I have spent the last fifteen years working in and around journalism — as a photojournalist, documentary filmmaker, training journalists, experimenting with what the craft can be in different forms and contexts. For the last several of those years, our work with Dreamtown has taken me into informal settlements and marginalised communities where enormous amounts of knowledge circulate, where stories shape daily survival - and where journalism’s infrastructure is entirely absent. These places are invisible in the system. And during those same years, I watched the profession itself hollow out — local newsrooms closing, the advertising model collapsing, audiences fragmenting into algorithmic feeds that no editor controls. The more time I spent at those edges, the clearer it became that the two problems were connected. Journalism isn’t just losing funding or readers. It is losing its grip on what it was supposed to be for. The model itself had failed. This article attempts to rethink the metaphor that has shaped journalism’s understanding of itself for over two centuries.
I remember watching a political interview on German television last year. Robert Habeck, the economy minister at the time, sitting across from a journalist. Before a single question was asked, the byline had already written the verdict — party numbers down, time in office a failure. The journalist’s first question wasn’t designed to understand anything. It was designed to produce a headline.
I don’t bring this up to defend Habeck. I bring it up because of what I was watching: a journalist performing the fourth estate model perfectly. Adversarial, accountability-focused, working the pillar exactly as designed. And none of it was helping me understand what was actually going on. The complexity of governing in a coalition, the tradeoffs no headline can capture, the grey that matters more than the black and white — the format couldn’t hold any of it. The journalist hadn’t failed. The metaphor had run out of room, because the room it is operating in has changed.
The phrase “fourth estate” carries inside it a picture of the world. Four pillars. Four distinct structures holding up the roof of a functioning society: clergy, nobility, commons, and — standing slightly apart, watching the other three — the press. The metaphor assumes that power is architectural, institutional. It sits in identifiable buildings. It belongs to identifiable people. And journalism’s job is to stand outside those buildings and report on what happens inside them.
For roughly two centuries, this was a serviceable enough description. Parliaments passed laws. Courts interpreted them. Executives enforced them. Journalists watched. The metaphor worked because the thing it described — a stable architecture of separated powers — actually existed in recognizable form.
It doesn’t anymore.
Between 2022 and 2024, Meta quietly rebuilt the recommendation engines behind Facebook and Instagram. The shift was systematic: where feeds had once shown posts from friends and pages you followed, they increasingly surfaced content from accounts you had never heard of — selected by AI systems predicting what would keep you scrolling. By 2024, more than half the content in an average Instagram feed came from accounts the user didn’t follow. On Facebook, the figure reached roughly a third [1]. Across both platforms, over three billion people had their daily information diet restructured by engineers optimising for engagement metrics. No legislation. No public consultation. No announcement beyond a technical blog post on Meta’s AI research page.
This is the part worth sitting with. The old estates — clergy, nobility, commons, press — derived their power from institutions that were, at least in principle, subject to public accountability. Parliaments face elections. Courts publish rulings. Even the press, for all its imperfections, operates under defamation law and editorial norms that developed over centuries. Meta’s recommendation engine answers to none of these. It governs the informational reality of a population larger than any nation-state, yet its logic is proprietary, its changes unannounced, and its accountability runs to shareholders, not citizens. A platform’s content moderation policy — written by engineers, revised by lawyers, enforced by AI — is private law governing speech at civilisational scale [2].
The pillars haven’t dissolved, then. They have been joined — and in many domains eclipsed — by new concentrations of power that operate entirely outside the accountability architecture the old metaphor assumes. A teenager’s TikTok reaches more people in an afternoon than a parliamentary debate reaches in a year. An algorithm tweak can reshape political reality across dozens of countries simultaneously. These are pillar-scale effects produced by entities that no pillar model can see, because they were never built into the blueprint.
And this is where the metaphor quietly breaks. The fourth estate model assumes a stable set of power structures that journalism can watch from the outside. When the most consequential power operates through proprietary systems, at computational speed, across borders, with no obligation to disclose — the watchdog has nothing to circle. The building is gone. Or rather, the building was replaced by infrastructure so pervasive it looks like weather.
The legal scholar Yochai Benkler saw part of this coming over a decade ago when he described the “Networked Fourth Estate” — a diverse set of actors and technologies providing public checks on government, but with no center, no single set of norms, no clear institutional boundary [3]. His description was accurate. But “networked fourth estate” still assumes the fundamental relationship runs between journalism and the state — the press watching the government. What it misses is that the most consequential power structures of this century are often not governments at all. They are the platforms, the algorithms, the infrastructure layer that sits beneath public discourse and shapes it before any journalist gets to write a word.
