A few months ago Greg Piechota from INMA handed me a task that sounded small. Spend some time looking at how news brands market themselves. Campaigns, slogans, advertisements. See if anything interesting comes out of it.

I thought I would spend a weekend watching slick videos and admiring JPEGs.

Then I started counting.

By the time I finished, I had reviewed more than 4,000 brand campaigns from INMA’s Best Practices archive - one of the largest commercial libraries of journalism marketing on the planet. I went further back too, to the earliest newspaper advertisements in the late 19th century, 130 years of press history condensed into a single spreadsheet. I looked at how broadcasters branded themselves in the 1950s, how cable disrupted that, how the web shattered it, and how today’s publishers are scrambling to rebuild whatever is left.

The first thing I noticed was not any individual campaign.

It was a texture. An acoustic. A kind of hum across the whole archive.

If you strip out the logos, almost all modern journalism marketing is saying the same four things. Truth. Objective. Independent. Trust.

Try this yourself. Walk into a bar tonight. Tell three people you are launching a media outlet. Ask them to sketch the tagline on a napkin. I will bet you every time that two of those four words show up - regardless of political leaning, country, or format.

This is what I call the Sea of Sameness.

And it is not just an aesthetic problem. It is a commercial and civic problem. In an era where AI can generate any of those claims in seconds, at any scale, in any language, the identical positioning of almost every serious news outlet is no longer a quirk of the industry. It is an existential vulnerability.

HOW TRUST BECAME A SLOGAN

For most of journalism’s modern history, trust was infrastructure. You bought the local paper because it was the local paper. Locality was credibility. You did not pick between sources. You picked the one that existed. Trust was invisible, granted, assumed.

Then broadcast arrived and added a face. The anchor became the trust provider. The first true journalism influencers - Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley - were not selling a brand. They were the brand. Cable fractured that, first commercially, then ideologically. The web finished the job. Algorithms took over the distribution. Platforms took over the surfaces. Outlets that once reached readers through physical proximity now had to fight for attention alongside teenagers with ring lights.

This is where the marketing begins in earnest. When trust stops being infrastructure, it has to be advertised. And once you advertise it, you commoditize it.

“Announcing trust is like a dentist running a poster campaign that says: I am a dentist. I use dental tools.”

Skim through the INMA archive and you see newsrooms reaching for the same rhetorical lifebuoy over and over. We are trusted. We are independent. We tell the truth. These are not unique positions. They are the baseline of the job description.

Worse than unoriginal, it is structurally weak. The moment every outlet insists on the same four virtues, those virtues dissolve into noise. They become the white-noise machine of legacy journalism - reassuring to those already inside, invisible to everyone else.

You can see the failure in the numbers. News avoidance in Poland, where I live, sits at 44% - and people will tell you to your face that they avoid news on purpose. Similar numbers reappear across Europe. The outlets’ response? More trust slogans. Louder truth claims. Bigger fonts.

The Sea of Sameness is not a marketing inefficiency. It is a distribution crisis dressed up as a values statement.

WHAT AI DOES TO THIS PICTURE

Here is the thing people in my industry are still not fully digesting.

AI does not threaten journalism by getting facts wrong. AI threatens journalism by getting generic facts right, faster than any human, in whatever register you want. It can produce a plausible version of a news article. It can generate a credible brand video. It can imitate the editorial tone of any major outlet with surprising accuracy. It can certainly string together the word truth, the word independent, and the word trust into a shiny fifteen-second spot.

Every piece of journalism marketing built on generic trust claims is now, by definition, something a machine can do more cheaply.

“AI is not collapsing newsrooms because it is smart. It is collapsing them because it has finally priced the generic fairly - at zero.”

The outlets that survive the next decade will not be the ones that claim trust louder. They will be the outlets that can offer something a machine structurally cannot produce. Something physical. Something embodied. Something with a body behind it.

In other words: the end of the Sea of Sameness is not a better tagline.

It is a different kind of work.

FIVE WAYS OUT OF THE SEA

In the INMA archive, a small number of campaigns genuinely stand out. When I broke them down, I found five strategies that actually work - not because they are clever, but because they each do something the sameness cannot.

The first is cinematic truth. The New York Times’ The Truth Is Worth It reframed subscription as civic investment, dramatising the sacrifice behind reporting. The Washington Post’s Democracy Dies in Darkness, timed to Super Bowl and narrated by Tom Hanks, turned civic duty into a rallying cry. The Guardian’s 1986 Points of View - still one of the most elegant arguments for journalism ever made - shows how a single event looks different from three angles. These campaigns work because they stop selling the product and start showing what it costs to produce.

The second is ego-driven pricing. The Economist’s I never read The Economist. Management trainee, aged 42. Bloomberg’s Context changes everything. The FT’s framing of the cost of not knowing. These brands do not sell you news. They sell you a status upgrade. Their subscribers are not buying information. They are buying themselves.

The third is innovation as product. Helsingin Sanomat built an anti-censorship Counter-Strike map at the start of the war in Ukraine, and a font that melts as global temperatures rise. Reporters Without Borders put an uncensorable library inside Minecraft, a game that no dictatorship has yet managed to block. None of this is a slogan. It is a signal: we are alive. We will experiment. We will not flinch.

