By Phil Eil
The U.S. is currently in an information emergency.
If this sounds extreme, consider a few facts.
In the last twenty years, more than 3,000 newspapers have closed. Between 2008 and 2020, alone, the news industry lost approximately 30,000 jobs.
If you travel around the country today, you’ll find ever-larger “news deserts.” In 2024, the Medill School’s Local News Initiative reported, “In 206 counties, where more than 3.5 million people live, there is no local news outlet consistently producing original content.”
Meanwhile, according to Gallup, trust in the media recently hit a “new low,” with only around one in four Americans trusting major news outlets to report the news fairly and accurately.
Press freedom is also declining. Last year, when the organization Reporters Without Borders released its annual World Press Freedom Index, one outlet reported, “Press freedom in the U.S. now falls in line with developing countries, such as Gambia, Uruguay and Sierra Leone.”
As I write this, some of the nation’s most heralded news organizations are floundering. The Washington Post recently laid off more than 300 journalists. CBS News is “on fire,” according to Scott Pelley, the former anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent who was recently fired after he clashed with the network’s new management. In March, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth expressed his excitement about the pending owners of CNN, comments which, the New York Times noted, “underscored concerns within CNN and elsewhere in the media industry that Mr. Ellison could shift the network’s reporting in a Trump-friendly direction.”
As a longtime journalist, this all worries me. The path toward sustainable and sturdy employment in this business gets narrower by the day – if it exists at all.
But you should care, too. Because when the news industry struggles, it affects everyone.
Recent years have shown all too vividly what happens when our information ecosystem is polluted, weakened, or overrun by misinformation. It looks like the return of preventable illnesses like measles. It looks like violent, misinformation-fueled uprisings on our nation’s capitol. It looks like a Pew Research Center report that eight in ten Americans believe that, on issues of importance, Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on basic facts.
This isn’t sustainable. This is why I call it an “emergency.”
So what can we do, individually, to navigate today’s chaotic information landscape? And what can we do, communally, to ensure that journalism can continue?
These are questions I’ve been trying to answer – or at least publicly grapple with – at local libraries over the last year.
My unexpected campaign began in May of 2025, when I was invited by a library in Westwood, Massachusetts to give a talk as part of a series called the “Digital Age Survival Guide.” My “News Media in the Misinformation Age” talk – where I defined journalism, offered context about how we got here, and discussed strategies for navigating the Wild West of today’s media environment – was a hit, apparently, because invitations soon arrived from other Bay State libraries.
In the year since, I have spoken at eight Massachusetts libraries and more than a dozen libraries here in Rhode Island. A few weeks ago, I debuted a new (but related) talk called “Understanding AI and Misinformation,” which has also generated strong interest. Between these two presentations, I have twenty more talks scheduled at RI and Mass. libraries in the coming months. And on Thursday, July 9, at 5:30 p.m. I’ll be bringing my “News Media in the Misinformation Age” program to the Newport Public Library.
If past sessions have been any indication, the event will be part lecture, part Q&A, and part commiseration session about the sorry state of our public sphere.
I’ll talk a bit about how the alarming national trends in the news business are visible here in Rhode Island. The once-premiere news organization in the state, The Providence Journal, is a shadow of its old self. Our local TV-news stations, including WPRI and WJAR, are owned by out-of-state mega-conglomerates. And last year we saw one of those parent companies, Sinclair, Inc., swallow up the station formerly known as ABC6. At the same time, the newly hybridized Ocean State Media (previously Rhode Island PBS and The Public’s Radio) faces a million-dollar shortfall due to the closure of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
I’ll also discuss some bright spots. The outlet where you’re reading this op-ed, What’s Up Newp, was one of the promising outlets I discussed in a January 2025 Rhode Island Monthly overview of local news startups. I’m now a board member and volunteer opinion editor at another newish outlet, the Providence Eye, a nonprofit which launched in 2023. The Eye recently hired its first full-time reporter.
During my talks about misinformation and the news business, I often joke that we’re unlikely to solve this country’s deep and complex information problems in a 90 minute-session.
But we’re not going to solve these issues by ignoring them either.
We’ve got to do something. The future of our democracy relies on it. And these library talks about news and misinformation are my effort to do something, however small, with the skills and platform that I have.
Like the news itself, these chats about the future of our information ecosystem benefit from as many voices and perspectives as possible. So I invite you to swing by the library on July 9 and join the conversation.
Philip Eil is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Providence, his hometown. He is the former news editor of the alt-weekly newspaper, The Providence Phoenix. Since the paper’s close in 2014, he has contributed to The Atlantic, Men’s Health, the Boston Globe, Huffington Post, and the Columbia Journalism Review, among other outlets. He has also taught writing and journalism classes at Brown University, Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and the Rhode Island School of Design. His first book, Prescription for Pain: How a Once-Promising Doctor Became the “Pill Mill Killer,” was published in 2024.