So the question then is: What metaphor can replace “the fourth estate”? The metaphor that comes closest — and it is still imperfect — may be ecological rather than architectural. If power is no longer a set of pillars, journalism is no longer a watchdog circling a building. Something more like mycelium in a forest floor. The tissue that links organisms that cannot see each other, that moves nutrients and signals across distances, that turns a collection of individual trees into a functioning ecosystem.
Mycelium is invisible. It is humble. It does not “hold power to account” in any dramatic, Watergate sense. But accountability doesn’t disappear in an ecological model — it changes shape. Investigative journalism still matters enormously. A reporter tracing how a platform’s algorithm amplified hate speech before an election, a team mapping the shell companies behind a land grab in Nairobi’s informal settlements, a leaked internal memo revealing that engineers knew a content moderation policy would suppress certain languages — these are acts of exposure, and they remain essential. The difference is where they sit. In the pillar model, investigation is the function. The whole edifice exists to produce the dramatic reveal. In the ecological model, investigation is one vital organ inside a larger living system. The exposé lands differently when a mycelium network already exists to carry it — when communities can receive, contextualise, and act on what the investigation reveals, rather than watching it flash across a news cycle and vanish. Accountability becomes more effective when it is embedded in connection rather than standing alone as spectacle.
What mycelium adds is everything that surrounds the investigation. The slow, unglamorous work of maintaining the conditions under which a complex system can function — distributing information, enabling coordination among parts that would otherwise remain isolated, ensuring that when power is exposed, there is living tissue ready to respond.
I’ve seen what this absence looks like. Through my work with Dreamtown, I’ve spent years in informal settlements and marginalized communities where enormous amounts of knowledge exist — oral traditions, community networks, local understanding passed between generations — but almost none of it in forms that journalism’s infrastructure can reach. From the pillar perspective, these places are invisible. Not because they lack stories. Because the model was built to watch buildings, not to listen underground. The knowledge is there. The connections aren’t. A mycelium model would start exactly there — in the places no watchdog thinks to look.
The collapse of local newspapers is the same story from the other direction. The reporters who attended council meetings and knew the neighbourhood were the mycelium. When they disappeared, social media filled the gap — but without the slow, accountable work that turns raw information into shared understanding.
The shift changes what journalism does. The fourth estate model asks journalism to oppose, to expose, to deliver the dramatic reveal. An ecological model asks journalism to connect — to move from the voice of authority to the facilitator of dialogue, making shared reality possible across a fragmented world. One assumes power is concentrated and needs watching. The other assumes power is distributed and needs linking.
Metaphors shape institutions. The fourth estate metaphor produced a specific kind of journalism: investigative, adversarial, oriented toward exposing wrongdoing by identifiable powerful actors. That journalism remains essential.
But consider climate change. There is no scandal to expose. No corrupt official to name. Systems interact, feedback loops compound, effects emerge that no single actor caused. Journalism that can only see pillars will miss this entirely. And climate change is now the norm, not the exception — algorithmic bias, the erosion of shared reality, the slow accumulation of systemic harm. These are ecological problems. They require an ecological press.
As Michael Schudson wrote, the fourth estate is “a myth, not patently false but selective and obscuring, a sacred story that embodies higher values and ignores so much” [4]. The myth will persist. Metaphors are sticky, and this one flatters journalism’s self-image. There is something heroic about being a pillar. There is nothing heroic about being fungus.
But the forest doesn’t need another pillar. It needs the organism that keeps everything connected underground, out of sight, doing the quiet work that makes the visible world possible. And the journalist’s own craft shifts with it — less the writer of the definitive article, more the person whose access, perspective, and emotional honesty make connections that no algorithm can replicate.
What would journalism look like if it took that seriously?
Sources
[1] Meta AI, “The AI behind unconnected content recommendations on Facebook and Instagram,” Meta Engineering Blog, June 29, 2023. Link. See also: Social Media Examiner data on Facebook Feed composition (35.2% unconnected content) and Instagram in-feed recommendations (50%+ from unfollowed accounts).
[2] Carroll, E. (2020), “Platforms and the Fall of the Fourth Estate,” Maryland Law Review, Vol. 79, Issue 3, Pp. 529–589. Link
[3] Benkler, Y. (2011), “A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle Over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Vol. 46. See also: testimony transcript, United States v. PFC Manning (2013)
[4] Schudson, M., “The Myth of the Fourth Estate,” Lapham’s Quarterly. Link
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