Written by Ornella Hernandez
I knew before it started. The way you know a relationship is over before either person says it out loud. You can feel the ending before it arrives.
Upon graduating from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism on the broadcast track, I chose not to pursue working in television — too much work for too little pay amid shrinking viewership. Later, as a Master’s student at the Paris School of Business, my thesis made the case I’ve been making ever since: news has never been a business. It’s always been a subsidy. From advertisers who needed eyeballs. From billionaires who wanted influence. From foundations that believed in the civic function of journalism. From venture funds who thought “this time will be different.”
Then I spent two years filing stories daily as a crypto reporter, watching editorial teams get built on VC money and call it infrastructure. The idea of a self-sustaining newsroom has always been more aspiration than fact. We just kept funding the aspiration.
Crypto media had the additional problem of believing its own mythology.
In October 2025, Blockworks shuttered its newsroom — one that I used to be a part of. Most recently, DL News announced it was closing in May 2026. Who will be next, I wonder?
Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz made the announcement on his X account. Framing the closure as a promotion, he said the data division had grown so fast and so profitably that the news operation had become a distraction. Journalists were laid off despite record revenues in 2025. The newsroom wasn’t killed by failure. It was killed by something that simply worked better.
DL News hit harder. Director Paige Aarhus, herself a journalist, wrote the closing statement. Revenue had grown 270% in 2025. Their research arm crossed seven figures. The journalism was good. None of it was enough.
“Traffic across crypto and tech media contracted severely,” she wrote. “AI accelerated the collapse of search distribution and enabled endless waves of parasitic aggregation.”
That’s the sentence. AI did not kill crypto media by writing articles. It killed crypto media by summarizing, by aggregating, by giving readers the answer before they ever reached the source. The audience had somewhere else to go.
What Blockworks and DL News prove is not that journalism is dying. They reveal that journalism was never meant to be packaged as a content operation with seventeen reporters, a CMS team, and an SEO roadmap. That model worked when Google still sent traffic. Once AI started answering questions directly, it hit a dead end.
Having reported for Blockworks and Cointelegraph, the internal reality was clear to me early on. The metric that mattered wasn’t depth — it was volume. How many articles can I write today? How fast from announcement to publish? Investigations took time, but time didn’t scale. What scaled was the feed: price moves, protocol updates, funding rounds, reworded press releases dressed as news.
That’s when I stepped away from daily newswriting. Readers didn’t actually want a news feed. They wanted a person they trusted to explain what something meant — not just that it happened. The publications that broke through had voices. The ones that didn’t were content factories. And content factories are easy to replace.
I don’t know what crypto media looks like in five years. But I know it doesn’t look like the Bloomberg of crypto. That dream had a good run.
What the industry actually needs — and always has — is real investigative journalism. Fewer stories about price action, more about where the money goes and who’s making decisions. Smaller outlets and direct relationships matter more than ever, because the reporters who built real audiences are harder to replicate than the outlets they worked for.
Trust cannot be indexed by a search engine. It cannot be automated. And it was never going to scale the way venture capital demanded.
