On January 26th, the Instagram page and organisation Mrror was launched, describing itself as Trinity’s largest social experiment. The group, seemingly run by Trinity Think Tank, conducts weekly, in-person, anonymous polling on campus, and then shares its findings in graphics via Instagram. The topics it polls are extensive and varied. Recent ones include “Who is your favourite parent?”, “Would you emigrate from Ireland?”, and “Have you ever taken back your ex?” Often, the weekly debates hosted by the Philosophical Society (the Phil) and the Historical Society (the Hist) are the focus of Mrror’s polls, gathering a wider public consensus on the topics debated by a select few in the Graduates Memorial Building (GMB). At the heart of Mrror is what they see as sharing the “Trinity Perspective” in order to stimulate public debate and critical thinking. From their manifesto it is clear that Mrror wishes to generate discourse and conversation among students.
This form of journalism counters traditional reporting, which often seeks to give its readers the full picture, whereas Mrror only offers the data. Any explanation, analysis, or secondary research is amiss from the organisation. This may be what journalism in the modern world looks like now. In order to understand why and how journalism is changing in shape and focus, it is worth looking at how information has been produced and received in the past century.
Is traditional journalism a thing of the past? Mrror’s popularity might suggest so. In past decades, the kind of information that Mrror seeks to provide would have been collated by established groups, fed to newsrooms, and then circulated to the public. In a university setting, journalism focused around opinion and polling would not have received Mrror’s level of attention had it existed in a post-Information Era world.
The Information Era dawned in the mid-twentieth century, and is characterised by an economy based on access to information, and the proliferation of information technology. The rise of Wikipedia, smartphones, search engines, the World Wide Web, and online data systems are all products of the Information Era. This era made journalism a highly lucrative industry. As the primary motors of economic value were analysis and information, news organisations were able to capitalise on this huge desire for information. Yet this era is either in decline, or has already ended. Social media was the first point of collapse. Increasing reliance on individually-made content reduced the public desire for formalised, published content. Furthermore, as social media progressed from content sharing to content creating, the content consumed on social media became increasingly disingenuous. While much still contains the truth, or aspects of it, there is an increasing awareness that much of social media content is not reality; influencers create it for the sake of profitability, brands create it for the sake of marketing, and so on. The effect that this is having on journalism is drastic. As people consume more content online, their desire for journalistic content decreases.
In 2026, this is more true than ever. The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) delivered the final blow to the Information Era. Large Language Models (LLMs) have replaced traditional journalism. Being accessible, personalised, and sycophantic, the public has embraced LLMs in droves. Consequently, the most popular LLM, ChatGPT, boasts a terrifying 700 million active users per week. This has had a significant impact on newsrooms. Once integral to society, newspapers are facing record low readerships, and a dwindling number of writers. Just last month, the Washington Post cut its newsroom by about a third. This is symptomatic of the end of the Information Era.
Now that information is more accessible than ever before, the world has moved from the Information to the Imagination Era. What society views as important, both culturally and economically, is now human and imaginative work, as AI has oversaturated us with information. Similarly, traditional journalism is no longer seen as integral to everyday life. Reporting and translating information can be done much quicker, albeit much worse, by most AI models.
However, as Mrror shows, this does not necessarily mean journalism is dead. Rather, the rise of casual journalism, or people-based journalism, tells us that society now wishes for a more human-centred, opinion-based news outlet. Mrror does one thing – capture the opinions of students on campus. The information you get is fairly simple: what do Trinity students think about issue XYZ? What is the common consensus on topic A? And then the think tank breaks down their data by demographic, such as by gender, age, degree level, and so on.
Notably, Mrror does not ask why its participants hold certain opinions, and it does not analyse or examine the beliefs held, nor the demographic makeup of the opinions they report. Mrror is an outlet of the Imagination Era. Firstly, because it is inherently human-focused. Mrror is interested in both the opinions of Trinity students and also reporting their findings back to Trinity students. There is no secondary research or supporting information; purely data gathered by people, from people, for people. This is characteristic of journalism in the new Imagination Era, where the abundance of artificially generated or online information results in a greater desire for human-created content. Secondly, although information is being provided, a certain amount is left up to the reader. It is up to the audience, for example, to form an opinion on the weekly poll, or to argue for or against the topic. The legwork is left up to the audience.
In a new era of journalism where the priority is on opinion, and human perspective, rather than information, we will surely be seeing more casual reporting, like Mrror’s, as opposed to the established titanic newsrooms of the past.
