You should care more about the Nexstar/Tegna merger than you do because it will have an impact on you — and it won’t be good.

A friend who still works in news texted me this morning after the Nexstar/Tegna merger news: “You got out at the right time.”

I had already been talking with two other friends about the merger — one who works in news and one who also got out — when she messaged that.

Her words really struck me. Leaving journalism is something I wrestle with far too often.

I miss following stories that actually affected people’s lives — directly and indirectly, and in ways they did not even realize.

I miss knowing more than the average person about what was happening in local government, in schools, in neighborhoods, on roads people drive every day.

I miss asking elected officials very basic questions and watching them get annoyed that someone was paying attention.

I miss all of what news was.

I left full-time journalism at the end of 2022.

At the time, I was working for a television news company, but none of this happened overnight. I had seen the shift starting years earlier — even a decade earlier — as people became more hostile toward local news and as newsrooms slowly started prioritizing things other than the news itself. For me, 2020 felt like a tipping point. That is when everything already in motion seemed to move into overdrive.

Important news was still getting covered. Real journalism was still happening.

But as attention spans waned and eyeballs wandered to other forms of media (like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube), the draw to make headlines more sensational, videos shorter with less information and more gimmicks only intensified.

And it was not just happening in TV. It was happening everywhere.

There appeared to be less emphasis on actually informing people and more emphasis on feeding the machine.

More and more news outlets were referring to news as “content.” And that “content” included links to Amazon products, useless user-submitted photo galleries, rewritten news releases and archived video made to look like something new.

And, I need to note, good journalism is still out there. People are still fighting to do quality journalism every day.

But too much of it is buried under junk, largely driven by the powers that be (typically, people who just have money to buy a news outlet or a few and have no actual concern about the news — or people being driven by those demands).

Maybe my friend is right. Maybe I did get out at the right time.

But I still go back and forth. Some days, I feel like I let news down by leaving. Other days, I know I was protecting myself by stepping away from a fight that already felt lost.