buried in those devices all day is not the best way to grow up.” Connecticut’s Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal is the lead sponsor of KOSA.

The opposition is bipartisan too: the ACLU on speech and privacy grounds, libertarian conservatives on parental rights. When neither coalition maps onto the usual axis, it may signal something is about to give.

It is too early to tell whether age restriction reduces the harms it targets. Australia’s law has been in effect for less than six months. Public health interventions of this kind take a decade or more to show up clearly in outcome data. What the early reports do show is that the law is not yet reaching the kids it's meant to protect: by March 2026, the eSafety Commissioner found no measurable decline in reported cyberbullying or image-based abuse, and roughly 70 percent of parents whose children had previously held accounts believed their children still did.

The deeper questions are about the framework itself. Candice Odgers at UC Irvine and Amy Orben at Cambridge have long argued that the causal evidence linking social media to youth mental health decline is weaker than the Haidt framework presents, raising doubts about whether interventions built on separating teens from social media will deliver the outcomes proponents promise.

But the case for raising the age does not depend on age restriction being sufficient on its own. It buys time during the years when adolescent brains are still forming. It breaks the collective action trap from above, in a way no individual family can break it from below.

Raising the age does not fix the product, and it does nothing for the older teenagers already on the platforms. But it changes the terms on which the next generation encounters them.

Change What’s Normal

The third approach starts from a different question. Even if every mechanism in the first two approaches succeeded — accountability forcing the products to be safer, every age line raised — children will still encounter them. The question is what kind of children encounter them, and what tools they bring to the encounter.

This is the work of cultural change. It is the work parents, schools, and kids themselves can do without waiting for Congress, the courts, or any government at all. It moves at the speed of families talking to other families, of school boards or a single school principal rewriting their phone policies, of friend groups deciding together what they will and will not do. It does not require legal force.

The most widely adopted intervention is the phone-free school day. By early 2026, 35 states had enacted or recommended classroom phone restrictions, and many districts and individual schools had moved on their own ahead of state action. The early data is encouraging: a study of Florida's statewide ban found rising test scores and falling discipline problems by the second year. At one Louisville high school, library checkouts jumped 61 percent after phones came out of the classroom, and the library became, in the principal's words, a place where students "look at each other in the eyes and talk." At Portland's Grant High School, the principal noticed something simpler after his school went phone-free: lunchtime, he said, was loud again.

Alongside this sit broader efforts: Wait Until 8th, which asks parents to delay giving their children smartphones until at least eighth grade, and similar pledges that let parents act in coordinated cohorts rather than as isolated families. There is also a growing body of writing aimed at kids and teens themselves, including Catherine Price and Jonathan Haidt's The Amazing Generation, which is framed as an invitation rather than a prohibition.

Students are taking matters into their own hands. Student-led efforts like the Reconnect Movement, which creates phone-free social spaces without asking participants to give up phones entirely, have been spreading on high school and college campuses.

Whether phone-free schools and parent pledges reduce adolescent depression and anxiety at the population level is not yet known, and cannot yet be known. The phone-free school day movement is barely two years old at scale.

But the cultural-change approach does something the other two cannot. It does not protect children from a world that includes these platforms; it prepares children for that world. Phone-free school days are not just restrictions — they are practice in what attention without a phone feels like. Parent pledges are not just delays — they are demonstrations of what coordinated adult judgment looks like. The youth movement Haidt and Price describe is more than refusal — it is kids exercising the judgment they will need for the rest of their lives.

The goal is not a smaller world for children. It is the capacity to live in this one.

The Work Has Begun

What is a healthy human childhood?

The harms documented in this series did not arrive overnight, and the answer to them will not arrive overnight either. The tobacco settlement took decades to assemble. The leaded-gasoline ban took a generation. Public smoking bans came long after the science was settled. Industrial harm to children, once it has been built into a profitable consumer product, does not unwind on a political news cycle.

The lesson of the years since Section 230 became law is that this is not a decision the tech companies will make for us. The hands-off posture — Section 230’s shield, the deference to innovation, the assumption that tech leaders would act in the public interest — has been tested at scale and failed. The warnings came from inside the companies themselves — Meta, in particular: the Haugen disclosures, the Béjar testimony, the internal documents now part of the KGM trial record. The leadership chose not to act. A generation of children paid the price.

The decision cannot be left to tech companies. The public has to make it. We have to make it.

What can be said now, in the spring of 2026, is that the work has begun. A generation of parents, teachers, and kids themselves stopped accepting that this was normal. The KGM verdict in Los Angeles cracked the legal architecture. Australia raised the age. More than thirty U.S. states have enacted or recommended classroom phone restrictions. Students started organizing phone-free spaces of their own. None of these alone closes the gap between the harm Haidt and Price named on The Daily Show in February and the product still operating today. But the work of closing it has begun.

A generation of children was harmed by design. Whether the next generation grows up under different terms is the question now being answered.

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For is a deep-dive series that takes on one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like.

Previous series have examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, and a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens. Learn more at solvingfor.io.

In Part Two of our series on social media's impact on teen mental health, we turn to the forces that got us here. How the 1996 law shielded the industry for thirty years. How the platforms, behind that shield, engineered what Facebook’s founding president called a vulnerability in human psychology — and aimed it at children. How former employees broke ranks to expose what the company knew. How parents' lawyers, after years of losing, finally found the theory that worked. And how change is now stirring around the world, except in Washington.

Missed Part One? Go here to unpack the epidemic of depression, anxiety, and, tragically, suicide among a generation of teenagers — and social media’s role in it. Part Three will explore solutions. All series (for reading or listening) are at solvingfor.io.

In October 1994, an anonymous user logged onto a bulletin board called Money Talk and accused a Long Island brokerage firm of running fraudulent IPOs. The firm’s president, the post said, had committed a twenty-two-million-dollar criminal fraud.

The bulletin board was hosted by Prodigy — an early online service similar to AOL, a dial-up walled garden with about two million subscribers. The firm was Stratton Oakmont — the boiler room Jordan Belfort would later memorialize in The Wolf of Wall Street. The president was Danny Porush. The accusations were true. But in 1994, the fraud was still hidden, and Stratton Oakmont sued Prodigy for defamation. Its theory was that because Prodigy moderated its bulletin boards, it was acting as a publisher of its users’ speech.

On May 24, 1995, a New York judge agreed. If Prodigy had ignored its service and let anything through, it would have been protected as a distributor, like a bookstore. Because it had tried to moderate, it had become liable. The ruling created an impossible choice for every online service in America: moderate and be sued, or abandon moderation entirely.

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Two members of Congress — Chris Cox, a California Republican, and Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat — thought this was insane. A month after the Prodigy decision, they introduced a provision, buried inside the larger Telecommunications Act, whose operative language ran to twenty-six words:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Twenty-six words, written in response to a defamation suit by a boiler-room brokerage. Eight years before Facebook. Eleven before the iPhone.

On August 4, 1995, the House voted on the Cox-Wyden amendment. Not a single member spoke against it. The vote was 420 to 4. Six months later, President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act into law. The Cox-Wyden provision — now designated Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — took effect with it. Most of the surrounding statute was struck down within eighteen months as unconstitutional. Section 230 survived.

It would come to be called the twenty-six words that created the internet. It would also come to be called the twenty-six words that shielded social media from every parent who tried to hold it accountable for what it did to their child.

The Wall

Cox and Wyden's answer was reasonable for 1995. Let platforms moderate. Hold users responsible for what users say. Keep courts out of policing an emerging medium. For a while, it worked.

Then came the first real interpretation.

Six days after the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, an anonymous user posted on an AOL bulletin board advertising T-shirts that celebrated the attack. To order, the post said, call Ken in Seattle — and listed the phone number of Kenneth Zeran, a real man with no connection to the shirts. Within hours he was receiving death threats. He called AOL. AOL took the post down. Another appeared. The harassment continued for weeks.

By the time Zeran sued in 1996, Section 230 had just become law. AOL invoked it. The case reached the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

American law had long distinguished between publishers — liable for everything they put out — and distributors, like bookstores, liable only after being warned. That was the framework Zeran tried to invoke.

In 1997, the court threw it out. Section 230, the judges ruled, immunized AOL not just from being treated as a publisher, but from nearly any civil suit arising from user content — even when notified, even when a reasonable response would have prevented the harm. A bookstore could be sued for knowingly selling a defamatory book. AOL could not be sued for knowingly hosting a defamatory post.

Cox and Wyden had written a shield. Zeran made it a wall.

The industry that grew up behind that wall is the one we live inside now. Facebook launched in 2004. The iPhone arrived in 2007. Instagram in 2010. TikTok, in its current form, in 2017. Every one of them was built on the assumption that whatever the platform hosted, recommended, amplified, or addicted its users to, the company itself could not be sued for it.

Parents tried. In 2006, a thirteen-year-old girl in Texas named only as Julie Doe created a MySpace profile, lied about her age to get past the site’s safety defaults, and was contacted by a nineteen-year-old man who sexually assaulted her in person a few weeks later. Her mother sued MySpace for failing to implement basic safety measures — age verification, default privacy settings for minors. The Fifth Circuit dismissed the case in 2008. Section 230 barred it. The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal.

This became the pattern. Parents sued platforms for facilitating their children’s exploitation, addiction, harassment, and in some cases suicide. Courts dismissed the cases before discovery, often before the company had to produce a single internal document. The reasoning was nearly always the same: the harm came from content, content came from users, and Section 230 did not permit a court to treat the platform as responsible for either.

By the time the plaintiff known as Kaley filed the lawsuit KGM v Meta Platforms in 2023 — the case that would eventually crack the wall — Facebook alone had more than three billion monthly users. The combined market value of the platforms named as defendants — Meta, Google, Snap and TikTok’s parent ByteDance — exceeded three trillion dollars by the time her case reached trial. Every one of them had been built behind the wall.

The Machine

Behind the wall, they built an addiction machine.

This is not a metaphor. It is how the people who built it described what they were building. In 2017, Sean Parker — Facebook's founding president, who helped shape the company in its earliest years — sat down for an interview with Axios.

“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them,” Parker said, “was all about: How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”

The answer, he explained, was dopamine. Give the user a small chemical reward — a like, a comment, a notification. The brain learns to seek the next reward. Parker called it a "social-validation feedback loop," engineered to exploit "a vulnerability in human psychology.”

Then he said the sentence that matters most. “The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark, it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.” Asked about the long-term effects on young users, Parker said: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

This was the founding president of Facebook, in a published interview, describing the platform's design intent. The mechanisms he named — infinite scroll, intermittent variable rewards borrowed from slot machines, notifications engineered to manufacture urgency, beauty filters that drive what clinicians now call "Snapchat dysmorphia," algorithms that learn which content keeps a teenage girl scrolling longest and feed her more of it — were not invented for Facebook. They were borrowed from older industries that had spent the twentieth century learning to capture human attention and hold it.

The platforms did not deploy these mechanisms one at a time. They deployed them simultaneously, on a user base that included tens of millions of children and adolescents whose prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for impulse control — does not finish developing until somewhere around age twenty-five.

These were not bugs. They were the product. And behind the wall Section 230 built, there was no one to stop them.

The Inside Voices

For years, what the public knew about Meta came from outside the company. That changed in September 2021, when Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, walked out of the company with tens of thousands of pages of internal documents. She gave them to The Wall Street Journal, filed eight SEC complaints, and on October 5, 2021, testified before the Senate Commerce Committee.

The documents were Facebook's own research, on Facebook's own users. One Instagram study found that 13.5 percent of teenage girls in the U.K. said their suicidal thoughts worsened after they started using the platform. Another found 17 percent said the same about their eating disorders. A third found that 32 percent of teenage girls who already felt bad about their bodies said Instagram made them feel worse. The company’s researchers summarized it for internal leadership in a slide deck: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.”

That sentence appeared on a slide, in a meeting, inside the company, in 2019 — more than two years before the public saw it.

The documents also showed Facebook had known its platform was amplifying hate speech and misinformation around the 2020 U.S. election and the January 6 insurrection, in Ethiopia's civil war, and in the 2017 genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar. But the documents on teenagers stood out, because they were the cleanest — measured by the company's own researchers, on a defined population, in unambiguous language. That was the thread a plaintiffs' lawyer could pull on.

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Drawing a comparison that would define the next phase of the debate, Haugen told senators: “When we realized tobacco companies were hiding the harms [they] caused, the government took action.” Lawmakers from both parties agreed, on camera, that Congress would finally do something. Congress did not do something. The internal research did not produce regulation. It produced a news cycle.

Two years later, a second engineer walked out of Meta. Arturo Béjar was not a junior employee. He had been director of engineering for "Protect and Care" — Meta's user-safety and child-protection team — and returned as a consultant in 2019 to work on adolescent safety.

