Unfinished Business — thoughts pulled from research I never got to finish, and project work I keep thinking about anyway.

Nobody Reads the Morning Paper Anymore. So What Are We Actually Reading?

I once tried to write a proposal narrowly focused on journalism students, how mobile phones were reshaping the way they consume news. Good topic, but honestly, the moment I started researching it, I realized the story was bigger than one classroom. It's not really about journalism students. It's about all of us, and what happens to news the moment it stops being something you sit down for and becomes something that just... arrives.

As a comms person, this is the stuff I think about constantly, not just "is the audience on mobile" (obviously, yes), but what mobile actually does to how people relate to information once it gets there.

News stopped being an event and became a background noise

There used to be a shape to how people consumed news, the morning paper, the evening bulletin, appointments you kept with information. Mobile broke that shape entirely. Now people "snack" on news, quick checks throughout the day, a headline glanced at between meetings, a push notification that interrupts something else entirely. It's less a meal, more grazing.

That shift matters for anyone doing comms work, not just journalists. If your audience isn't sitting down with your message, they're catching it sideways, in fragments, competing with a dozen other notifications for the same three seconds of attention. That changes what "good communication" even means. It's not about writing a complete, well-argued piece anymore, it's about surviving the scroll.

The algorithm is now doing part of your job

A lot of what people see isn't chosen by them or by you, it's chosen by a feed that's learned what keeps them looking. That's true whether we're talking about breaking news or a development project's Facebook update. Personalization sounds neutral, even helpful, but it also means two people can be looking at the "same" platform and seeing entirely different realities, shaped by what they clicked on last week.

For comms work, that's a quiet but real problem. You can craft the perfect message, and the platform decides whether it's worth showing to anyone. Understanding the mechanics of the channel isn't optional anymore, it's half the job.

Trust didn't move at the same speed as access

This is the part that actually worries me. Mobile made news faster and easier to reach than ever, but it didn't make it more trustworthy, if anything, the flood of unverified content moving at the same speed as verified reporting has made trust the harder problem to solve. People increasingly get their information from whoever is in their social feed, not necessarily from anyone with an obligation to get it right.

That puts real weight on anyone doing communications work, especially in contexts like ours where there's already a trust deficit between institutions and the public. It's not enough to just be on the platforms people use. You have to actively work to be a credible voice inside a stream where credibility isn't the default.

What I keep coming back to

I never finished the research this started from, and I won't pretend I have a tidy answer. But sitting with it taught me something that's stuck with every comms project I've touched since: reach isn't the hard part anymore. Mobile solved reach.

"Reach isn't the hard part anymore. What's unsolved is depth, trust, and whether anything meaningful survives the format it travels through."

If you're doing comms work, for a newsroom, an NGO, a brand, doesn't matter, the real question isn't "are we on mobile." Everyone is. It's whether what you're putting into that stream is built to survive it, or just built to be seen for three seconds and forgotten. That's the question I'd want more of us in this field to sit with.

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I'm Martin — a communications and partnerships person based in Tanzania, working across storytelling, donor communications, and multimedia in the development sector. This blog is where I dig into ideas I don't get to fully explore in day-to-day project work. More of what I do: martinmajambele.netlify.app