Siren

This one is meant to be a little provocative—a different approach for me!—so I’d love to hear your thoughts. It’s also 10 days late. I don’t think anyone’s counting, but sorry about that!

At a recent journalism conference, an attendee posed the question: “If you were creating a news organization today, what would it look like?” They followed up with a diagnosis: “We’re experiencing a profound lack of imagination.” Both are things I think about all the time—but I have different feelings about each one.

Not long ago, the playbook for starting a news org was straightforward and involved a defined series of steps: secure funding and validate your product, build your editorial and marketing platform, implement monetization and measurement systems, and focus on customer retention and brand scaling.

Now that we have AI search summaries and chatbots to answer just about any question without the need to scramble across websites, I have this uneasy feeling that much of the current internet—and the above playbook—is already anachronistic. You might look at the old playbook and think, “This is still mostly good advice.” That would be true, except that its linchpin—driving traffic to your site via search—is increasingly less reliable. Right now, results seem to vary from org to org, but there’s a sense that so-called discovery is rapidly getting worse.

A very smart colleague whom I admire and who spends a lot of time building solutions for journalism in the AI space, calls himself an AI optimist. I appreciate that. People might think I’m an AI pessimist, but I see myself as neither. I think we need to deeply and actively work to understand both the opportunities and the risks of consumer technologies—including but not limited to AI—and ground ourselves in the knowledge that both benefits and harms can now occur at greater scale than ever in history. We should also understand that the tech industry is more and more inclined to let us figure out how to deal with its harms, rather than try to prevent them proactively. (The decline in literacy and writing skills among young people allegedly due to screens, for instance—a topic lamented in another session—makes me wonder if this era won’t be viewed as one of mass social experiments, conducted at scale on entire generations really without their consent. Each generation will have different issues because of products they used during different stages of life—whether it’s literacy, anxiety, attention disorders, loneliness, inactivity, or whatever.)

Regardless, the news industry is once again experiencing a wave of disruption, and this one feels big. In some ways, the sector may be better positioned than others because many news providers have received extensive training from tech companies for nearly a decade, and this isn’t our first rodeo. It would be good if the industry turned out to be more resilient than I think it is. I’m just not sure. Since the news industry still largely deals in words, information, and visual and audio media, it is still ripe for disruption—including by things like AI search summaries and other forms of AI intermediation.

When it comes to the “profound lack of imagination,” I agree—but I’m not judging. In response to this prompt, I asked, “How often do industries successfully adapt and remain profitable while experiencing significant external pressure?” The answer is: Not often. Historically, this rarely comes from the incumbents. So while there may be a lack of imagination, it fits the pattern. We’re in a period of transition with old systems that still have some life, and the people operating within them are thinking about how to survive. It’s hard for them to also think about the future. The difference between now and fairly recently is that digital startups—news websites—are looking more like legacy systems than modern disruptors.

As humans under pressure in this era of scaled experimentation, our tendency is to want to press the skip button or read the spoilers. But nobody knows what the future holds—nobody even knows how LLMs really work!

So when it comes to what a news organization of the future might look like and how to design now for the future, I’d say it feels like we’re circling something like the end of the writer and the rise of the editor: there could be more investment in curating source information for consumers to engage with themselves. (I’m sorry to say this because I like writers!) I can also imagine fewer jobs in general in the news sector, but not necessarily less profit. It could be a leaner, more productive sector. It could even be a golden era of information providers producing meaningful insights into public meetings and documents in ways they’ve never done before—that mountain of data that requires massive staff time but that AI is increasingly good at processing—without much of a writing staff. Maybe if I’m being Pollyannaish, I’d say this might even bring us to a new era of great (human) writing, where the workmanlike reporting and informing are done by robots, and consumers find this satisfactory, even worth paying for—but the storytelling (analysis, context, and human insight) is reserved for true craftspeople.

But I can also quite easily imagine the end of the old web—with many small self-hosted sites shutting down because their operators have no incentive (audience or revenue) to keep going. Out of this might emerge a world where consumers more heavily rely on fewer but very high quality sources of truth, and those sources remain essential to their lives. Put another way, as slop takes over the platforms, people will still want a few places they can go to find out what’s true. I can count on two hands what I really need from the internet today (not including work)—Gmail, my local news of record, the statewide news of record, the nearest major metro news of record, the national news site of record, Wikipedia, perhaps... Google Gemini for my most trivial questions. This is not a hypothetical; it’s what people are doing already. But are we ready for this?

I’m not saying I endorse any of these futures, but I can imagine them. Honest question: Do they seem plausible to you? (Add a comment!)

Nobody in the conference session successfully answered what a news organization started today should look like (IMO). Someone described how they’d rearrange the editorial deck chairs. But the question is not one of org structure so much as it is about audience and format. How will you find people without search referrals? How will you provide customers with what they need and want? What’s going to keep them coming back? What formats (including but not limited to words) do they want? How will any of this be paid for? There are some interesting ideas coming out now, but no matter what anyone says, nobody really knows the answers yet.

There’s also another important question in the wings: Not just how would you start a news organization today, but how do you maintain an existing one—even as a “legacy” digital startup? I think there are some things most organizations can do to shore things up, which they should make a high priority. Things like: consider restricting AI crawlers, aggressively pursue direct relationships with audience members and reader revenue, unite with peers for mutual aid, maintain a strict focus on your core mission, and make sure your infrastructure is sound and you’re not too far ahead of your skis financially.

I asked another question (meant to be rhetorical) in response to the conference prompt and kinda got heckled: “If the big mistake of the ‘90s was that news orgs gave away their product for free for too long, why are we repeating the past? Unless your organization is profitable right now, why aren’t you putting some kind of barrier up right this second—whether it’s a paywall, or registration wall?”

The first internet era’s idealism—open access, civic duty, exposure over monetization—was a truly wonderful ideal, and I personally believed in it. But if there’s anything we should know by now it’s that if you leave the garden gate open, the bunnies will eventually find out and eat your produce. This is what’s happening as we speak. And it’s not cute like bunnies at all.

Someone shouted their answer: “Because news is a public service!” I agree with this, and I think my career, working largely under this assumption, should lend me some credibility. I believe news is a public service. I just think we need to recognize that the experiments and ideals of this era were just that—and we need new ones now. I’m not convinced public service = free anymore—certainly not to robots. It’s not that I don’t want it to be free, but the ground has shifted.

Free, paywalled, it doesn’t much matter if you don’t exist.

Each month, I put together a Spotify playlist of the songs that caught my ear. Some are familiar to me, some aren’t. Some are old, some are new. The playlist tends to span eras, genres, and sounds. It’s probably not for everyone but here it is!

2024