The defining question in media right now isn’t about technology or distribution. It’s about control.
Who decides the conditions under which creative and journalistic work gets made, distributed, and monetized? At Locarno, a cohort of filmmakers is asserting the right to choose analog over digital, craft over efficiency, archival programming over algorithmic recommendation. Meanwhile, journalists are discovering their choices are being made for them, by federal pressure campaigns, corporate data partnerships, or resource constraints forcing structural consolidation.
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The gap between those realities tells you something about institutional power. When you have leverage, you can reject the dominant industrial logic and find validation for it. When you don’t, you fight rearguard actions against decisions handed down from elsewhere.
The Case for Craft at Locarno
Albert Serra doesn’t want you to call his new film a concert film. “Seize moments de ma vie” (“Sixteen Moments of My Life”), which premiered out of competition at Locarno, documents a one-off performance by screen legend Ingrid Caven at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris.
Serra’s framing is deliberate: singularity over polish, capturing something that happened once rather than engineering something repeatable. In his conversation with Variety, he positions the approach as a rejection of industrial production values in favor of live capture. A philosophical stance as much as an aesthetic one.
That same philosophy animates “Piluk,” the animated short from Canada’s National Film Board that premiered in Locarno’s Pardi di Domani section. The filmmakers made a pointed choice: pencil, paper, and the human voice. No digital intermediaries, no AI-assisted pipelines.
As they explain in their Variety interview, the decision was about finding the simplest possible textures for the story they wanted to tell. In an animation industry racing toward automation, that simplicity registers as radical.
Locarno itself is institutionalizing this logic. Heritage Monday, the festival’s industry strand dedicated to film restoration and retrospective work, devoted this year’s edition to building new young audiences for classic cinema.
The panels, detailed in Variety’s coverage, treated restoration as audience development. The bet: deliberately curated access to older films can compete with algorithmic recommendation engines. Programming expertise still has commercial value.
Whether that advantage scales beyond festivals and art-house contexts is another matter. Locarno provides the proof of concept. Sustaining careers on those terms requires distribution infrastructure that doesn’t yet exist at scale.
Who Controls the Newsroom’s Infrastructure
While filmmakers at Locarno are choosing their terms, journalists increasingly are not.
Poynter has been tracking federal actions targeting press freedom since the current administration took office, and the cumulative picture is stark. More than 100 documented incidents, from the dissolution of independent White House press pool oversight to the elimination of hundreds of millions in federal support for public broadcasters.
The full analysis reveals a systematic pattern. This is about dismantling the institutional and financial infrastructure that enables independent journalism.
The threat doesn’t always come from outside the building. USA Today Co. unions are calling on management to cut ties with Palantir following a data monetization deal. The pitch: use Palantir’s technology to extract more value from user data across Gannett’s properties.
The unions’ response, documented in Poynter’s reporting, frames this as a direct threat to editorial credibility. When your parent company partners with a defense contractor known for surveillance infrastructure, the wall between business and editorial gets harder to defend.
The unions aren’t arguing against data-driven strategies in principle. They’re arguing that some partnerships compromise the newsroom’s ability to maintain public trust. That distinction matters.
The BBC World Service is consolidating seven language-specific apps into one multilingual platform. Press Gazette’s coverage treats this as a pragmatic response to resource constraints and changing user behavior. Public broadcasters globally are facing funding cuts and political pressure. Consolidation maintains service levels with fewer resources.
But even pragmatic choices have editorial consequences. Collapsing seven apps into one changes how audiences access content, how stories get prioritized in shared feeds, how language communities maintain distinct identities within a unified platform.
What This Means
Locarno’s artisanal filmmakers and embattled newsroom workers face versions of the same challenge: maintaining creative and editorial autonomy when the infrastructure they depend on is controlled by others.
The filmmakers have more leverage because festival validation and art-house distribution still reward deliberate resistance to industrial logic. Journalists are fighting harder because the threats are more existential and institutional support is thinner.
For media professionals, the takeaway is strategic. Pay attention to who controls the infrastructure you depend on, whether that’s distribution platforms, data partnerships, funding sources, or institutional validation. When you have leverage, use it to set your own terms. When you don’t, organize. The unions pushing back against the Palantir deal understand this. So do the Locarno programmers betting that curated classic cinema can build new audiences.
If you’re looking to shift roles in response to these dynamics, browse open editorial roles on Mediabistro to find organizations that align with your values. And if you’re hiring for positions where infrastructure and autonomy questions matter, post a job on Mediabistro to reach candidates who think strategically about institutional power.
Infrastructure consolidation is accelerating across media through corporate mergers, platform dominance, and government pressure. The question isn’t whether it continues. It’s who will control the consolidated infrastructure, and whether creative and editorial workers will have any say in the terms.
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