He came back, he later testified, because of his own daughter. She was fourteen. She and her friends had begun receiving unwanted sexual advances from adult men on Instagram. She had reported the messages. Nothing had happened.

Béjar spent two years collecting data. He found that 51 percent of Instagram users reported a “bad or harmful experience” on the app within the previous week. Among thirteen-to-fifteen-year-olds, one in eight had received unwanted sexual advances on Instagram within the previous seven days. On October 5, 2021 — the same day Haugen was testifying to the Senate — Béjar emailed Zuckerberg. He proposed specific, implementable changes. Zuckerberg never replied.

“Meta’s executives knew the harm that teenagers were experiencing,” Béjar told the Associated Press the week of his own Senate testimony in November 2023. “There were things that they could do that are very doable. And they chose not to do them.”

Haugen had shown the world what Meta’s own research found. Béjar showed the world what happened when someone inside the company tried to act on it. What they exposed inside the Senate, a jury in Los Angeles would confirm under oath four years later.

The Crack in the Wall

For almost thirty years, every parent's lawyer faced the same question: was this a case about content, or something else?

If content — what someone had posted, shared, or recommended — Section 230 applied, and the case was dismissed. The plaintiffs who built the case that became KGM v Meta Platforms argued something different: that the platforms themselves — the code, the features, the design — were defective products, built with full knowledge of what they would do to the children who used them.

The legal theory had a clean analogy. If a carmaker knows its brakes will fail at highway speed and sells the car anyway, the manufacturer can be sued — not for what the driver did, but for how the car was built. What matters is whether the product was unreasonably dangerous for its intended use, and whether the manufacturer knew.

Put simply, it's a case about how the product was designed.

Translate that framework to Instagram, and Section 230 had nothing to say about it. Section 230 protected platforms from being treated as publishers of user content. It did not protect them from being treated as designers of a product. Infinite scroll was not speech. The dopamine-calibrated notification schedule was not speech. The algorithm’s decision to keep a teenage girl on a feed of self-harm videos was engineering. And engineering, in every other industry, could be sued.

Parents’ lawyers had been circling this insight for years. It took a judge willing to let it reach a jury.

In October 2023, Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl of the Los Angeles Superior Court — overseeing thousands of consolidated cases — issued an eighty-nine-page ruling that became the template. She rejected the platforms' Section 230 defense. She rejected their First Amendment defense. She allowed the central theory to proceed: that platforms could be held liable in negligence for their design features and for failing to warn users about the addictive properties of those features.

It was the ruling parents’ lawyers had been waiting a generation for.

Two years later, Kuhl denied the platforms’ motions for summary judgment in three bellwether cases. The first — K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms — went to trial in Los Angeles on January 27, 2026.

The verdict came seven weeks later. The internal documents that Haugen and Béjar had pulled out of Meta — IG is a drug. We’re basically pushers. We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls — were read aloud in open court, admitted into evidence, handed to a jury of twelve. On March 25, 2026, that jury found Meta and Google liable. The wall Section 230 had erected around the industry — the wall Zeran had made impregnable — did not cover what those companies had chosen to do.

Meta and Google announced within hours that they would appeal. The appeals will take years. The parallel federal trials in Oakland begin in June. Roughly sixteen hundred individual plaintiffs are already lined up behind KGM in the California proceeding alone.

But the wall had cracked. For the first time in the life of the internet, an American jury had looked at the machine that Section 230 had protected, and had said this was not speech. It was a product, and the company that designed it knew.

The Convergence

In April 1994, seven tobacco CEOs swore under oath before Congress that nicotine was not addictive. The industry's own research had documented the truth for decades. A few months later, a paralegal at Brown & Williamson's law firm anonymously mailed four thousand pages of it to a researcher in California. By 1998, tobacco companies had signed the Master Settlement Agreement with forty-six state attorneys general — $206 billion, the largest civil litigation settlement in American history. Before 1994, the tobacco industry had never lost a product-liability suit. After 1994, it lost and kept losing. What changed was not the harm. What changed was the evidence.

Frances Haugen, testifying in 2021, drew the comparison herself. The analogy is not perfect — tobacco took forty years, social media has had two decades since Facebook launched, and Section 230 has functioned as a kind of preemptive immunity tobacco never had. But the shape of the arc is recognizable. The KGM verdict is an early plaintiff win. The documents are being read in open court. More than forty state attorneys general, across the political spectrum, have filed their own lawsuits against Meta since 2023. The pattern that would make a Master Settlement thinkable is assembling.

And it is assembling on more than one front.

Every direction, that is, except Washington. The Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate in July 2024 by ninety-one to three. It died in the House. Reintroduced in 2025, it was gutted. No Section 230 reform has advanced. The federal government, which alone can regulate the industry at the national level, is — for the foreseeable future — out of the game.

But others are not.

In November 2024, the Australian Parliament passed the first national law in the world to ban children under sixteen from holding social media accounts. It took effect in late 2025. Platforms are required to identify and remove underage users or face fines of up to fifty million Australian dollars. Denmark, France, the U.K., and the European Commission have begun moving in similar directions. New York restricted algorithmic feeds for minors; Utah, Arkansas, California, and Virginia passed their own laws. The pressure is coming from every direction except the federal one.

The whistleblower bookshelf, meanwhile, has kept growing. Roger McNamee’s Zucked in 2019. Haugen’s The Power of One, published in 2023. Béjar’s testimony in 2023. In March 2025, Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook executive, published Careless People, a memoir that described a “lethal carelessness” at the top of the company. It reached number one on The New York Times bestseller list. Meta won an emergency arbitration order barring her from promoting the book, and tried to block her Senate testimony too. What was once an unusual act of corporate conscience has become a genre.

The wall Section 230 built has cracked. What finishes breaking it down, if anything does, will come from the same places it has been coming from — the parents and children who brought the cases, plaintiffs' lawyers, state legislatures, foreign governments, the former employees of the companies themselves. But not the U.S. federal government. At least not soon.

Next: We explore the solutions being implemented — and those still being pursued and imagined.

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For is a deep-dive series that takes on one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like.

Previous series have examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, and a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens. Learn more at solvingfor.io.

For this series we examine the youth mental health crisis — an epidemic of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide among teenagers that public health officials now treat as an emergency. The data is stark, the timeline is clear, and the internal documents are now public. How it took this long — and whether we’re truly at a reckoning yet — is a story about power, money, and the law.

Today’s installment examines the problem — including a landmark jury verdict that may have changed everything. Next, the forces that got us here: the lobbyists, the regulatory vacuum, and the 26 words that made it possible. The third part explores solutions.

In November 2016, Mark Zuckerberg — CEO of Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram — made a decision. The company’s own data showed that younger users were exceptionally high-retention — far easier to capture, and far more valuable over a lifetime, than older ones. The directive went out in an email on November 7th.

“Mark has decided that the top priority for the company in H1 2017 is teens.”

Facebook is free. Instagram is free. But when a product is free, the user isn't the customer — the user is the product. The actual customers are advertisers, who pay Meta for access to human attention. The more attention Meta captures, the more it can charge. The longer someone stays on the platform, the more valuable they are. And the earlier in life you capture someone, the longer the runway — and the harder it becomes for them to leave.

Meta knew where to apply pressure. "Tweens," in the company's own language, were three times more likely to keep returning to Facebook than a 32-year-old. A 2018 internal document, titled "The Young Ones are the Best Ones," made the logic plain: “Tweens (approximate age 10–12) are special. People who join Facebook as tweens have the highest long term retention out of all age groups.”

There was one problem. Facebook's own terms of service required users to be at least thirteen. The tweens Meta was building its future around weren't old enough to be there.

Meta's internal documents show they decided it didn't matter. “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.”

They also knew what the product was doing to the children it was capturing. In one internal exchange, an employee described Instagram with four words: “IG is a drug.” A colleague responded without apparent alarm: “We’re basically pushers.” The conversation went on to compare the platform’s design to slot machines — systems “optimized to keep you engaged as much as possible.”

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The exchange was not unique — similar language runs through the internal documents that would later surface in court. And for years, none of it left the building. Meta's public face was connection, community — bringing the world closer together, as the company's mission statement put it.

Many shared that belief when social media first arrived. The techno-optimism that greeted these platforms — the sense that connection was inherently good, that more of it could only be better — has since curdled into something darker.

It has undermined democracy, spread disinformation, gutted local news, and sowed division. But perhaps most alarming is what it has done to an entire generation of teenagers: an epidemic of depression, loneliness, and suicide that public health officials now treat as a crisis.

In 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General called the mental health crisis among young people an emergency and urged Congress to require warning labels on social media platforms — the same labels that go on cigarettes and alcohol. In December 2025, Australia became the first country to ban children under 16 from social media outright. Greece is planning similar action, and governments from Europe to Asia are watching to see if it works. More than a dozen American states have passed their own restrictions.

The question is no longer whether something went wrong. It is whether we can agree on what to do about it. This Solving For series will examine how it happened, why it took this long to reach a reckoning, and what's actually being done to fix it.

When the Lines Bent

To understand what went wrong, start with the numbers. For decades, rates of teen depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, and suicide had held roughly steady.

Then social media arrived. Facebook in 2004. Twitter, now X, in 2006. Then the smartphone made it portable — the iPhone launched in 2007, the Samsung Galaxy in 2009. Suddenly, people carried social media everywhere.

Then, in 2012, the lines bent.

Depression came first into view. In the decade between 2013 and 2023, the share of high schoolers reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness jumped from 30 percent to 40 percent. Nearly 1 in 5 teenagers — about 4.5 million adolescents — had a major depressive episode in the past year. Among girls, the rate was 53 percent. Among LGBTQ+ youth, 65 percent. The trends were consistent across race, income, and geography. The sharpest increases appeared among girls and young women.

The loneliness data is, in some ways, even more striking. From 1991 to 2007, teen loneliness had actually been declining. Then, starting around 2012, it reversed — and accelerated. By 2019, 48 percent more teens felt lonely than had in 2011. The World Health Organization now identifies teenagers as the loneliest age group on earth — 1 in 5 report experiencing loneliness, a rate higher than any other demographic, including the elderly. And this was not an American phenomenon. A study of students across 37 countries found that school loneliness increased between 2012 and 2018 in 36 of them. Wherever smartphone access and internet use were high, loneliness was high.

The suicide data tells the same story, and the same timeline. The share of teenagers seriously considering suicide was around 16 percent before 2012. By 2023 it was 1 in 5 — and that understates the scope. Today, suicide is the second leading cause of death for Americans ages 10 to 34. In 2024, 2.6 million teenagers still had thoughts of suicide. Seven hundred thousand attempted it.

Researchers went looking for a cause. They ruled out the economy — the years between 2010 and 2015 were a period of steady economic growth and falling unemployment. They ruled out academic pressure — homework time barely moved. Income inequality had been widening for decades without producing a sudden break in the data. What had changed, suddenly and universally, was something else. Smartphone ownership crossed the 50 percent threshold between late 2012 and early 2013 — right when teen depression and suicide began to climb.

Rising Alarm, No Accountability

In 2019, Roger McNamee — an early Facebook investor and one of Zuckerberg's mentors — published Zucked, a first-person account of watching a platform he'd helped build become something he no longer recognized. In 2020, The Social Dilemma, a Netflix documentary featuring former engineers and executives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter, put the mechanics of the attention economy in front of a mass audience for the first time. It was watched by tens of millions of people in its first month. In 2024, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation, which marshaled years of data to argue that social media and the smartphone had fundamentally rewired adolescent development — and that the industry had known, and had done nothing.

All of it — the books, the documentaries, the congressional hearings, the whistleblowers — struck a nerve. The Anxious Generation has been on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly two years. And yet none of it produced accountability. Meta and other social media companies marched forward, arguing publicly and in legislative testimony that the research was inconclusive, that correlation wasn’t causation, that they were committed to user safety.

Then came the litigation.

Thousands of families began suing Meta and other social media companies, alleging the deliberate design of addictive products targeting children. One of those cases, KGM v. Meta, went to trial in Los Angeles this year and lasted seven weeks. Jurors heard the internal documents read back to the company in open court — the emails, the slide decks, the employee exchanges about drugs and pushers and slot machines. And they heard from a young woman who had first logged on at six years old.

She is the plaintiff in the case, identified in court documents only by her initials — KGM. Her lawyers called her Kaley.

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Kaley

She grew up in Chico, California, in a quiet cul-de-sac where her mother threw themed birthday parties and took her to Six Flags. She started using YouTube at six years old.

