Azeem Azhar

I do trends and forecasts.

And there are people who do real journalism, but proper investigative journalism.

There's a very, very well-regarded British journalist called Jim Watterson who left his

storied newspaper to set up a Substack just to write about London.

And he's taken the tools of being a great investigative journalist to cover stories that were simply not being covered because actually before Substack, before AI, local media was struggling because classifieds had gone on to eBay.

So I think those people do exist.

I'm trying to square Martin Gury's prescient essay, the notion of the revolt of the publics in a world where there's so much information around that trust in institutions will start to decline.

And I think the Edelman Trust Barometer, the Reuters Institute for Journalism, their trust numbers for...

media are declining, but they are also stabilizing in some sense.

They're lower than they were 10, 15 years ago.

Yeah, but you can't decline too much further.

I mean, like... Right.

But how do you think about closing that challenge between increasing trust for better or for worse in talking heads and more skepticism about anyone with a masthead?

I view it as...

Like back in the days when Democrats had friends who were Republicans and Republicans had friends who were Democrats, which I think is not the world the U.S.

lives in today.

I love that example of having a, you know, a critic, a helpful critic to challenge perspectives on a piece.

And I think that's, I'm mentally logging that to think, you know, we don't write much around politics, but lots of issues today have those political undertones.

I found it extremely difficult to find that balance because I think, as you know, you've read a few of my essays.

I really...