Last night RRR Spin Cycle hosts Jess Lilley, Rachel Withers and Charlie Lewis presented a special event with guests Raf Epstein (774 ABC Melbourne), Antoun Issa (co-founder of Deepcut News) and Najma Sambul (freelance journalist and writer). As Spin Cycle’s regular irregular guest co-host, where else would I be?

Who killed journalism? It’s one of the big questions of our times as we grapple with the decline of traditional media, the collapse of the mainstream, shrinking newsrooms, the algorithm, and the growth of independent and freelance journalism in myriad new models.

You shouldn’t have to jettison your identity and your dignity to be a good journalist, said Najma, recounting her days in commercial media. The longer you stay in there, she cautioned, you get moulded into a white man, assimilated into the groupthink. Najma recalled being asked whether she was a “journalist” or a “Muslim journalist” – at her interview for a cadetship at The Age! How to endure the tension of being in a newsroom that’s trashed your community? Channelling supreme dignity, “objectivity is not a white bloke” was her response. I’d like to be able to say that a great deal has changed in more recent years but, Reader, I’ve had A Week.

— We can add “white men” to the suspects list, said Charlie.
— Case closed! said Jess.

Ultimately, said Antoun, people want journalism that respects their brains. Who killed journalism? Capitalism is a big culprit, he continued. Substackers in Australia are following UK and US trends to see whether the model can be viable financially. A handful of sites have grown a great deal on the basis of subscription models, and even employed staff.

What journalism looks like today is a vexed question, said Raf Epstein. It’s the cartoon cloud when Tom & Jerry are scrapping: sometimes it all feels like one big mess. We all know what good journalism is – it’s just that we all disagree. And while there are strict rules at the ABC, Raf noted that he can only be responsible for the show he’s on, standing by his editorial decisions, and expressing his voice where he can. Raf remarked that the BBC just hasn’t been the same since Brexit – and we can’t risk getting Trumpified here. For the ABC, audience is everything, requiring “super hyper accountability”. They’re open to criticism, and ask that actual examples and actual data are offered.

The online landscape flattens our reading experience and makes a great many demands on us as critical readers. It’s not a level playing field culturally, said Najma and Antoun. A narrative has already been framed; dehumanising people is an indignity that our communities will not tolerate. For audiences, there’s hard work to be done distinguishing mastheads with integrity, rigorous independent media and sophisticated freelancers from bad actors, AI-generated simulacra, disinformation, and the AI slop that’s filling more and more of the known mastheads struggling to stay afloat instead of reimagining their business models for a contemporary world.

Follow the money, asked Rachel: do we still need large, mainstream media outlets? All those resources and fact-checkers and staff in Canberra offer great potential, but what if they just replicate discriminatory practices and false objectivities that distort the news we receive? The model is shifting, said Antoun. Niche operations succeed if their focus remains tight, but what we’re lacking now is truly local news. This, of course, is the realm that social media exploits, its algorithms hijacking the authenticity we create in our social interactions to insert its profiteering.

That’s what makes RRR so important. The community we foster is real, generous and closely connected. It’s the clear-eyed local lens from which we look out across the world. Big thanks to Jess, Charlie, Rachel and all the good people at RRR for another superb evening together. As for our culprit… the question of who killed journalism remains a live one. Keep a lookout!

>>> Listen back to the full recording at RRR

Image: (left to right) Jess Lilley, Charlie Lewis, Rachel Withers, Najma Sambul, Raf Epstein and Antoun Issa recording Spin Cycle live in the RRR events space on Thursday 16 July 2026. Photo by Esther Anatolitis.