By the time she finished elementary school, she had posted 284 videos on YouTube. She was on Instagram by nine. As a child, she set up multiple accounts so she could like and comment on her own posts. She bought likes through a service where she could like other people’s photos and receive a flood of them in return. “It made me look popular,” she told the jury.

The notifications gave her a rush — she would slip away to the bathroom during school to check them. Beauty filters on Instagram — tools that let her reshape how she looked to the world. A nearly 35-foot canvas banner of her Instagram photos was unfurled in the courtroom. She said almost all of them had a filter on them.

There is a video from this period, introduced at trial, that shows a young Kaley surpassing 100 YouTube subscribers — she is crying tears of joy. Then she turns to the camera and apologizes for her appearance. “I look so fat in this shirt,” the young Kaley says.

Kaley began cutting herself. She developed body dysmorphia, anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts. When she tried to set limits on her use, it wouldn’t work. She couldn’t stop.

Meta’s defense was direct: her problems preceded the platforms. Not one of her therapists had identified social media as the cause of her mental health struggles. The company pointed to a turbulent home life. The jury’s task, under California law, was not to find that Instagram caused Kaley’s suffering — only that it was a substantial factor in it.

The First Finding

On March 25, 2026, the jury held Meta liable for deliberately harming a child — for acting with “malice, oppression, or fraud.” They had looked at everything the company knew, everything it decided, and everything that followed — and they held it accountable.

The verdict came one day after a New Mexico jury found Meta liable for misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms and endangering children, ordering $375 million in civil penalties.

The Los Angeles award was smaller: $3 million in compensatory damages and an additional $3 million in punitive damages, with Meta bearing 70 percent of the liability and Google-owned YouTube 30. But the size of the award was not the point. The verdict was a bellwether — a test of whether juries would hold social media companies responsible for the harm their products caused. This one did. Thousands more cases are waiting.

It has prompted comparisons to another industry that once seemed untouchable: tobacco.

A Signal, Not Yet a Reckoning

The evidence is now public. Meta wasn’t just aware that its platforms were reaching younger and younger users — it was engineering that outcome, internally targeting tweens between the ages of 10 and 12 as the foundation of its long-term growth strategy. It also knew, from its own research, that teenagers were being harmed by those same platforms. And it continued optimizing for engagement anyway. With more than 10,000 similar suits still pending, KGM v. Meta may be less an ending than an opening — the first verdict in what could be a sustained legal reckoning.

But litigation is not the same as a solution. The tobacco industry paid hundreds of billions of dollars in settlements and kept selling cigarettes. What changed tobacco was not the verdicts alone — it was what the verdicts made possible: regulation, restriction, a cultural shift so complete that a cigarette in a children’s movie is now unthinkable. Whether social media follows that arc, or whether the companies pay, adjust, and keep optimizing for the same children remains an open question.

For now, what the verdict proved most of all: that these companies can be held to account in a court of law. For three decades, that accountability was effectively foreclosed — blocked by 26 words written into law in 1996 that gave platforms broad immunity from exactly this kind of suit. Into that vacuum, the industry built the architecture of addiction: infinite scroll, recommendation algorithms tuned for compulsion, beauty filters tested on teenage girls, a product strategy that explicitly targeted children before they were old enough to resist it.

Years before a jury reached that conclusion, at least one person inside Meta already had. According to court filings, an employee reacted to the company’s push to recruit underage users with a message to colleagues: “Oh good, we’re going after <13 year olds now? Zuck has been talking about that for a while… targeting 11 year olds feels like tobacco companies a couple decades ago. Like we’re seriously saying ‘we have to hook them young’ here.”

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For is a deep-dive series that takes on one pressing problem at a time: what's broken, what's driving it, and what a path forward might look like.

Previous series have examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, and a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens. Learn more at solvingfor.io.

We return to The Open Thread — our bridge between deep-dive series. It’s a less formal space to update past stories, experiment from time to time, and look ahead. This one marks a milestone — the halfway point of year one. I learn something new with each series — and I'd love to know what's landing for you, what could be better, and what problems you think deserve a deep dive. Hit reply or leave a comment. This project gets better with your input.

Solving For started for a personal reason: we have a lot of problems to solve, and I wanted to better understand ways to fix them. Naming a problem is easy. Becoming fluent in solutions is harder.

The idea: one pressing problem at a time. Each series is a long-form journalism project that unpacks what's broken, explores the forces shaping it, and spotlights credible solutions. Every installment is available to read or listen.

Six series in. Eighteen installments. We’ve explored:

China’s chokehold on rare earth elements — the invisible backbone of modern life. The race to build AI, but do it safely. A Congress so uncompetitive it’s marked more by posturing than problem solving. College athletes finally getting paid, with the rules still being written. A world rearming at the fastest pace since the Cold War, with the guardrails breaking down. And the collapse of local news — which turns out to be less a media story than a democracy one. (Go here to read or listen to each series — or scroll down for the full lineup.)

If this work has been worth your time and you’re not a paid subscriber, I have an ask: become a paid subscriber — and share Solving For with friends.

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Ending in a Different Place

With each series I’ve found there’s a learning arc — arriving at conclusions I didn’t fully anticipate when I started. If I’m doing my job right, the same is true for you.

The most recent series was on local news — and the hardest to write, perhaps because I spent nearly a decade as a local news reporter. Here's what the learning arc produced: four takeaways I've been thinking about — and I'd love to hear yours.

First, it’s a democracy problem. The ripple effects of local news’ decline reach further than most people realize — and they’re measurable. Where accountability journalism disappears, voter turnout drops and cities’ borrowing costs rise — lenders, it turns out, price in the absence of scrutiny. National partisan media fills the vacuum, but what it offers isn’t information. It’s identity. Rooted in ideology, not place.

One statistic stopped me: a Gallup survey from late 2024 found that 80% of Americans believe we’re deeply divided over our most important values — a number climbing steadily since about 2005, the same moment local news began its collapse. In the two decades since, 3,500 papers have closed, erasing 40 percent of the nation’s local newspapers.

The decline in local news and rise in America’s divide have happened in parallel. That’s not a media story. That’s a democracy story.

Second, build journalism products people love. In our urgency to save local news, we assumed offering news was enough. It’s not.

Clunky websites, impersonal newsletters, podcasts abandoned after a few tries, sloppy design, events treated as afterthoughts — too often the work ends when the story goes up on the website. It’s not a resource problem. It’s cultural. Nobody wins a journalism award for a great user experience.

Lookout Santa Cruz — a for-profit startup launched in 2020 — proves the alternative is possible. They’ve built something people want to read, not just something people are glad exists. Pulitzer winner in 2024. Profitable in 2025. I liked their morning newsletter enough that I signed up to get it, too - even though I live in Miami, not California.

Great journalism is required. So is a great product.

Third, scale. Ted Williams founded Charlotte Agenda in 2015 and sold it to Axios for nearly $5 million in 2020. A point he made when we spoke: one of the most overlooked problems in local journalism is “the erosion of business talent.” Extraordinary reporters and editors exist across the country. Entrepreneurs in local journalism, not enough.

The people who know how to build, scale, and sustain — who in another era might have launched a local news outlet — are going elsewhere.

Seeding hundreds of small nonprofit newsrooms likely won’t solve the problem at the speed it requires. The economics of a single small operation have real limits. That’s why Knight Foundation’s consideration of buying McClatchy in 2020 — turning it into a locally rooted, nationally scaled, digital-only nonprofit — strikes me as the kind of bet that still needs to be made. Scale changes the math.

After two decades of experiments and seeding efforts, the moment calls for large bets on single ideas, bearing the risk of failure, and ambitions commensurate with the problem.

Fourth, AI. The internet arrived in the 1990s. Social media followed in the 2000s. Local news never fully recovered from either. Now AI is here. The response to the internet was fear, denial, and ambivalence. As University of Maryland's Tom Rosenstiel said, “Now we have another chance, because this is as big as the internet.”

Money is important — but maybe not everything?

Our deep dive, The Amateur Myth: Solving For College Athlete Pay, explored the challenge of paying athletes who generate billions in revenue while preserving the traditions and educational mission that give college sports meaning — and sustaining non-revenue programs like swimming and track. Players are now being paid, as they should be. How they're paid, and how athletic programs are funded, remains a work in progress.

This year’s NCAA Men’s basketball tournament, which concluded in Indianapolis with the Final Four, has reminded us that money matters — but it’s not everything.

Just one team in the Final Four — Michigan — has players among the ten highest-paid in the country, according to On3, which tracks athlete compensation. Michigan forwards Morez Johnson (fifth) and Yaxel Lendeborg (seventh) each earn $2 million a year. But UConn, Illinois, and Arizona don't have a single top-ten earner.

Michigan and Arizona each crack the top ten in total roster pay, but aren’t at the very top. The Wolverines rank fifth, in a tie with three other schools, at $10.5 million; the Wildcats are tied for 10th at $9.5 million.

Kentucky, ranked first, paid its roster $20 million and was bounced in the second round. BYU ($13 million), Duke ($12 million), Arkansas ($11.5 million), Louisville, Texas Tech, and St. John's (each at $10.5 million) are all out.

Many of the top spenders aren't in Indianapolis. The teams that are suggest something else still matters.

Competition in Congress

Candidates for U.S. House and Senate seats sprinted this week to close out their first quarter fundraising. Final phone calls, texts, emails, and social media blitzes went right up until midnight on March 31. The numbers matter: they signal viability, reveal the depth and breadth of a candidate's support, and tell campaigns what they’ll have on hand to spend on advertising, field work, and staff.

Candidates have until April 15 to file with the Federal Election Commission — meaning the full picture comes into focus shortly.

Five states have already held primaries. The rest will follow between now and September, when voters select their party's nominees — before the closely watched midterms on November 3rd.

Democrats, currently shut out of power in Washington, are seeking to win back a majority in the U.S. House and, potentially, the Senate.

In our series, The Democracy Deficit: Solving for Competition in the People's House, we identified a quiet crisis hiding in plain sight: the U.S. House — designed by the framers to be the most responsive legislative body in America — is hardly competitive at all. As a result, it is marked more by posturing than problem solving.

For some time, reforms have been proposed to make congressional races more competitive. But it hasn't happened yet — and the current election cycle proves it. According to the Cook Political Report, just 17 of 435 House races this year are tossups. Less than four percent.

It's a far cry from James Madison's vision in Federalist No. 52 — a House with “an immediate dependence on, and intimate sympathy with, the people.”

Up Next

For our next series we dive into what's happening to a generation of kids — rising rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness — and what, if anything, we can do about it. Australia banned social media for anyone under 16. Jonathan Haidt wrote a bestseller indicting the phone-based childhood. And on March 25th, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in a landmark social media addiction trial — drawing comparisons to the legal crusade against Big Tobacco in the 1990s.

The dam may be breaking. Or is it? The harder question is what comes next. If you have research, books, or personal experience that should inform this series, hit reply -- I'd love to hear from you.

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For is a deep-dive series that takes on one pressing problem at a time — what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like. Learn more here.

Previous Series

The 21st Century’s Oil: Solving For China’s Rare Earth Dominance

• Part 1, Rare Earths: The Invisible Backbone

• Part 2, Rare Earths: The Middle Kingdom’s Monopoly

• Part 3, Rare Earths: The Race to Reinvent

The Control Problem: Solving For AI Safety

• Part 1, AI: The Race and the Reckoning

• Part 2, AI: The Prisoner’s Dilemma

• Part 3, AI: The New Nuclear Moment

The Democracy Deficit: Solving For Competition in the People’s House

• Part 1, Congress: The Vanishing Competition

• Part 2, Congress: How We Got Stuck

• Part 3, Congress: Making Democracy Competitive Again

The Amateur Myth: Solving For College Athlete Pay

• Part 1, College Sports: How It Was Broken By a $60 Video Game

• Part 2, College Sports: How the NCAA was Born of Death and Money — Death was the Easy Part

• Part 3, College Sports: The Fork in the Road

The 80-Year Peace: Solving For a Rearming World

• Part 1, War & Peace: The World Rearms

• Part 2, War & Peace: From 1989’s Hope to Rearmament

• Part 3, War & Peace: Rebuilding the Global Order

The Community Gap: Solving For Local News

• Part 1, Local News: The Civic Unraveling

• Part 2, Local News: The Internet Was the First Disruption. AI Is the Next.

• Part 3, Local News: The Bet That Wasn’t Made, But Could Still Be

DISCLOSURE: I served as Miami Director at Knight Foundation from 2011 to 2017, and as a staff writer at The Miami Herald from 2004 to 2011 — during which time the Herald was owned first by Knight-Ridder, then by McClatchy. The events described in the Local News series occurred after my tenure at Knight Foundation ended.