The fourth is emotional experience. The Guardian’s Hope Is Power reframed news as something that enables transformation instead of documenting decline. The Philadelphia Inquirer, rather than ask people to subscribe, built Unsubscribe from hate, unsubscribe from noise, unsubscribe from apathy. Subscribe to Philly. Two letters, and the whole register shifts.

The fifth is the shift from mission to conversion. The oldest rhetorical move in the set. The Guardian’s Not for Sale took the Scott Trust ownership structure and turned it into a membership argument. You are not buying news. You are funding a structure that cannot be bought.

“From nouns to verbs. From product to process. From possession to action.”

Each of these campaigns refuses a specific default. Each trades possession for process. Each goes from we have the truth to here is what we risk, what we build, what we stand for.

THE DEAD ZONE AT THE PAYWALL

There is one more thing I noticed while working through the archive, and it annoys me more than I expected.

The top of the funnel in most news marketing is carefully crafted. Real agencies. Real budgets. Real storytelling. Then you reach the paywall - and every outlet collapses into the same dead prompt. Seven days. Thirty days. 99 cents. Cancel anytime.

The civic register that was doing so much work a second ago disappears. No ebook. No welcome ritual. No thank you for crossing this threshold. My dentist gives me a sticker. My news outlet gives me a silent invoice.

If you believe the marketing, you are about to join a civilisational defence of democracy. If you look at the paywall, you are apparently entering a SaaS trial.

This is the Sea of Sameness in its most operational form. Top of funnel: mission. Bottom of funnel: silence. The exact moment a reader signals commitment, the brand goes mute. It is not a conversion problem. It is a rhetorical betrayal.

WHAT ARTISTIC JOURNALISM ACTUALLY IS

I do a specific kind of work for a living. I call it Artistic Journalism.

Most people hear that phrase and assume it means pretty journalism or journalism with design. That is not what it means. Artistic Journalism is a practice that integrates rigorous factual reporting with deliberate aesthetic presentation across sensory forms - a stage, an exhibition, a room, a spatial audio piece, a live magazine. The facts do not soften. The aesthetic does not decorate. They are the same operation.

The academic literature has been circling this territory for years. Stijn Postema’s work on journalism as artistic practice maps the emerging continuum between arts and reportage. Marcel Broersma, two decades ago, already argued that journalism is fundamentally performative - that reporting is a communicative act of persuasion, not a neutral mirror of the world. Joe Atkinson, writing about television newsrooms, pointed out that journalistic “performance” is never just ethical - it is also commercial and theatrical, whether the newsroom admits it or not.

What I have been building - Reakcja on stage in Warsaw, the View From Somewhere exhibition that toured INMA Toronto, the Newspaper Mural turning a wall into a living publication, the new Portal installation launching this summer - is the same road, paved differently.

A MACHINE CAN DRAFT
A NEWSLETTER.
IT CANNOT HOLD A ROOM.

THE ECONOMIC ARGUMENT FOR PHYSICAL PRESENCE

The point is not spectacle. The point is that the reporting arrives with a body, in a room, under a spotlight, where it has to mean something to the people physically present. Journalism on stage. Journalism as architecture. Journalism as ritual. Journalism that asks for an audience’s time, not their eyeballs.

Nothing about this bypasses reporting rigour. The researcher is a researcher. The sources are sources. The facts remain facts. What changes is the container. And the container, it turns out, is where trust gets rebuilt.

This is also - and this is the part that matters for publishers - the single thing AI cannot touch.

In the age of synthetic media, physical presence, emotional risk, and shared attention become premium cultural values. That is not a mood. That is an economic argument.

BRANDING IS A BY-PRODUCT OF THE WORK

This is where artistic journalism and media branding fold into the same conversation.

Publishers keep asking how to stand out. The answer most agencies give is a campaign, a refresh, a new palette, a manifesto film. I have looked at 4,000 of those. Most of them are good. Very few of them change anything durable.

What does change things is when the work itself is different enough that the branding writes itself.

The Guardian’s ownership structure became the Not for Sale campaign. Helsingin Sanomat’s anti-censorship stunts are the brand. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Unsubscribe from hate campaign is less a slogan than an operating principle rendered visible. Reakcja’s brand is the room. Portal’s brand is a wall on a specific street in Warsaw.

Branding journalism is the argument that opens the room. Artistic journalism is what happens inside it. You cannot separate them without losing both.

The outlets that survive AI will not do so because they shouted trust more loudly. They will survive because they built something - physical, live, spatial, bodied - that you cannot write a prompt for. Branding will follow. It has no choice.

WHAT THIS NEWSLETTER WILL DO

This is the first essay of a newsletter that will run twice a month. I want to be honest about what it is.

It is written from Warsaw. It is written by someone who has spent the last ten years co-founding and running Outriders, an award-winning journalism collective, and who is now entering a different chapter - working independently, building special projects for publishers and cultural institutions, developing a formal methodology for Artistic Journalism, and continuing to research how journalism has marketed itself across more than a century of press history.

I will not write clickbait. I will not write corporate abstractions. I will not tell you that AI is unlocking anything. And I will not pretend that the answer to journalism’s trust crisis is another dashboard.

If you are a publisher, editor, cultural producer, or journalist trying to figure out what can still work in a feed full of synthetic everything - this newsletter is for you. If you are a reader who wants to understand why your news outlet feels strangely flat these days, this is also for you.

Journalism does not need more content. It does not need more trust slogans.

It needs forms that make the reporting feel like it landed inside a human life.

That is the work.

This newsletter is where I will argue for it.