This is open to debate. I'm John Donbent. Today, another in the series we are calling

generational divides with Nick Gillespie. This one zooms out to look at some of the changes

that have happened in the news landscape over the past several decades. As a journalist who worked

for many years for ABC News myself, I found it really, really interesting, really fascinating.

This episode was made possible

by a generous grant from Liberty Ears Foundation. It's a wide-ranging conversation that went a lot of

places, which we edited and organized for clarity. This is open to debate. I'm Nick Gillespie.

This is our second installment in a series we're calling generational divides in which we gather

three different generations,

a boomer, a zoomer, and a millennial to see where the dividing lines fall.

Today we're talking about the state of news and journalism, which is often in the news,

and again recently when the Washington Post announced it was laying off one third of its reporting

staff and cutting entire departments, including the books desk and the sports section.

And then there's the rest of the news that's also being reported about the news, which is

also grim. A century ago, the number of newspapers was around 24,000. Now the number is closer

to 6,000, with the majority of them being

weeklies, not even daily newspapers. The major news networks have seen steep declines in viewership

and trust and confidence in the news has sunk to 28 percent of Americans expressing faith

in the media. That's a low point over the past 50 years. Yet,

the internet has also brought the explosion of blogging websites and podcasts. There are, by many

accounts, more places to access more information, more opinions in the ether than ever before.

Anyone can start a platform, start a podcast,

...