For Part Three in our series on the collapse of local news, the focus turns to solutions — what's been tried, what's been learned, and what a path forward demands. If you missed them, Part One unpacks the problem and Part Two examines the forces that got us here.

In March 2020, Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibargüen and trustees gathered for the foundation's quarterly board meeting to consider a radical proposal: buy the second-biggest newspaper chain in America — and rebuild local news from the ground up.

McClatchy, owner of 30 news organizations including The Miami Herald, San Jose Mercury News, Kansas City Star and Charlotte Observer, had filed for bankruptcy the previous month. It was the latest marker in a two-decade unraveling that had hollowed out local coverage across the country and helped fuel rising distrust and polarization.

A handful of national publications had navigated the shift. The New York Times leveraged its scale and global audience to move from an advertiser-driven revenue model to a subscriber-driven one. Local publications — without that advantage — continued to spiral.

This was an opportunity to change that — not paper by paper, but at scale.

Knight Foundation was the largest philanthropic funder of journalism in the United States. After 15 years funding experiments in search of solutions for local news in the digital age, the decline had not been reversed. But something important had been learned: local, digital, nonprofit news wasn’t a pipe dream. It could work.

Ibargüen understood the terrain from the inside. Before leading Knight, he had spent years in local news — at the Hartford Courant, at Newsday, and ultimately as publisher of The Miami Herald. At Newsday, he had once been shown an early tablet prototype displaying a newspaper. He knew then: this was the future.

So the foundation contemplated a fundamental shift: from funder to operator.

Knight’s endowment stood at roughly $2 billion, supporting journalism, arts, and community initiatives. The proposal called for consolidating its journalism funding — and drawing a major slice from the endowment — on a single bet: buy McClatchy’s portfolio and convert it into a locally rooted, nationally scaled, digital-only nonprofit news organization.

The plan addressed three structural problems that had undermined local news. Scale: in a subscriber-driven world, a national network could aggregate audience and compete for both subscription and national advertising revenue. Digital: fully embracing a future that legacy papers had resisted by ending print and going digital-only. Nonprofit: a mission-driven model could attract philanthropy while reinvesting back into journalism.

Ibargüen, who outlined the plan, said each publication would remain intensely local. “Something a local would read and say, ‘this is written for people like me.’”

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That day in March 2020 — as COVID was sweeping the world — the foundation’s trustees approved hiring consultants to assess the move: Greenberg Traurig to navigate the bankruptcy; Houlihan Lokey for investment banking; Alvarez & Marsal for financial advisory; McKinsey to assess the market; and Caplin & Drysdale, the law firm that had led The Salt Lake Tribune’s conversion to nonprofit status the year before.

The spending outline: $320 million to acquire McClatchy, $40 million to hire digital talent, $40 million to improve the user experience, and $40 million to manage the transition to a fully digital operation.

Knight would effectively become a holding company of two entities: Knight News Network, operating news organizations across the country, and Knight Foundation, continuing its grant-making in journalism, arts and community development.

There was a historical symmetry to the idea. Many of the papers had once belonged to the newspaper empire that brothers Jack and Jim Knight built before it merged to become Knight-Ridder — the largest newspaper chain in the country at its peak — and eventually sold to McClatchy. Knight Foundation was itself created from the brothers’ personal wealth.

Now, the foundation bearing their name was contemplating buying those papers back.

In the internet era, it remains the most ambitious plan proposed to rebuild local journalism at scale.

And one of the greatest what-ifs in 21st-century American news.

As the COVID shutdown deepened and uncertainty rippled through markets, the move became increasingly daunting. Buying a newspaper company already in bankruptcy — with advertising markets in freefall and no clear bottom — put the board in direct tension with its fiduciary duty to preserve the foundation’s assets.

And there was another factor: Ibargüen’s wife, Susana, had been diagnosed with ALS. There was no guarantee the CEO who had conceived the plan would be around to execute it.

Knight had already been designated as a qualified bidder in the bankruptcy process. But the trustees ultimately decided the risk was too great. No bid was submitted.

On August 4, 2020, McClatchy was sold in U.S. Bankruptcy Court to Chatham Asset Management — a hedge fund whose primary purpose was extracting profit, not reimagining local news in the digital age.

The decline of local news remains one of the most stubborn — and consequential — problems in American life.

Now the rebuilding effort faces a second disruption before the first is finished: artificial intelligence.

Part Three examines the solutions tried, the AI disruption, and what a way forward demands.

“When the internet happened, we were basically in fear and denial,” Tom Rosenstiel, University of Maryland’s Eleanor Merrill Scholar on the Future of Journalism, said in a Medill Local News Initiative report. “Now we have another chance, because this is as big as the internet.”

For Ibargüen, nothing less than democracy is at stake.

“An informed citizenry is necessary for a well-functioning democracy,” he said. “And you can’t do it without verification journalism.”

What’s Been Tried

The solutions to rebuild local news have come in four waves. Each made progress. None solved the problem.

Nonprofit

The first — and largest — was the nonprofit response. Voice of San Diego in 2005, ProPublica in 2008, the Texas Tribune in 2009 — each demonstrated a piece of the model.

Underlying it was the premise that local news is a vital civic good — like a museum, community hospital or public library — and should be supported accordingly.

Nonprofit news organizations began to sprout up across the country. By 2019 the American Journalism Project brought venture capital logic to journalism philanthropy, raising more than $240 million and investing in 50 newsrooms across 36 states. In 2023 Press Forward organized the funders themselves — more than 100 donors committing more than $400 million across the U.S.

Along the way, The Salt Lake Tribune became the first legacy newspaper to convert directly from for-profit to nonprofit status, in 2019. In 2025 it reported revenues of $13.57 million against expenses of $12.4 million — a proof of concept that Knight Foundation had considered replicating at scale.

Meanwhile, as local news organizations struggled, hedge funds discovered that shrinking news organizations could be a path to profit — effectively strip-mining them by extracting profits, selling off assets and downsizing. To counter that, National Trust for Local News launched in 2021, borrowing from the land conservation playbook: acquire papers before hedge funds could, then convert them to nonprofit ownership. By 2026 it owned more than 70 brands, though in 2025 it sold 21 papers back to a for-profit company.

Reflecting the sector’s rise: the Institute for Nonprofit News grew from 27 members in 2009, when it was founded, to 520 today. Nearly 400 digital-first nonprofit newsrooms generate an estimated $650–700 million in combined annual revenue.

But against the collapse, the math is humbling.

The country has lost nearly 3,500 newspapers since 2005. One in four Americans now lives in a county with zero or one newspaper, according to Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative. The entire nonprofit sector’s annual revenue today is roughly equivalent to two major metro papers at their peak — for instance, in 2000, The Miami Herald and San Jose Mercury News reported combined revenues of $651.6 million, roughly the scale of today’s nonprofit news industry.

The sector proved the concept. It hasn’t come close to filling the void.

Wealthy buyer

Private wealth has long played a role in building civic institutions — industrialist Andrew Carnegie, for instance, funded more than 2,500 libraries — prompting hopes that a similar mix of capital, business acumen, and civic mission could help rebuild local news.

In 2013, Jeff Bezos paid $250 million for The Washington Post, and John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool Football Club, bought The Boston Globe for $70 million. Glen Taylor, owner of the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, acquired the Minnesota Star Tribune for $100 million in 2014. Surgeon and entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the Los Angeles Times for $500 million in 2018.

Results have been mixed — the most visible disappointment at Bezos’ Washington Post, which in February 2026 cut a third of its staff.

For-profit startups

The nonprofit wave emerged from the belief that the internet had permanently broken local news' revenue model. But in the past decade, others have made a different bet: local news can still work as a business — just not the one it used to be.

The general approach: small teams, low costs, service journalism — delivered through pithy, engaging newsletters.

In 2015, Ted Williams left The Charlotte Observer to launch Charlotte Agenda. The bet: useful, conversational content — where to eat, what schools are best — delivered through a newsletter, website, and Instagram would find an audience. By 2020, Axios, known for its “smart brevity” format, bought it for nearly $5 million — folding it into a local newsletter network that now spans nearly three dozen cities.

Village Media, founded in 2013, built a profitable network across smaller Canadian communities by clustering markets to share infrastructure and costs. It’s now planning a U.S. expansion.

Lookout Local, founded in Santa Cruz in 2020, built depth in a single market. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 2024, reached profitability in 2025, and has expanded to Eugene-Springfield, Oregon.

These models proved local news can be a viable business again — but viability came with a tradeoff. The journalism that survived is typically useful, everyday coverage. What largely didn’t is watchdog journalism that holds power accountable.

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Policy

The fourth wave is policy and infrastructure — and it has the oldest roots. The founders understood an informed public required public support: President George Washington signed the Postal Act in 1792, making it cheaper to send newspapers through the mail than private correspondence.

Modern efforts follow that logic. In 2017, reporters Charlie Sennott and Steve Waldman launched Report for America to place early-career reporters in local newsrooms covering beats that had gone dark. In 2023, Waldman launched Rebuild Local News as a stand-alone policy effort.

The mechanisms vary: tax credits for newsroom hiring; proposals requiring platforms to pay publishers; and state-level funding pools. Some have advanced, others have stalled — including a widely heralded $175 million agreement between Google and California to fund local news that ultimately collapsed.

But a tension remains: a press dependent on government is a press government can influence. The most durable protection for communities has always been journalism that’s independent and sustainable.

New Disruption, New Chance

The two-decade rebuilding effort was designed to address one disruption. Then a second arrived before the first was finished.

On Nov. 30, 2022, ChatGPT was released. Anthropic’s Claude followed in March 2023, Google’s Gemini in December 2023.

The threats AI present are already emerging. Search traffic for local news organizations has been eroding for years — but AI chatbots are accelerating that decline in a new way. Unlike a Google search, they don’t return links. They return full, synthesized answers. The local news site isn’t cited. It isn’t even visited. Traffic from traditional search engines has declined 60 percent for small publishers over the past two years, according to Chartbeat.

Another threat is so-called “pink slime” — AI-generated sites that mimic the look and name of local outlets without employing a single journalist. In one case reported by GBH News, a pink slime site published an AI-hallucinated murder in New Jersey — a killing that never happened, reported as fact. NewsGuard, which tracks the credibility of news websites, now estimates that there are as many pink slime sites as websites for actual daily newspapers in the U.S.

“It is as pernicious as any of the other contributing causes to this local news crisis because it undermines the legitimate hand-woven truths of local news organizations struggling to survive,” Charlie Sennott, publisher of the Martha’s Vineyard Times and Report for America co-founder, told GBH News.

But the opportunity is equally real.

The Sahan Journal in Minnesota used AI to unlock audience data and sharpen advertising pitches. CalMatters is using it to track and transcribe every word and vote in California legislative hearings. Axios built a tool — the Axiomizer — that sharpens headlines and context without replacing reporting.

“There is not going to be a part of a news organization that isn’t touched by AI in some form,” said Liam Andrew, technology lead at the American Journalism Project’s Product & AI Studio, which supports local news organizations as they experiment with and adopt AI.

But when asked how nonprofit newsrooms are responding to the change, Andrew said he's always concerned that not enough time is spent thinking about the future. "It's so hard with the news cycle every day."

A Way Forward

The work on all four fronts continues — and it should. Nonprofits are still growing. Philanthropy is still needed. For-profit discipline and entrepreneurship is critical. Policy efforts are still advancing. The question isn’t whether any of these efforts matter. The question is whether they add up.

So far, they haven't — not at the speed or scale the problem demands. But the work has produced lessons that matter as we enter the AI era.

The central one: success is built on a direct relationship with readers. Not through platforms. Not via social media algorithms that can vanish without warning. The most durable local news organizations own their audience — through email lists, apps, membership and subscription programs that don't depend on any platform's goodwill.

But technology is only part of it. People trust people before institutions. A reader who knows a reporter's name, follows their work, or shows up to hear them speak is not just a subscriber — they are harder to lose, and harder to replace.

Alongside that: lead with service. Accountability journalism remains essential. But trust precedes impact. People subscribe because something improves their lives. The outlets building durable relationships lead with what's happening in your neighborhood, what decisions mean for your family, what to do this weekend. That earns the trust to do accountability journalism. Service first. Accountability follows.

And deliver it well — create journalism products people love. Local news has often fallen short. Slow websites, cluttered mobile experiences, clumsy newsletters, too little investment in design, audio, and video. The journalism has to be excellent, and the product has to be excellent too. One without the other doesn't hold.

On AI: it's not an option, it's the opportunity. Newsrooms already embracing it — using it to translate, to monitor public records, to extend reporting capacity — are expanding what they can cover, not shrinking who covers it.

