“Register now!” “Special offer for early registration!” “Early bird offer!” These phrases may be the best way to understand an entire phase of how we have come to relate to war.

Register now to understand Iran. Register now to understand Israel. Register now to find out who rules the world. And register now to understand southern Lebanon too: its history, its borders, its memory, and everything you still do not know about it.

Somewhere in Lebanon, people from the south still cannot return home. In September 2026, the United Nations estimated that around 330,000 people remained displaced across Lebanon, while humanitarian access to areas south of the Litani River remained extremely difficult. Months into the war, schools are still sheltering displaced families, buildings are still being destroyed, and Israeli airstrikes continue in the south.

Yet that same south can appear on your phone screen in a completely different form: a catchy title, a polished poster, a date, a limited number of seats, and a bank account to transfer money to.

War is no longer just news. It has become a market for meaning.

This is where the “economy of triviality” becomes more interesting. It does not always feed on trivial things. Sometimes it does the exact opposite. It takes the heaviest things in people’s lives- war, death, displacement, memory, borders- and runs them through the same market logic used to sell any other product.

Lana Medawar and Ghadi Francis

The problem is not that journalists get paid. That is an easy argument that avoids the real issue. Journalists are workers, and they have every right to earn a living from their work. The problem begins when what is being sold is no longer a skill the journalist possesses, but knowledge extracted from other people’s lives. That distinction matters.

Lana Medawar, for example, founded the “Storytelling Academy,” where she offered paid workshops on content creation. She later expanded the model to politics, history and geopolitics, covering Iran, the Middle East, the United States and the global order. In an advertisement for one of her workshops on Iran, she promises participants a “deep and balanced understanding” of the country, its history, political system and regional project in just three days. In another, she tells those who want to understand the Middle East without spending hours doing research that she has saved them the “time and effort.”

The question, then, is not simply why someone would pay this much to attend a session on politics. It is also what exactly they are buying.

Can a country like Iran, with thousands of years of history and a deeply complex political, religious, and social landscape, really be condensed into three days, leaving participants with a “deep and balanced understanding”? Or is what is being sold less about understanding itself and more about the promise of understanding quickly?

“Deep and balanced understanding” could almost sum up the new knowledge economy.

Do not read. Do not research. Do not waste your time. Someone else has already digested the world for you. All you have to do is pay for the summary.

But the model becomes more complicated when it involves journalists who have not only covered the region’s conflicts, but have also been clearly involved in the battle over how those conflicts are narrated.

This is where journalism starts to resemble the logic of life coaching. Not simply because a journalist is charging for a workshop, but because the promise itself is similar: I will give you the shortcut. I will give you in a few hours what would normally take years of reading, following events, and trying to understand them.

Just as a life coach promises that a limited number of sessions can turn you into a better version of yourself, “life coach journalism” promises to turn you into an expert on Iran, the Middle East, or the global order after an intensive workshop. Knowledge is no longer presented as a process. It is sold as a package.

There is also an important distinction between paid journalism and selling the illusion of knowledge. When a media outlet places an investigation or report behind a paywall, as many do, the reader is paying for journalistic work: research, documents, interviews, editing, fact-checking, and professional time. That model can certainly be debated and criticized, but it remains a way of funding the production of journalism.

When people pay for a promise such as “understand Iran in three days” or “save yourself hours of research,” the relationship with knowledge changes entirely. What is being sold is not the investigation itself, but the authority of the person telling you: I know, and I can simplify the world for you.

Ghadi Francis, for example, has never hidden her position on the “resistance.” In a 2024 interview, she said that being described as a “resistance journalist” was an “honor,” and called resistance “an act of life in this region.” In public discussions, she has repeatedly defended the resistance and her understanding of the conflict. At a later panel, she said that “the popular movement in the south is at the forefront,” and called for “the concern of fighting Israel to return to everyone.”

This commitment was not limited to her articles or political positions. At many points, the line between journalism and celebrating the resistance seemed so thin that it became difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. This is not a political position we are assigning to her. These are positions she has expressed herself.

And this is where the contradiction becomes worth examining.

Any journalist has the right to hold a political position, and Ghadi Francis has every right to defend the resistance as she sees fit. But when someone moves from selling a political promise to selling an explanation of the reality produced by the very choices they defended, the question becomes legitimate.

What Is a Journalist Actually Selling?

For years, the narrative was not simply about describing what was happening. A whole vocabulary of steadfastness, victory, dignity, strength, and deterrence emerged. War was not always presented simply as something that could bring loss. It was also framed as something that could carry moral meaning, even heroism.

Then the war comes. People die. Israel destroys homes. The land burns. People are displaced.

And then comes the next product: come understand the south.

This is not an accusation that a journalist caused the war, nor does it suggest that those who defended the resistance are responsible for Israeli bombardment or the destruction of villages. That would be an unserious leap. The issue is more subtle, and more brutal.

