The past few weeks have brought more troubling news across the news media landscape. To name a few:
1. The Washington Post, a top-five circulation newspaper in the United States and in publication since 1877, announced significant cuts this week. The company fired over a third of its journalists, more than 300 people out of a total of 800.
2. The Pittsburg Post-Gazette, the largest newspaper serving Pittsburg and in business since 1786, shut down last month after 240 years in business. That’s 240 years of community journalism — gone!
3. “60 Minutes” — once one of the most respected news shows on TV for decades — has seen an erosion of trust from its viewers as the program has been seen as increasingly politically biased. In late 2025, it faced a scandal related to what was deemed favorable editing of an interview with Kamala Harris. Now again in 2026, under new leadership, it faces accusations of favoritism towards the Trump administration. What was once a rock steady pillar of unbiased journalism now has a serious credibility and reputation problem from both sides of the political aisle.
4. Since 2005, the United States has lost nearly 40% of its newspapers, almost 3,500 in total. This means that in a typical week, an average of two newspapers in the U.S. shut down!
5. Versant Media Group — the owners of the business news network CNBC and other outlets like MS NOW and the USA Network — had its IPO in early January and has since seen its stock drop by a third in just one month!
This is scary stuff if you own an online newspaper like my wife and I do. But the real question is: What does this mean for all of us?
For publishers:
1. “Being political” or picking sides in today’s political climate is a very risky business.
2. It’s nearly impossible to outrun a legacy print media business model as the “innovators dilemma” slows the transition to digital.
3. A polarizing leader, such as Jeff Bezos of the Washington Post or Bari Weiss of CBS News, makes for an easy target for readers/viewers.
4. The ad-based revenue model that sustained the media industry for decades simply doesn’t work anymore for most companies.
5. Big tech companies and their AI models are truly an existential threat to the entire news media industry.
For consumers of news:
1. Understand that although much of the pain being experienced by the industry is self-inflicted, much of it is not. The news industry has faced massive threats and challenges over recent years. From a shift of print to digital to a massive decline in ad revenues, to the rise of social media, to now the threat of AI. This has been exceptionally difficult to navigate and very few companies have been successful in managing it.
2. Social media is not a “like for like” replacement of the traditional news media. It is less transparent, it is not fact-checked and it is easy to hide the author’s identify. It is also fraught with misleading or downright fake news, and it is increasingly filled with AI-created content that is completely false and misleading. Although traditional news media is far from perfect, social media news, relatively speaking, is a cesspool.
3. Most importantly — it’s critical for you to support the media sources that you value. Put simply, if you don’t, they will disappear. It’s not hyperbole to imagine a world where unbiased, fact-checked news sources no longer exist — in fact, it’s happening before our very eyes at the rate of two newspapers per week!
Imagine a world where all news reporting is just opinions — we are racing towards that world. Although there are some great opinion perspectives out there, we cannot lose the agency to make up our own minds based on our own review of the facts. We cannot outsource thinking and opinion-forming to the loudest (or most well-funded) voices.
Once we reach that world, how do we ever go back? How do we ensure our children and grandchildren become trained, active, curious seekers of knowledge and truth? Very serious questions for very serious times.
Our commitment — and our ask
The team at Mexico News Daily will continue to provide you, day in and day out, with fact-based, objective reporting on Mexico and Mexico’s relationship with the world. We will continue to do so without advertising, in order to give you the best reading experience possible. And we will continue to invest in our business to increase our impact, with initiatives like our new MND Kids platform now being used in schools in both the U.S. and Mexico.
This is not an easy business and my wife and I still have not taken one peso of salary in the nearly 3.5 years since we have purchased MND. That’s not right. That’s not fair. But it’s the reality we have chosen as we have eliminated advertising, built up and invested in our team, and added new platforms like MND Kids and MND TV on YouTube.
I am often asked “How can I support the great work MND does?” The answer is simple and urgent:
Subscribe. Encourage others to subscribe. Share our content with people who value complete, fact-based reporting on Mexico and its place in the world.
We will soon be adding a new feature on our website that allows paid subscribers to “gift” several free MND articles to friends each month — helping us reach future subscribers.
Here’s one last thing that you need to know: Just reading our free newsletter or following us on social media generates zero revenue for us. I can’t tell you how many times I hear, “I love you guys, I follow you on social media” or “I love you guys, I get your free newsletter.” To which I am forced to say, “Thank you, but that isn’t really supporting us. If you truly value our work, we need you to become a paid subscriber.”
The business model is simple: Paid subscribers fund independent journalism. No subscribers means no journalism. We are asking you to choose which world you want to live in and which world do you want to leave behind for your children and grandchildren to live in.
Thank you for taking the time to read my perspective today and for supporting our work and our team.
Travis Bembenek is the CEO of Mexico News Daily and has been living, working or playing in Mexico for nearly 30 years.