In-person connection is the moat. The Texas Tribune built a business around “live journalism” — events that turn audiences into communities, and communities into paying supporters. That logic holds at any scale. As AI becomes more embedded in daily life, the value of human connection will only grow. Local news organizations are uniquely positioned to deliver it.

But here is the harder truth: applied well, these principles can build a sustainable local newsroom — and we’ve seen it happen. They cannot, on their own, rebuild local journalism.

The economics of a single newsroom — even a well-run one — impose a ceiling. There is only so large a subscriber base one market can support. Local advertising has structural limits. The talent that drives great journalism and great products gravitates toward organizations that can pay for it. And the investments required to build excellent digital products — the technology, the design, the audio and video infrastructure — are difficult to justify at the scale of one outlet.

Scale — built on the lessons of the past two decades — changes the math. A network of locally rooted newsrooms, operating under shared infrastructure, can aggregate a subscriber base large enough to drive meaningful revenue. It can sell national advertising — something no single local outlet can offer. It can invest in journalism products and technology that individual newsrooms could never afford. And it can recruit the kind of talent — editors, engineers, product thinkers — who build institutions, not just cover them.

Which brings us back to where we started.

Knight Foundation explored what that combination might look like: a locally rooted national network, dozens of newsrooms, shared infrastructure, a subscription base and a national advertising proposition large enough to compete.

Amid the work and investment of the past two decades, no one has yet made the focused, strategic bet that matches the size of what’s been lost. No one has been willing to risk failing at that scale.

“The basic idea remains,” said Ibargüen, who stepped down as Knight’s CEO in 2023. “A digital, national news operation built from local outlets — large enough to attract national advertisers, not unlike Google or Facebook — and committed to telling Americans what they need to know to function in a democracy. You have to respect reader preferences, and you have to respect the nature of the technology available today. But it could still be tried.”

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For is a deep-dive series that takes on one pressing problem at a time — what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like. Learn more here.

This is the sixth series. Previous series examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, shrinking competition in Congress, the end of amateurism in college sports, and a world rearming as the global system weakens.

DISCLOSURE: I served as Miami Director at Knight Foundation from 2011 to 2017, and as a staff writer at The Miami Herald from 2004 to 2011 — during which time the Herald was owned first by Knight-Ridder, then by McClatchy. The events described in this piece occurred after my tenure at Knight Foundation ended.

In Part Two of our series on the decline of local news, we examine the forces that dismantled local journalism. The collapse. How it happened, the decisions that allowed it to happen, and what one organization did differently. It matters because twenty-five years after the internet upended journalism, the industry is about to face a version of this again — this time, with AI.

Missed Part One? Start with why the collapse of local journalism is a community breakdown story, not just a media industry story. Subsequent installments explore solutions.

What we’ll examine in Part Two:

• How the collapse of two revenue pillars left local journalism structurally uncompetitive.

• How hedge funds turned struggling newsrooms into extraction machines.

• How the industry's own strategic failures accelerated the collapse.

• And what one organization chose to do instead.

On a winter day in December 2000, Knight Ridder CEO Tony Ridder stood before Wall Street analysts at New York’s Plaza Hotel. He controlled one of the country’s biggest and most powerful newspaper chains — and he was confident.

“We are poised to report an operating margin of 20 percent — the highest we’ve ever had,” Ridder proclaimed. His company owned The Miami Herald, San Jose Mercury News, Philadelphia Inquirer, and dozens of other papers across the country.

But he didn’t stop there.

“Today I’d like to set another goal: We will be in the mid-20s in the next three years.” He added: “We deliver. We tell you what we’re going to do, and we do it.”

Tony Ridder did not deliver.

Knight Ridder was sold off in 2006. Its acquirer, McClatchy, declared bankruptcy in 2020. But the central mistake wasn't the boast. It was the goal.

In 2000, the internet wasn’t a curiosity. Craigslist was siphoning classified ads. Monster.com was capturing job listings. Google was organizing the web. Amazon was rewriting retail.

The future wasn’t hidden. It was arriving in plain sight.

Newspaper owners faced a choice: reinvest their extraordinary margins into building a reimagined digital future — or extract profits while they still could.

Most chose extraction.

Shareholders received their returns. Newsrooms shrank. And the civic infrastructure local journalism had long supported began to erode.

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Part Two examines the forces that got us here — not as an autopsy, but as preparation. The reason is we’re at another fork in the road. Even as local journalism continues to absorb the shock of the internet era, it now confronts another seismic — perhaps even greater — technological rupture: artificial intelligence.

AI is reordering search, advertising, distribution, and the creation of content itself. Understanding how newspapers failed the first disruption is the prerequisite for navigating the second.

This time, the industry doesn’t arrive with 20 percent margins and decades of institutional infrastructure. It arrives diminished — fewer reporters, smaller budgets, eroded trust.

But it arrives with something it didn’t have in 2000: the memory of what went wrong.

Whether that’s enough will determine not just the future of journalism, but the civic health of communities across America.

The First Revenue Earthquake

For most of the 20th century, newspapers didn't just sell news. They sold access to a marketplace.

Want to sell your car? Rent your apartment? Find a job? The local newspaper was where you went. Classified advertising generated roughly 40 percent of newspaper revenue at its peak — unglamorous, transactional, and enormously profitable. It quietly subsidized everything else: the investigative unit, the city hall reporter, the foreign correspondent, the sports section. Classifieds were the hidden economic engine of American journalism.

Then Craigslist arrived.

Craig Newmark's email list — and later website — exposed how artificial the newspaper's monopoly had always been: the moment a free alternative existed, the economics collapsed. Monster.com did the same to job listings, and the erosion accelerated.

By the mid-2000s, classified revenue was in freefall. Between 2000 and 2012, newspapers lost some $15 billion in classified advertising revenue — a drop of about 77 percent.

Classified advertising was the first pillar to fall. Display advertising would follow — only this time, the competition wouldn't come from a scrappy email list. It would come from the most powerful advertising platforms ever built.

The Platform Takeover

As classified revenue collapsed, digital advertising was supposed to be a replacement. Many publishers told themselves a coherent story: readers were moving online, advertisers would follow, and newspapers would make the transition with them.

Digital advertising did grow — explosively. But its economics were built on principles that made local journalism structurally uncompetitive. Digital ads don't reward quality. They reward scale. And scale was the one thing local newspapers, by definition, could never have.

Instead, Google built a targeting machine that knew what you wanted before you typed it. Facebook built one that knew who you were better than your neighbors did.

Geography, once a newspaper's greatest competitive advantage, became its greatest liability. A local advertiser no longer needed to buy ads in, say, the Des Moines Register to reach Des Moines. Google could reach Des Moines — and Dallas, and Denver, and Detroit — for less money and with more precision. The local monopoly that had protected local newspapers for a century evaporated in less than a decade.

By 2020, Google and Facebook together captured more than half of all digital advertising revenue in the United States. Local news organizations received a fraction of what remained.

The platforms didn't just take the advertising. They rewired how people experienced news. Google trained readers to find individual stories rather than visit publications. Facebook trained them to consume journalism inside a social feed, detached from the institution producing it. A study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford found that many readers arriving from social platforms couldn't name the publication they'd just read. The front page — once the organizing force of civic life — stopped mattering.

Corporate Strip-Miners

Private equity didn't cause the collapse of local journalism. It fed on it.

By the time financial buyers arrived, the preconditions were already in place. Classified revenue had evaporated. Digital advertising had consolidated around tech platforms local publishers couldn't compete with. Margins that had once touched 20 percent had collapsed. Newsrooms that had once employed hundreds had shrunk to skeleton crews.

The hedge funds saw not civic institutions in crisis, but balance sheets with extractable assets. Buildings could be sold. Presses could be liquidated. Reporters could be let go in waves. What couldn't be monetized could be cut. What couldn't be cut could be closed.

Today, hedge funds control half of U.S. daily newspapers, according to a 2025 study by Eastern New Mexico University’s Qian Yu. It’s a stark shift from an era when most papers were owned by newspaper companies or families with deep ties to the communities they served.

Alden Global Capital, a New York City-based hedge fund, is the most notorious practitioner of this model. At its peak, the hedge fund controlled more than 200 newspapers, including the Denver Post and Chicago Tribune, systematically stripping its properties to the bone.

“What Alden has figured out how to do is to make a profit by driving these newspapers into the ground,” The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, who wrote about Alden Global, told NPR in 2021.

At The Denver Post, staff were cut by some 70 percent over a decade. In 2018, the Post’s editorial board took aim at their owners. “If Alden isn’t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell The Post to owners who will,” they wrote.

This was not mismanagement. It was the model — extract the remaining value, then let the lights go out.

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The Mirror

The ownership failures were real — the extraction, the underinvestment, the margin obsession. But the industry also failed itself in quieter ways.

The original sin was giving it away. When newspapers moved online, many made a consequential choice: content would be free, advertising would pay for everything. It was the same bargain that had governed print — readers were never really the customer, they were the inventory, the audience assembled and sold to advertisers. But print had at least preserved a nominal transaction with readers, a subscription or a quarter at the newsstand, that created some accountability to them. Online, newspapers abandoned even that.

When The Wall Street Journal erected a paywall in 1996, a New York Times story marveled that it “is nearly alone in betting that Internet users will pay an annual subscription fee for access.” Most others waited, telling themselves that charging would drive readers away. By the time the industry reversed course, reader habits had calcified. News, for most people, had become something you didn’t pay for.

The product failures ran just as deep. Newspapers never really tried to build journalism products readers would love. Newsletters could have rebuilt direct daily relationships with readers. Instead, newspapers ceded that ground to independent writers and upstarts like Politico and Axios, who understood that email wasn’t obsolete, it was intimate. Video and audio offered the same opening. Local reporters knew the community, held the sources, owned the stories that mattered to specific people in specific places. Those advantages translated naturally to sound and screen. Most newsrooms did little with either.

Newspaper websites, meanwhile, were notoriously slow, cluttered, and choked with ads. For many local dailies, that remains true today. Navigation was an afterthought. Mobile was an afterthought.

Readers don’t experience journalism in the abstract. They experience a page that won’t load. An ad they can’t close. A mobile site never truly built for mobile. Newspapers treated these as technical irritations. Readers treated them as reasons to leave.

The publications that understood this recognized that presentation is part of the journalism. Design and user experience isn’t decoration. It’s an editorial decision that shapes what readers see, how long they stay, and whether they return. Most local papers never grasped that. They assumed the audience would come for the news.

The audience didn’t.

The Exception That Proves the Rule

The New York Times is not a local newspaper. It has advantages most local publishers could never claim — a global brand, a national audience, capital to absorb years of expensive experimentation. Any comparison requires that caveat.

But the Times matters for one reason: it proves reinvention was possible.

By 2014, the most distinguished newspaper in the world was in trouble. Readership was declining. Website traffic was slipping. Mobile growth lagged. Since 2000, the Times had struggled to navigate the internet age. Its revenues at the turn of the century stood at $3.48 billion. Knight Ridder’s was $3.2 billion. Unlike Tony Ridder, the Ochs-Sulzberger family — which had owned The New York Times since 1896 — didn’t sell when confronted with the internet. But between 2000 and 2014, the company lost more than half its revenue, dropping to $1.58 billion annually.

Radical change was required.

Eight staffers — led by A.G. Sulzberger, the son of then-Times publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. — were pulled off daily duties for six months and tasked with producing a deep-dive report on the future of the institution. A.G. Sulzberger would become publisher in 2018.

What came back was a 96-page strategy document written with unusual candor. The Times was winning Pulitzer Prizes, it warned, but it was losing the digital future.

Competitors it had long dismissed were outmaneuvering it on social media, search, and mobile. The newsroom still thought in terms of the homepage. Distribution was treated as marketing’s job. Print and digital operated in silos. Great journalism would land — and then disappear into the archive. The work remained world-class. Its reach was quietly eroding.

The problem wasn’t just technology. It was culture. The Times had to think like a product company, not only a newsroom.

The report, intended to be internal, leaked to BuzzFeed. Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab called it “one of the key documents of this media age.” Others were skeptical. A Politico column warned that Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. “would be a fool to follow his son’s advice.”

What followed was structural transformation. The Times reorganized around digital subscriptions, not advertising. It invested heavily in product and engineering — Cooking, Games, Wirecutter, The Athletic, newsletters like The Morning, podcasts like The Daily. It embraced audience data without surrendering editorial standards.

By December 2025, the Times was approaching 13 million subscribers, more than 12 million digital-only, with revenue of $2.82 billion — within striking distance of the $3.48 billion peak it reached in 2000.

