Social media, as we once understood it, is gone. It didn’t die quietly. It transformed into something far more insidious — and the consequences for news media are only beginning to unfold.
Gary Vaynerchuk put it plainly over the weekend. He argued that social media has been replaced by what he calls “attention media.” The premise is simple. Platforms don’t reward connection anymore. They reward attention. And attention, it turns out, is most easily captured through outrage.
Think about how the cycle works. Outrage fuels engagement. Engagement fuels monetization. Monetization then demands more outrage. It’s a loop with no natural exit, and it’s reshaping every corner of media — including news.
That’s a real problem. News organizations aren’t selling widgets. They’re supposed to be informing the public. But now they’re operating inside a system that financially rewards the loudest, angriest, most provocative version of any story. The incentives are broken, and everyone can feel it.
Here’s something worth remembering: boring news is often good news. Stable markets, quiet diplomatic progress, a President that can form a complete sentence without going off on a tangent, a city council that balanced its budget — none of that earns clicks. Yet it all matters. In an attention economy, though, “it matters” isn’t enough. It has to agitate. It has to make someone feel something hot and immediate.
So instead, we get wall-to-wall outrage. Stories get framed to provoke rather than inform. Headlines are engineered to trigger a response before the reader even opens the article. Journalists who should be focused on storytelling are, instead, chasing engagement metrics. The craft suffers. The audience suffers too, even if they don’t realize it.
It isn’t a new phenomenon, by the way. “If it bleeds, it leads” wasn’t devised in the past decade. But there used to be plenty of other ways to monetize content, too. As we’ve seen in both radio and television, the ability to simply point to Nielsen numbers and say “This many people are watching/listening. Now give me your money,” feels like a bygone era.
News media is at its best when storytelling drives the work. The best content you’ll ever see operates from curiosity, not controversy. Reporters find the human thread in complicated stories and pull it carefully, giving audiences something they couldn’t find elsewhere. That’s the work that builds trust. That’s the work that lasts.
But trust doesn’t trend. Nuance doesn’t go viral. And so, unfortunately, neither gets rewarded in the current environment.
We’re already living with the consequences. News media is already fractured sharply along political and ideological lines. Audiences self-select into bubbles. Outlets have learned — correctly, from a business standpoint — that serving a passionate, enraged niche pays better than serving a broad, curious public. So that’s what they do. The fracture deepens. The trust erodes further.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better. How much worse is anyone’s guess.
The real danger isn’t just that news becomes less accurate or less fair, though both are genuine risks. The deeper danger is structural. If the only viable monetization model for news content runs through outrage and attention, then the industry will keep recruiting for that skillset. It’ll keep rewarding that behavior. Eventually, it won’t just be that bad incentives exist — it’ll be that no one inside the system remembers what the good incentives used to look like.
Vaynerchuk is a marketing mind, not a media critic. Still, he identified something the industry has been slow to name clearly. Calling it “attention media” instead of “social media” goes past semantics. It’s a diagnosis of sorts. Attention, by itself, is neutral. But attention harvested through manufactured outrage is corrosive — especially when the product you’re selling is supposed to be the truth.
The question now isn’t whether the model is broken. It clearly is. The question is whether enough people inside news media have the will to build something different before the damage becomes permanent.
Some are trying, but it won’t be easy. Algorithms aren’t going to help. But the alternative — a news landscape permanently optimized for outrage — isn’t really news at all. It’s just noise with a dateline.
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing daily news stories, features, and opinion columns. He joined Barrett Media in 2022 after a decade leading several radio brands in several formats, as well as a 5-year stint working in local television. In addition to his work with Barrett Media, he is a radio and TV play-by-play broadcaster. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
