A new father's guide to the information ecosystem

Nine whole days into fatherhood, I'm learning that babies and journalism have something in common: neither cares much about your plans, theories, or our illusion of control.

I became a father a little more than a week ago. Rosie is beautiful, overwhelming, and currently believes the only acceptable lullaby is “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath.

Like any normal, anxious, spreadsheet-inclined human, my partner and I spent months prepping for this.

We read, we watched videos, we comparison-shopped bassinets, strollers, and baby monitors like VCs benchmarking future investments. Information would give us understanding; understanding would give us control; control would deliver safety, healthy development, and more than four consecutive hours of sleep. Looking back with the immense wisdom of nine full days of fatherhood, this was a theory bordering on hubris. The baby arrived like a tornado, and even equipped with an AI crying translator and IR-enabled camera (it’s real, it works), control, it turns out, is a vibe at best.

This logic: “information → understanding → control” will sound familiar to anyone who’s ever worked in journalism. It’s the premise behind every news brief, every analysis piece, every explanatory deep dive. And it’s not entirely wrong. But I’m starting to suspect the gap between the information we gather and the reality we face might be wider than we care to admit.

Someone recently described life with an infant to me as a cognitive curtain you cannot peek behind until you walk through it. People can tell you what’s coming. You hear and understand what they’re saying. But you cannot fully grasp what the new reality is like until you’re in it.

This loss of control is, I think, a pretty universal feeling among first-time parents. During our prep phase, I came across Erik Erikson’s concept of psychosocial stages and normative crises: the idea that life is often a sequence of expected disruptions that require you to rearrange your identity and much of everything else with it.

I was intrigued by this concept. And while trying (and usually failing) to get Rosie to sleep at 2 a.m., I kept thinking how neatly it maps onto the challenges facing the media sector. (Father of the Year behavior, I know: bouncing a screaming infant while mentally drafting paragraphs about business model collapse.)

Out with the old, in with the…

Before the baby, life had structure. There were clear rhythms, roles, expectations. I knew (roughly) when I’d sleep, when I’d work, what my days would look like. Then, overnight, those rules collapsed. Sleep became a negotiation. Time became a myth. Autonomy became a fond memory. The entire operating system of our lives became unstable, and no amount of reading prepared me for that.

Legacy media, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, but really everywhere, once operated under a similarly stable order. Gatekeeping authority, predictable business models, clear(ish) professional ethics. We mostly understood the rules. Then came digital platforms, social media, economic disruption, and suddenly the “rules” no longer held. Both situations are crises of norm disintegration: the collapse of established ways of making meaning and sustaining order.

And when norms collapse, identity becomes the next casualty. In the delivery room, nurses and doctors and midwives all called my partner by her first name, while I was only “the dad.” “Dad, please step away from the table!” “Dad, please fetch that blanket.” “Dad, you may stop crying now and cut the umbilical cord.” This new identity was sprung upon me by complete strangers, and suddenly my self had to expand to include another person, a new role, a fundamentally different way of being in the world. I still recognize myself in the mirror (I desperately need to shave), but the person looking back already has different priorities, different fears, different capabilities.

Journalism is struggling with the same disorientation. Who are we now that we’re no longer the sole arbiters of truth or attention? News outlets must redefine their identity from scratch. Educators? Entertainers? Activists? Curators? Community organizers? Brands? The answer is probably some uncomfortable combination of all of the above. Both crises involve identity reconstruction, moving from autonomous individual or institution to relational ecosystem participant.

And identity crises, it turns out, are expensive.