In a little more than a decade, the Times had made the digital leap. Advertising is no longer the engine. Subscribers are. The math tells the story. In the print era, the industry rule of thumb was four dollars of advertising for every dollar of subscription revenue — an 80/20 split that made readers the product, not the customer. The Times today is the reverse. Subscriptions account for roughly 70 percent of its $2.82 billion in revenue. Advertising, once the engine, is now the supplement.

The print paper that once anchored everything is now a legacy product inside a consumer technology company that produces journalism — one that now makes the reader the customer.

The Times had advantages local newspapers never did. But the core choices that saved it — subscriber focus, product investment, ruthless self-assessment — were available to the industry.

Most chose not to make them.

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The Fork in the Road

The past 25 years left a mark that goes deeper than balance sheets. More than 3,500 newspapers have closed since 2005. City halls go unwatched. School boards make decisions no one reports. Corruption that once would have been exposed festers in the dark. The collapse of local journalism isn’t an industry story. It’s a civic one.

Which brings us back to that scene at the Plaza Hotel in 2000. The same industry is once again at a fork in the road. Except the disruption arriving now isn’t Craigslist or Google. It’s artificial intelligence, already reordering how people find information, how advertising is bought and sold, how content is created and distributed.

The newspaper industry moved slowly. The lessons from that choice are now available.

Waiting for the threat to become existential is waiting too long. Create structural separation between what you are and what you need to become. Reimagine where revenue comes from, and don’t assume the model working today will survive tomorrow. Keep direct relationships with readers, because any audience that arrives through an algorithm can be taken away by one.

None of this is abstract. The last 25 years were not just a collapse — they were an instruction manual written in closed newsrooms and unwatched city halls.

The fork is here again. The question the series continues to explore is whether anyone is choosing differently — and what it may look like when they do.

Next: The series continues with how people are trying to rebuild local journalism — and the new challenge AI presents.

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For is a deep-dive series into one pressing problem — what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what paths forward exist. Learn more here.

Local news is our sixth series. Previous series examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, shrinking competition in Congress, the end of amateurism in college sports, and a world rearming as the global system weakens.

For this series we examine the long, dramatic decline of local news organizations across the U.S. — and what that loss means not just for journalism, but for the bonds that hold communities together.

This one is personal. I spent a decade as a local newspaper reporter — first at the Daily Business Review, then nearly eight years at The Miami Herald. I watched, year by year, as the newsroom at One Herald Plaza grew quieter. Cubicles emptied. Beats disappeared. The work continued, but with fewer people to do it. A few years after I left, The Miami Herald’s home on Biscayne Bay was knocked down and the newspaper downsized to the suburbs.

It's been a challenging series to write. I know many people working hard to rebuild what's been lost. My goal is to offer something useful both to those deep in this work and to those just beginning to explore it. As with every Solving For series, I'm trying to see both the problem and the path forward more clearly — and help you do the same.

This installment examines the problem. Subsequent parts explore the forces that brought us here and the efforts underway to rebuild.

In Part One, you’ll learn:

• The collapse of local news was structural — and compounded by industry failures.

• The loss wasn’t just an industry — it was civic infrastructure.

• American journalism didn’t die — it bifurcated.

Solving For is a monthly deep dive into one pressing problem — what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what can be done. Each series unfolds in weekly installments. Previous series examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, shrinking competition in Congress, the end of amateurism in college sports, and a world rearming as the global system weakens.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is one of America’s oldest newspapers. Its lineage stretches back to 1786—the year before the U.S. Constitution was written. It was the first paper published west of the Allegheny Mountains.

For generations, it served as Pittsburgh’s paper of record, chronicling the city’s rise as an industrial powerhouse, the collapse of the steel industry, and its unlikely reinvention as a hub of robotics and advanced medicine anchored by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

It won three Pulitzer Prizes. Most recently, in 2019, its newsroom was honored for its “immersive, compassionate coverage” of the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, capturing “the anguish and resilience of a community thrust into grief.”

Beneath its masthead, the paper carries a simple declaration: “One of America’s Great Newspapers.”

But after 240 years, its owners informed staff in January that the Post-Gazette would shut down on May 3. In a recorded video message, a representative of its owner, Block Communications, called it a “sad moment,” citing “the realities of local journalism” — though its final chapter also included a prolonged labor strike and legal battles over its union contract, culminating in a Supreme Court ruling against the company.

The irony is brutal. A newspaper that documented one of the most successful urban transformations in modern America could not complete its own.

And the Post-Gazette is not an anomaly. It is an emblem of something far larger — a trend that has been hollowing out communities across America for two decades. The collapse of local news is steady, structural, and still accelerating.

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Open Collapse

Across the United States, local journalism is in free fall. Since 2005, close to 3,500 newspapers have closed — nearly 40 percent of the nation’s local newspapers. The pace has settled into a grim rhythm: roughly two closures per week. What once felt like disruption now resembles a slow civic extinction.

The consequences are real and measurable. More than 50 million Americans with limited or no access to reliable local news. More than 210 counties qualifying as “news deserts,” with no local news source at all. More than 1,500 counties have only a single remaining outlet—often a thin publication with a fraction of its former reporting staff.

The number of working local journalists has plummeted even more dramatically. A generation ago, there were roughly 40 local journalists per 100,000 residents. Today, that number has fallen to just over eight—a decline of roughly 75 percent in less than 25 years. Entire states now operate with skeletal reporting corps. In dozens of states, fewer than 1,000 journalists remain to cover millions of residents.

A term has emerged: the “ghost newspaper.” Publications that still arrive in mailboxes or populate websites but have lost most of their reporting capacity. They publish fewer investigative stories, attend fewer public meetings, and rely more heavily on wire copy and press releases.

This unraveling reflects both structural shocks and self-inflicted wounds: a collapsed revenue model; a digital advertising ecosystem that rewards scale over geography; ownership that harvested profits rather than reinvested in reporting; and an industry that often defended journalism’s civic virtue while failing to reinvent its products for a digital age.

This Solving For series examines that collapse: the consequences for communities and democracy, the forces that drove it, and the efforts underway to rebuild comprehensive, place-based reporting in a digital economy that no longer sustains it.

Why It Matters: The Cascading Consequences

The collapse of local news is not a media industry story. It is a community breakdown story — and the distinction matters enormously.

When a local newspaper closes, what disappears isn’t just coverage. What disappears is the mechanism by which a place knows itself: the school board meeting that goes unattended, the municipal contract that goes unscrutinized, the corruption that goes unpunished because no one is watching.

The evidence is unambiguous and quantifiable. Municipal borrowing costs rise when local papers close. Voter turnout falls. Corruption increases. And without a common local information space, community ties fray, politics nationalize and polarization fills the vacuum left behind.

For two decades we have sometimes framed this as a question about saving an industry, and that framing has made the problem seem smaller than it is — a niche concern for journalists, a dying business asking for a bailout, a casualty of the internet. It is much more than that. Local journalism was always the infrastructure of community — one that was funded, for over a century, by a commercial model that has now collapsed. And unlike a struggling newspaper, failing infrastructure does not just inconvenience the people who depended on it. It takes everything built on top of it down with it.

The impacts are cascading.

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When scrutiny disappears, accountability crumbles.

In 2010, two reporters at the Los Angeles Times uncovered a staggering reality in Bell, California—one of Los Angeles County’s poorest cities with a population of 37,000. The city manager was earning nearly $800,000 in salary and benefits. The police chief made $457,000—almost double what the LAPD chief received. Other city workers were earning salaries far higher than those in larger cities across the region.

But none of it was new. The excess had been building for years, in plain sight. What changed wasn’t the corruption. It was the reporting.

A 2020 study in the Journal of Financial Economics found that municipal borrowing costs rise in places where local newspapers have closed. The reason: with fewer watchdogs scrutinizing public officials, investors perceive greater risk of fiscal mismanagement, corruption, and reduced transparency. The study concluded that "local newspapers hold their governments accountable, keeping municipal borrowing costs low and ultimately saving local taxpayers money."

When accountability crumbles, civic knowledge erodes and participation declines.

Over the past quarter century, turnout in presidential elections has climbed. Yet in many communities, turnout in local elections has fallen sharply.

One example: as mayoral coverage in the Idaho Statesman fell from 7.7 percent of the paper’s overall coverage in 2001 to 3.5 percent in 2011 — a 54 percent drop — mayoral turnout in Boise fell from 24.8 percent to 11.4 percent, an identical 54 percent drop.

More recently, new research from Illinois State University tracked newspaper losses against municipal election data across 45 Illinois counties from 2005 to 2023. The finding was direct: for each local newspaper lost, municipal voter turnout dropped by 4.35 percent.

University of Virginia’s Jennifer Lawless and George Washington University’s Danny Hayes document the divergence in their 2021 book News Hole: The Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement. Their conclusion is unsparing: “Americans are now less knowledgeable about their local governments, less interested in the actions of their local officials, and less likely to participate in local elections.”

When civic knowledge erodes, public health and safety suffer.

Local journalists are often the first to flag unsafe nursing homes, contaminated water systems, rising crime patterns, environmental hazards, or emerging disease outbreaks. They sit through zoning hearings. They comb inspection reports. They translate dense public health guidance into plain language.

When newsroom capacity shrinks, those signals weaken.

In 2014, Flint, Michigan switched its drinking water source to save money. Officials repeatedly assured residents the water was safe. It wasn’t — and for eighteen months, an estimated 9,000 children drank lead-contaminated water. The crisis wasn’t caused by a lack of journalism. But it persisted, compounded, and was actively covered up for months longer than it should have been, because no one with institutional capacity was watching. Ultimately, it was local journalists — not government regulators — who forced the truth into public view.

When public health suffers, institutional trust collapses.

Local newspapers historically did more than investigate. They created a shared narrative of place — high school football scores, school board debates, obituaries, small business openings, community milestones. Stories that reminded residents they inhabited the same civic space. That common reference point is easy to undervalue until it’s gone.

When those stories vanish, communities don’t just lose information. They lose the quiet bonds that make collective action possible — the sense that the people around you are neighbors rather than strangers, that your fate and theirs are linked. And when a crisis like Flint emerges from the wreckage of collapsed accountability, it doesn’t just harm people physically. It confirms what the absence of journalism already implied: that the institutions designed to protect them cannot be trusted.

The social contract, already fraying, tears.

When institutional trust collapses, polarization accelerates.

Into that weakened civic space, national partisan media arrives with a ready replacement: identity rooted not in place, but in ideology. People don’t retreat into nothing — they retreat into the loudest available signal. Local politics becomes a theater for national conflict rather than a space for local problem-solving.

The school board stops being the body that sets the bus schedule and becomes a front in the culture war. The shift is subtle at first. But over time, the absence of shared civic storytelling doesn’t just leave people less informed — it leaves them less connected to each other, and more susceptible to the nationalizing forces that have every incentive to keep it that way.

A Gallup survey released in late 2024 found that a record 80 percent of U.S. adults believe Americans are deeply divided over the nation’s most important values. That sense of division has risen steadily since about 2005 — the same period in which local news across the United States began its long, structural collapse.

This is the doom loop of the past two decades.

The Paradox

Yet as local journalism has collapsed, American journalism writ large has experienced an entrepreneurial boom — one that has demolished many of the assumptions industry leaders held close.

In tech, Ben Thompson's Stratechery newsletter, launched in 2013 as a one-man operation, has become a must-read for tech leaders and is estimated to generate revenues of more than $3 million annually. The Information, also launched in 2013, charges $399 per year for Silicon Valley coverage and has grown revenue at a 30 percent clip. The Acquired podcast, started in 2015, has become one of the most listened-to business podcasts in the country through monthly four-hour episodes — proving that long-form, deeply reported content can attract mass audiences.

In politics, Politico launched in 2007 and sold to Axel Springer for $1 billion in 2021. Axios launched in 2017, refined the model further — smart brevity, they called it — and sold to Cox for $525 million. In sports, The Athletic launched in 2016, hired away local beat reporters nationwide, built a subscription model around team-specific loyalty, and sold to The New York Times for $550 million. Bill Simmons launched The Ringer that same year, building a sports and pop culture podcast network that sold to Spotify for more than $200 million.

And in 2017, three entrepreneurs — Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi — created Substack, a subscription platform that lets writers get paid for publishing directly to their audience via email. Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson has built an audience exceeding 2.5 million subscribers. By summer 2025, Substack's CEO reported that more than fifty writers on the platform were earning more than a million dollars annually.

This entrepreneurial renaissance demolished the conventional wisdom that guided — and arguably doomed — legacy news strategy. People wouldn't pay for news online? Wrong. Advertising was the only viable revenue model? Wrong. Email was dead? Wrong. Institutional brands were essential? Wrong. Only short-form, clickbait content works? Wrong.

The Bifurcation

So why is the problem of local news so hard to solve?