It is about who gets to accumulate capital at every stage of the catastrophe. Before the war, they own the narrative. During the war, they own the platform. After the war, they own the explanation.

And the people?

They are left with the rubble.

That is precisely why this is bigger than one workshop, one journalist, or two names.

From Journalism to Personal Branding

Media scholars began documenting this shift years ago, while the digital world has continued to evolve at an almost daily pace, further blurring the lines between journalist, content creator, and brand.

In a 2017 study published in the academic journal Digital Journalism, titled Personal Branding on Twitter: How Employed and Freelance Journalists Stage Themselves on Social Media, researchers found that social media platforms encourage journalists to build personal brands, turning themselves into independent hubs for news and opinion and increasing what the study described as their “market value.”

In another study, How Journalists Engage in Branding on Twitter: Individual, Organizational, and Institutional Levels, researchers Logan Molyneux, Avery Holton, and Seth Lewis analyzed a representative sample of 384 American journalists and their Twitter accounts. Published online in 2017 in the academic journal Information, Communication & Society, the study found that branding had become widespread among journalists. Branding elements appeared in 95 percent of their profiles and in 58 percent of their tweets. This branding was not limited to the media organizations they worked for. It also operated at the individual level, shaping how journalists presented themselves and built an independent presence on the platform.

The researchers did not stop at documenting the phenomenon. In a later study, Media Work, Identity, and the Motivations that Shape Branding Practices among Journalists: An Explanatory Framework, published online in 2018 in New Media & Society, Molyneux, Lewis and Holton linked the rise of branding practices to growing instability in media work and to the pressures pushing journalists to market themselves alongside the organizations they work for.

Years after these studies were published, the issue feels more urgent, not less. The digital world changes almost daily, and with it, the boundaries between journalist, content creator, influencer and entrepreneur continue to erode. What these studies described as building a “personal brand” no longer stops at improving visibility online or increasing a journalist’s professional value. In some cases, the personal brand itself has become an economic structure, one that can turn an audience into a market, trust into a product, and knowledge into a paid service.

In other words, the journalist no longer has to sell only the story. The journalist can become the product.

And that changes the function of war, too.

In a study titled The Aestheticization of Suffering on Television, published in 2006 in the academic journal Visual Communication, researcher Lilie Chouliaraki analyzed television coverage of the bombing of Baghdad, focusing on what can be described as the “aestheticization of suffering”: the way media representation can turn war into spectacle, keeping images of horror constantly visible while pushing the actual human experience of pain further away from the viewer.

But this does not mean that journalists necessarily stand outside the tragedy that the media turns into something to be consumed. In wars, particularly in our region, journalists are often part of the same communities paying the price. They live under bombardment. They are displaced. They lose their homes and their colleagues. Some pay for their work with their lives.

This contradiction is at the heart of researcher Isaac Blacksin’s study, Agitation at the Margins: War, Reportage, and Their Contradiction in Iraq, published in 2022 in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory and based on two years of fieldwork in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. The study does not reduce the war journalist to a producer of media commodities. Instead, it examines the tension between experiencing war as a material and violent reality and, within the news industry, having to turn that same experience into media content that can be produced and circulated.

This distinction matters. The problem is not that journalists tell stories about war, nor that they are paid for work that may cost them their lives. The question raised by the platform economy begins somewhere else: what happens when the knowledge and symbolic authority a journalist has built through covering war, through access to its communities, memories and testimonies, becomes an independent personal product that is then sold back to the public?

This is where we move from the economy of journalism to the economy of the brand. From a media organization selling journalism to a journalist selling their position as the person who knows.

Those Who Sell the Promise Can Sell the Explanation for Its Collapse

This is where triviality reaches its peak. Not because the south has become trivial, but because the market has erased the distinction between the south and any other product.

What makes this even harsher is that the product does not emerge only after the war. It begins before it, when a narrative is sold to people: hope, steadfastness, deterrence, the promise of victory, the ability to endure. War is given a meaning that makes its cost seem bearable, even though that cost is not shared equally between those who shape the narrative and those who live with its consequences.

Then the war happens, and the cost becomes material: a destroyed home, scorched land, displacement, poverty, injury or death. And when the promise collapses under the weight of reality, the cycle does not necessarily end. A new product can emerge from the rubble itself: knowledge.

Those who once sold an interpretation that made war seem bearable can now sell an interpretation of what the war has done.

Tragedy can therefore be monetized twice. Before it happens, as hope. After it happens, as knowledge. And somewhere between the two, the people who paid the real price remain outside the commercial equation.

Even tragedy can now have a “brand.” Even memory can come with a seat reservation. Even war can come with a registration link.

Perhaps that is why the phrase that best captures our time is no longer “the resistance continues,” or even “the war continues.”

Because the war may end. The promise may collapse. People may remain among the rubble.

But the market will always find something to sell.

Register now.