It’s been a difficult time for ink-stained wretches, not least because most of our journalistic output these days uses hardly any ink at all. It can sometimes feel a tad insubstantial, especially the paycheck part.
But the moment is mixing schadenfreude and existential dread in a toxic brew as we witness the humbling of previously untouchable hegemons and the rise of new capabilities/threats to financial viability on a near-daily basis.
Where it goes matters plenty for those of us in the thumb-sucking/navel-gazing class, of course. We’re always in danger of extinction. But it matters for other forms of news provision, too. From the 24-hour cable channels (where a massive, libel law-shifting suit against Fox News over rampant post-election lying settled this past week for a mere $787.5 million, with more suits to come) to the local fish wrappers getting stripped for parts by private equity.
How does journalism pay for itself in the future?
Fueling the schadenfreude (that delightfully precise and unique German term for taking pleasure in the misery of others), we have the spectacle of Google’s flailing first months in the suddenly high-profile revolution in artificial-intelligence tools.
Put simply, Google’s Bard AI tool is getting its butt kicked by Microsoft’s Bing, which now incorporates OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALLE-2.
Google has dominated the search-engine business for two decades, claiming well over 90% market share. Bing, by contrast, has claimed well under 4% market share.
Suddenly, though, Google looks vulnerable to what I would dub Bing’s Conversation Engine, which can return a fully formed passage, paper or image with just a few text prompts. Could that conversation capability finally end Google’s problematic stranglehold on news?
The schadenfreude tumbles out because journalism’s relationship with Google has been … fraught. Actually, it’s mostly been about feeling exploited and used, with virtually no alternatives to acceding to that exploitation.
News outlets have depended on Google to drive a huge percentage of their readership/viewership. Rather than directly compensate the content creators, Google basically promised that increased site traffic would make up for direct payments to the journalism outlets. Social-media giants Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter made much the same promise.
News organizations piled in on that promise, as did new kinds of journalism companies, such as Vice, Politico, Vox and Buzzfeed.
But the increasingly obvious reality is that Google’s search engine mostly just generates hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue for Google, while delivering considerably less to the sources of their content.
It’s the same promise, and problem, with social media platforms.
Facebook, after thousands of layoffs and other cuts, has moved to full revenue-extraction mode. What used to be called the Newsfeed now features fewer posts from news outlets or people you know, and much more branded content, sponsored posts and plain ol’ ads.
The situation is even worse at Elon Musk’s chaotic iteration of Twitter. This week, among much else, the confused little bird stripped verification checkmarks from most famous people, companies and journalists.
Musk instituted a pay-to-play replacement checkmark that seems destined mostly to destroy the verification process. The New York Times, NPR and a growing number of journalists are pulling back from the site, likely to be joined by others as the site devolves from useful amplifier of notable news and views to one man’s personal echo chamber.
As a result, the aging revenue models for journalism for the past couple of decades are ending, in some cases taking their leading practitioners with them.
Just this week, Buzzfeed said it would shut down its Pulitzer Prize-winning news division and eliminate 160 jobs. Huffington Post, another pioneering online site that became part of Buzzfeed when Verizon dumped AOL in 2020, will continue, as will Buzzfeed’s viral quizzes and listicles but remain on crisis watch. In March, Vox sold a $100 million stake to Penske Media Corp., which dominates Hollywood’s awards advertising business.
Many other sites, led by the redoubtable New York Times, are relying increasingly on subscriptions to pay most of their bills. But questions abound across journalism, especially in this new AI-driven era.
I’ve already written about the uncertain future facing CNN in Warner Bros. Discovery’s debt-strangled hands (will Gayle King and Charles Barkley really fix everything?). NBCUniversal just lost CEO Jeff Shell over the weekend to an inappropriate romantic entanglement.
And NextGen TV continues its excruciatingly slow, muddled rollout. At least with NextGen TV, the putative future of local broadcast news and information, we now have the FCC and NAB collaborating to make it all work better and faster. That should fix things.
Fox News is still cranking along at the top of the cable ratings, but that massive Dominion lawsuit settlement this week is only the first of several looming legal headaches, which may whack other, less financially sturdy right-wing news outlets too.
All of which brings us back to that heady brew of schadenfreude and existential angst.
Yes, it’s kinda fun to see Google’s high-handed approach to copyright getting some paradigm-shifting competition. But the issues don’t necessarily improve in an AI-dominated future.
Possibly a problem: sometimes those AI responses are wildly wrong or just plain awful, thanks to the crud tucked into those vast sets of training materials. The crud tends to resurface just when you need a fast and fluent take on, say, vaccinations or election security or, heck, the Illuminati.
Even worse for journalism, even the good responses are unlikely to disclose, never mind compensate, the humans and companies who did the actual work of journalism.
I talked this week with several lawyers, CEOs and other entertainment and tech executives grappling with AI’s burgeoning copyright headache in journalism, art, music, and video. In many, though not all, cases (Adobe’s Firefly is a notable exception), those AI systems are trained on billions of pieces of content that belongs to someone else.
Someone’s going to have to figure out how to compensate all those copyright holders for the use of their material to make billions of dollars for someone else. Or not, as happened in the search era.
We’re starting to realize that, aside from the limited joys of schadenfreude, the Conversation Engine era may be no better, and potentially far worse, for journalism. Figuring it out will be the existential fight of the next few years.
As The Who’s Pete Townshend once presciently wrote, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. What a week.