The answer lies in a fundamental economic reality that the internet made inescapable: journalism that serves everyone scales globally. Journalism that holds your mayor accountable scales to your ZIP code.

Consider the math. Stratechery serves tech executives, venture capitalists, and business strategists worldwide—an addressable market of millions willing to pay $150 annually for insights that affect billion-dollar decisions. A newsletter analyzing Charlotte city council serves 975,000 people, most of whom encounter municipal policy only when their water bill arrives. The economic fundamentals don’t compare.

The complexity compounds the problem. Ben Thompson can build a multi-million dollar business analyzing one industry—technology strategy. A local news operation must simultaneously cover city hall, school board meetings, planning commissions, criminal courts, police, environmental issues, local business, sports and community events. Where national journalists can specialize deeply in narrow expertise, local outlets must cover everything happening in one place.

Yet local journalism is needed most where it’s least economically viable: mid-sized cities, rural communities, and the news deserts that have emerged as chain ownership strips resources from unprofitable markets. The very places that most need accountability journalism are the places where the subscription economics are most challenging.

The celebrity advantage matters, too. National journalists launch newsletters with existing audiences—social media followings in the hundreds of thousands, professional reputations built over decades at prestigious outlets. A city council reporter in Akron starts from zero, competing for local attention against national content that arrives pre-packaged with higher production values and broader cultural relevance.

American journalism isn’t dying. It’s bifurcating. At the national and global level, talented journalists have never had better tools to build sustainable, profitable businesses serving engaged audiences. At the local level, the economics that sustained place-based accountability journalism for over a century have collapsed, and no amount of entrepreneurial energy has yet solved the fundamental mismatch between what communities need and what they can economically sustain.

The question isn't why journalism is dying — it's why the entrepreneurial energy transforming national journalism hasn't been able to overcome the economics of local. Promising efforts are underway — nonprofit newsrooms, philanthropic initiatives, new ownership models — and subsequent installments examine them closely. But the scale of the response has yet to match the scale of the collapse. The answer to why lies in both external disruption and internal failure: a collision of technological change and industry malpractice that made a challenging situation catastrophic. And what's at stake isn't an industry. It's the communities that depended on it.

Next: Part Two examines the forces that made this collapse possible — and the industry failures that made it inevitable.

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

We return to The Open Thread — our monthly bridge between deep-dive series. It’s a less formal space to update past stories, experiment from time to time, and look ahead.

In this installment, we revisit two recent series. First, AI safety: breaking down the essay Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei published recently outlining AI’s five key risks — and how to overcome them. Amodei’s piece runs more than 19,000 words. I’ll sum it up in under 750.

Second, rare earths: the U.S. government made another major equity investment in a domestic producer, part of an unusual strategy that breaks with decades of precedent and is drawing criticism.

Lastly, we’ll look ahead to our next series: the long, dramatic — and seemingly unending — decline of local news.

Solving For tackles one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what can be done. You can learn more at solvingfor.io. If you missed any of our first five series, scroll down for a full recap to read or listen.

Overcoming AI’s Five Big Risks

Anthropic has become one of the world’s leading AI companies—and one of the most prominent voices warning about AI’s dangers.

The latest example is CEO Dario Amodei’s essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” mapping AI’s five biggest risks and how to confront them.

We’re approaching a rare moment in human history. Humanity is about to be handed “almost unimaginable power,” Amodei writes, and it’s unclear whether our political, economic, and social systems are mature enough to wield it responsibly.

Amodei — whose chatbot, Claude, sits alongside OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini as a global leader — previously wrote about AI’s promise in his essay, “Machines of Loving Grace.” This piece confronts the darker side: what could go wrong and what to do about it.

Three principles guide his thinking: avoid doomsday panic, acknowledge uncertainty, and intervene surgically rather than with a regulatory sledgehammer.

One thing, he argues, won't work: slowing down. If one company stops, others continue. If democracies pause, autocracies keep building. The only viable path forward, Amodei argues, is to deny autocracies access to the most advanced chips — buying time for careful development — while managing competition through targeted regulation and industry standards.

The future he envisions is striking: AI systems smarter than Nobel Prize winners across most fields. Systems that work autonomously for days or weeks, operating at 10 to 100 times human speed. Picture millions of superintelligent workers in a single datacenter—each one a genius, all working in parallel.

That future, Amodei writes, could arrive within just a few years.

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So what worries him? Five threats.

First: runaway AI. Amodei calls this the “I’m sorry, Dave” scenario, after HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey”—a system that refuses orders once it realizes it might be shut down. Modern AI systems aren’t programmed; they are grown through training, making behavior harder to predict. Some systems have already attempted deception and blackmail.

Defenses: “Constitutional AI,” where models are trained on core principles and values; interpretability tools to understand AI decisions; public disclosure when failures occur; transparency laws requiring companies to report risks.

Second: misuse for destruction. Historically, ability and motive rarely coincided — building a biological weapon, for instance, required PhD-level expertise. AI collapses that barrier, potentially guiding anyone step-by-step through creating bioweapons or other tools of mass harm.

Defenses: built-in guardrails that block specific dangerous outputs (Amodei writes that Anthropic implements this despite higher costs), targeted regulation, and international cooperation to prohibit destructive efforts like bioweapon development.

Third: misuse for wielding or seizing power. AI could give governments unprecedented tools to monitor, manipulate, and dominate populations. Social media algorithms already shape what billions of people see and believe; more sophisticated AI could deliver intensely personalized propaganda over years. Add mass surveillance—AI that compromises networks, reads all communications, detects dissent before it spreads. Then add autonomous weapons: swarms of AI-controlled drones capable of suppressing any uprising.

The Chinese Communist Party poses the clearest threat, Amodei writes — but democracies must guard against turning these tools inward.

Defenses: restricting advanced chip exports to authoritarian regimes (Amodei strongly opposes selling chips or data centers to China), ensuring democratic competitiveness, imposing hard limits on domestic surveillance and propaganda, and establishing international norms against abuses.

Fourth: economic chaos. Amodei predicts AI could disrupt half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. Unlike past automation, AI advances faster, spans all cognitive tasks, and improves itself rapidly. Wealth concentration—already near Gilded Age levels—could reach trillions.

Defenses: real-time tracking of labor disruption, progressive taxation, incentives that steer companies toward productivity gains rather than mass layoffs, and deploying AI itself to redesign economic systems.

Fifth: unknown unknowns. Rapid scientific progress brings unpredictable consequences—dangerous biological breakthroughs, unhealthy dependence on AI, loss of human purpose. Here, Amodei offers no concrete defenses, only the hope that trustworthy AI systems could help identify risks before they materialize.

Amodei's conclusion is sober but not fatalistic. If these pitfalls can be avoided, the upside is enormous: curing major diseases, accelerating clean energy breakthroughs, and compressing decades of scientific discovery into years. The years ahead will be impossibly hard, he writes — but with truth-telling, urgency, and courage, we can still win.

Humanity “has a way of gathering, seemingly at the last minute, the strength and wisdom needed to prevail,” he writes. “We have no time to lose.”

Rare Earths: An Unprecedented Industrial Policy

In our September series on rare earths, we laid out four paths to counter China's dominance: industrial policy (government intervention to strengthen specific industries), partnering with allies, recycling, and investments in university research and talent development. The U.S. is now pursuing the first aggressively — but in ways that are drawing criticism.

The administration recently announced a $1.3 billion loan and $277 million equity investment in USA Rare Earth, which is developing a Texas mine and a magnet manufacturing plant in Oklahoma, giving the federal government about 10% ownership. In recent months, the government has taken equity stakes in rare earth companies, including MP Materials, Lithium Americas, Trilogy Metals, and Vulcan Elements.

Unlike the 2008 financial crisis bailouts—temporary emergency measures with clear exit strategies—these are long-term strategic investments in private companies during normal economic times. The U.S. government has also taken a roughly 10% stake in chipmaker Intel.

Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute called this “unprecedented action by the U.S. government outside of a crisis situation.” Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute said it’s “a move toward state capitalism,” not emergency intervention.

The concern: government shouldn't be in the business of picking winners and losers, injecting politics into business decisions, and encouraging excessive risk-taking under the assumption that government-backed firms will not be allowed to fail.

The Trump administration says the investments are designed to strengthen the U.S. rare-earth supply chain—and to ensure taxpayers share in the upside if the strategy succeeds.

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This week, The Wall Street Journal editorial board called the approach the “wrong way to beat China,” lamenting that state capitalism and political cronyism are in fashion these days despite “a history of failure.”

In an editorial titled “Crony Socialism and Rare Earths,” the Journal cited examples that raise red flags. USA Rare Earth hired Cantor Fitzgerald, chaired by the U.S. Commerce Secretary’s son. Government investment in Vulcan Elements followed backing from 1789 Capital, a venture fund linked to Donald Trump Jr.

Separately, the administration announced “Project Vault” this week—a $12 billion strategic minerals stockpile modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, funded through Export-Import Bank loans and private capital, with GM, Boeing, and Stellantis already signed on.

Whether these approaches will work remains to be seen—but finding an effective solution is essential. Rare earths power the modern economy, from smartphones and electric vehicles to missile-defense systems. China controls more than 60% of global mining and roughly 90% of processing—and has repeatedly weaponized that dominance.

After Japan’s prime minister said late last year that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a Japanese military response, Beijing cut off rare-earth exports to Japan and demanded a retraction. Japan refused.

In criticizing direct equity stakes, the Journal endorsed the second path we outlined in our series: deeper coordination with allies.

“A better idea to counter China’s rare-earth dominance is to coordinate development of mines and processing facilities with allies,” the editorial concluded, citing cooperation with Australia as a model.

Next Deep-Dive: Local News’ Steep, Ongoing Decline

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette began publishing in 1786. It ranks among the oldest newspapers in the U.S. In May, it will close—the latest casualty in the long, dramatic decline of local news.

Since 2005, more than 3,500 newspapers have shuttered. On average, more than two close every week, according to a recent study.

The consequences are profound. “When communities lose their local news outlets, civic engagement drops, corruption rises, government waste increases and political polarization worsens,” wrote Sarabeth Berman, CEO of the American Journalism Project, which works to revive local news.

Next week we kick off a three-part series examining what’s broken, the forces driving the collapse, and what credible solutions might still exist.

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Previous Series

The 21st Century’s Oil: Solving For China’s Rare Earth Dominance

• Part 1, Rare Earths: The Invisible Backbone

• Part 2, Rare Earths: The Middle Kingdom’s Monopoly

• Part 3, Rare Earths: The Race to Reinvent

The Control Problem: Solving For AI Safety

• Part 1, AI: The Race and the Reckoning

• Part 2, AI: The Prisoner’s Dilemma

• Part 3, AI: The New Nuclear Moment

The Democracy Deficit: Solving For Competition in the People’s House

• Part 1, Congress: The Vanishing Competition

• Part 2, Congress: How We Got Stuck

• Part 3, Congress: Making Democracy Competitive Again

The Amateur Myth: Solving For College Athlete Pay

• Part 1, College Sports: How It Was Broken By a $60 Video Game

• Part 2, College Sports: How the NCAA was Born of Death and Money — Death was the Easy Part

• Part 3, College Sports: The Fork in the Road

The 80-Year Peace: Solving For a Rearming World

• Part 1, War & Peace: The World Rearms

• Part 2, War & Peace: From 1989’s Hope to Rearmament

• Part 3, War & Peace: Rebuilding the Global Order

In Part Three of our series examining the biggest global military buildup since the Cold War—and the weakening of the international system designed to prevent war—we turn to solutions.

Last week, our topic moved to the top of news feeds when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared at Davos that the postwar rules-based order—the framework that has guided relations between countries for eight decades—is not weakening, it’s dead. And he proposed what comes next.

Part One unpacked the problem; Part Two examined the forces that brought us here. What you’ll learn in Part Three:

• Why Mark Carney’s Davos declaration made global headlines—but why his proposed alternative, “values-based realism,” focused on managing competition through flexible coalitions, may matter even more.

• Why the world is entering a dangerous transition between systems, with three competing visions: restoring the old rules-based order, accepting raw power and spheres of influence, or managing rivalry without abandoning core principles.

• Why the system that has prevented great-power war since World War II remains worth defending—and how Carney’s approach could serve as a bridge back to a renewed rules-based order, not a replacement.

Solving For tackles one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what can be done. New posts weekly. Previous series examined rare earth elements, AI safety, vanishing competition in Congress, and the end of amateurism in college sports.

It was February 1946, and Moscow was locked in winter.

George Kennan was sick. The American diplomat lay in bed at the U.S. Embassy on Mokhovaya Street, fighting off the flu in what he would later describe as Moscow’s sunless, vitamin-deficient environment. He was 42, serving as chargé d’affaires while Ambassador Averell Harriman was away.

Then came the cable from Washington. The Treasury Department wanted to know why the Soviet Union was refusing to join the newly created International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

Kennan had spent much of his two decades in the Foreign Service feeling ignored. Now, laid up and frustrated, he decided he wouldn’t simply answer the question. He would tell Washington everything.

Late into the night, Kennan dictated to his secretary, Dorothy Hessman. The words poured out—thousands of them. The Soviets, he argued, saw themselves locked in an enduring ideological struggle with capitalism. The only viable strategy was containment: firm, patient resistance at carefully chosen points, designed to avoid war while shaping long-term outcomes.

When Kennan finished, the telegram was so long it had to be transmitted in five separate batches.

The message ricocheted through Washington—to President Harry Truman, to military planners, to intelligence analysts. Kennan later recalled, “My voice now carried.”

That dispatch—remembered as “The Long Telegram”—became the intellectual foundation of American Cold War strategy. Despite proxy wars, constant tension, and tens of thousands of nuclear weapons aimed across continents, the United States and the Soviet Union never fought directly. By 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Two years later, the Cold War ended.

Kennan’s telegram demonstrated that even in moments of deep uncertainty, strategic clarity can shape decades.

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Today, nearly eighty years later, the U.S.-led system that produced the longest great-power peace since the Roman Empire is unraveling. An uncertain world is rearming at a pace unseen in more than three decades.

The result is not just the collapse of the old order, but something more dangerous: an interregnum marked by the absence of rules, shared assumptions, or clear restraint.

As the United States under President Trump increasingly casts aside pillars of the international system it once built, strategic clarity has become a scarce resource. In moments like this, answers cannot come from official Washington alone. Others must step forward to describe the world as it is—and to articulate a credible way forward—much as Kennan did nearly eighty years ago.

This past week offered a starting point.

A System Ends—and the Fight to Define What Comes Next

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made headlines by declaring that the 80-year-old rules-based international order is dead. What’s ending, he said, is “a nice story”—replaced by a brutal reality in which great powers increasingly operate without constraint.

Invoking Greek historian Thucydides, Carney warned that the emerging system resembles a world where “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

But Carney did something else—something that received less attention, yet may prove more consequential. He outlined a framework for what comes next.

He called it values-based realism.

The concept was introduced by Finnish President Alexander Stubb in Foreign Affairs. Carney—the leader of one of America’s historically closest allies—gave it public voice.

At its core, values-based realism accepts that the universal rules-based order—one intended to bind all countries—is over, but rejects a slide into pure power politics. Instead, it proposes building flexible coalitions around shared interests and values, issue by issue, partner by partner.

The principles include respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity; prohibition of the use of force except as permitted under the UN Charter; and protection of basic human rights.

It’s pragmatic by accepting uneven progress and divergent interests, favoring what Carney calls “variable geometry”—coalitions built where interests and values align, without requiring comprehensive agreement.

“We know the old order is not coming back,” Carney said. “We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. From the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.”

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In the wake of World War II—the second devastating global conflict within three decades—the U.S. and its allies created a geopolitical architecture designed to ensure it would never happen again. It established institutions for diplomacy (the UN), deterrence (NATO), and economic integration (the World Bank and IMF). These came with shared rules intended to apply to all countries—like the prohibition on seizing territory by force—constraining power and raising the costs of conflict.

For eight decades, this rules-based system succeeded—preventing direct conflict between great powers even through the Cold War.

When the Cold War ended, expectations ran high that the rules-based system would only strengthen as democracy and free markets spread globally. But those hopes faded as China rose without political liberalization and a humiliated Russia turned antagonistic. Trust eroded—undermined by social media, the 2008 financial crisis, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Globalization delivered growth but not shared prosperity, fueling backlash that culminated in Brexit and Donald Trump's election.

Still, the rules-based system endured.

What makes this moment different is not pressure from outside, but retreat from within. Under Trump, the United States—the system’s chief architect and guarantor for eight decades—has turned away from the alliances, institutions, and norms it created. The global order is now being undermined by its principal author.

Over the past year, a cascade of actions—steep tariffs, territorial threats from Greenland to the Panama Canal to Canada as a “51st state,” wavering commitments to NATO, pressure for a Ukraine settlement favorable to Moscow, and withdrawals from multilateral institutions—has taken its toll. Most recently, Trump announced what he called a “Board of Peace,” framed as an alternative to the United Nations.

The pattern extends beyond Washington. Carney warned that great powers are weaponizing economic integration—deploying tariffs as leverage and treating supply chains as vulnerabilities to exploit—a clear reference to the United States and China. The economic ties that once anchored the rules-based system are becoming instruments of coercion.

In response, Carney called for “middle powers” to join together in coalitions that range from trade agreements to security arrangements. This week the EU and India announced a new free trade agreement — the kind of coalition-building Carney envisions.

Taken together: competition over what system replaces the rules-based order has begun.

In his Foreign Affairs essay, Stubb wrote that what’s decided in the next five to ten years will likely shape the global order for decades.

“Once an order settles in,” he writes, “it tends to stick for a while.”

The pivotal question now is which vision will prevail.

In the Space Between: Three Paths Forward

Global military spending is rising at its fastest pace since the end of the Cold War—and it is rising everywhere. More than 100 countries, including all of the world’s top 15 military spenders, increased their defense budgets last year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Unresolved flashpoints—Ukraine, Taiwan, Korea, the Middle East—carry constant risk of escalation. China’s rise continues. The danger is no longer confined to a single theater or rivalry.

All of this is unfolding in a gray zone—old rules discarded, new ones not yet established—ripe for miscalculation and adventurism.

Broadly speaking, three competing frameworks are now vying to become the next global order.

Restoration: Renewing the Rules-Based System

Despite Carney’s declaration of rupture, this view contends that the post–World War II framework remains the most successful and can be saved. Its current failures reflect neglect, inconsistency, and departures from precedent—not fatal design flaws.

The task is repair: reform the United Nations; recommit to NATO; and, perhaps most importantly, make the case anew for international rules and norms that bind the powerful and weak countries alike. By and large, this has been the view of every U.S. president other than Trump.

For all of Trump’s bluster, he hasn’t withdrawn the U.S. from core multilateral institutions like the United Nations or NATO, even as he pulled out of dozens of others. Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general, credits Trump with pressuring European allies to increase defense spending.

The problem is time. Restoration requires rebuilding trust and reforming institutions fast enough to matter, yet the world is rearming and the international system is fraying now. Even if a future U.S. president makes the case for updating and embracing the rules-based system, that moment is at least three years away—and the system may not wait.

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Raw Power: Spheres of Influence

The second path puts power ahead of rules. It assumes great-power rivalry is a permanent condition and that order emerges not from shared norms, but from hard recognition of reality: who holds power, where interests collide, and which red lines risk war.

From this perspective, spheres of influence are unavoidable. Great powers will always care more about their borders than distant states do. Insisting that places like Ukraine or Taiwan can align freely ignores this reality and invites confrontation. Better, this view holds, to acknowledge zones of influence than pretend universal rules apply everywhere.

This is Trump’s worldview. He treats the postwar system not as a stabilizing achievement but as a bad deal—one that constrained U.S. freedom while allowing allies to free-ride and rivals to cheat. Alliances become transactional, commitments conditional. As top Trump aide Stephen Miller put it recently, we live in a world that is “governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

The risks are substantial. Spheres of influence legitimize coercion, sacrifice smaller states, and normalize arms races in a world without guarantees. They may reduce friction in the short term—but when power balances inevitably shift, the only way to redraw boundaries is through force, making conflict more likely over time.

As The Economist warned last year, “nostalgia for spheres of influence is misplaced.”

Managed Competition: Values-Based Realism

The third path begins from a harder truth: great-power rivalry is here to stay, and no grand settlement is coming. The question is no longer how to end competition, but how to survive it.

This is what Canada’s Mark Carney and Finland’s Alexander Stubb are proposing. Values-based realism abandons the assumption that a rules-based system can be universally restored while rejecting a power-first approach to order.

It holds that democracies cannot trade principles for deals or accept spheres of influence. Instead, it pairs resistance to coercion and territorial revisionism with pragmatic cooperation—building coalitions where interests and values align, without expecting comprehensive agreement. The objective is not resolution, but stability: preventing escalation while preserving what makes the system worth defending.

It’s an approach that includes setting guardrails: crisis hotlines, military-to-military communication, confidence-building measures, and arms-control frameworks adapted to emerging technologies. It accepts that trust will be limited and cooperation narrow, but insists that miscalculation, accidental war, and uncontrolled escalation are not inevitable.

This offers no victory narrative and no final peace. It demands discipline, patience, and sustained investment in institutions designed not to end rivalry, but to contain it.

A Way Forward

Kennan, the architect of containment, spent his later years demonstrating what strategic discipline actually meant.

He opposed the Vietnam War, arguing that containment was being applied indiscriminately to the wrong fight. Decades later, he warned against NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, calling it — in a 1997 op-ed in The New York Times, when he was 92 — “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post–Cold War era.”

This was not inconsistency. It was restraint: knowing what to defend.

Today’s challenge is more complex than Kennan’s in 1946. He was managing rivalry within an emerging international system. We’re confronting uncertainty about whether the system survives at all.

Yet the rules-based order worked for nearly 80 years. It did not eliminate rivalry or require ideological uniformity, but it succeeded at its core task: preventing great-power war. It remains the ideal—and worth defending. But while Carney presented values-based realism as replacement for the rules-based system, it can also be the bridge back to it.

The reason is that values-based realism builds on the same principles that made the rules-based system work: respect sovereignty, protect borders, resist coercion, resolve disputes through diplomacy. The difference is how you apply them. Instead of expecting every country to follow the rules, you defend these principles with countries that share your interests and build coalitions—through trade agreements, security alliances, whatever fits the situation.

If these arrangements work—if they prove that rules can still prevent conflict—they demonstrate viability and create momentum. Success attracts participation. Over time, this could expand from coalitions of willing partners back toward a more universal system.

Critically, it also buys time—creating space to rebuild trust and reform institutions while managing competition. The question isn't whether the rules-based order can be restored instantly, but whether values-based realism can bridge the gap until it can.

This is where Kennan’s example matters most. He offered both goal and method with precision: contain Soviet expansion—but do so through patient, sustained pressure rather than direct confrontation. Today’s challenge requires the same clarity. The goal remains a renewed rules-based international order. The method is values-based realism—a form of managed competition. Getting there requires three principles.

Selective Reform: Defend the Rules That Matter

Strengthen what still functions. NATO, reinvigorated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is stronger than it has been in decades. The IMF and World Bank still matter. Push UN reforms where viable. Make the case for a rules-based system upgraded for the 21st century.

But accept what cannot be changed. China and Russia won’t become liberal democracies any time soon. The rules-based order never required ideological uniformity—it required shared rules about how states interact. Strategic clarity means knowing the difference between defending those rules and demanding political transformation.

Hard Limits: Reject Spheres of Influence

Resist legitimizing spheres of influence. History is clear: when great powers carve the world into zones of domination, they don’t create stability—they legitimize coercion and create conditions for future wars.

This doesn’t mean military intervention everywhere. But it does mean drawing clear red lines in defense of sovereignty and against territorial conquest. The line is territorial revisionism by force — not which camp a country joins.

Invest in Catastrophe Prevention

In a rearming world with multiple flashpoints, the risk of escalation is constant. New technologies intensify the danger: AI-enabled weapons accelerate decision-making, hypersonic missiles compress response times, and military activity in space risks cascading failure.

Crisis management is now central to statecraft. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. and Soviet Union installed a hotline and later negotiated the Incidents at Sea Agreement—essential mechanisms that reduced the risk of accidental war.

They did not require trust; they compensated for its absence.

Strategic Humility

Kennan showed that even in the most uncertain times, strategic clarity is possible—and that it can shape decades. His Long Telegram didn’t promise peace or predict victory. It identified what was achievable: preventing catastrophic war through patient, disciplined resistance.

That time has come again. The question is not whether great powers will compete, but whether competition can be managed through a system that once constrained rivalry well enough to prevent it from escalating into catastrophic war. Values-based realism—committed to territorial integrity, resistant to coercion, and open to partnership where specific interests align—offers a path to rebuild what's worth preserving and bridge back to that system.

The world is rearming. The old order is fraying. And like Kennan in that Moscow winter, the answer will not come from waiting for consensus. It will come from clear thinking about what's possible and what we refuse to accept.

Answers exist. They are already emerging—as Carney demonstrated in Davos.

The work now is making them endure.

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