Will the slow anaconda crush of AI mean the end of journalism? It’s hard to imagine it completely eliminating the profession outright, unless the machines end up enslaving humanity à la the “Matrix” films. There will always be nosy gumshoes meddling in everyone’s affairs.
But major media companies are in dire straits, and their executives aren’t sounding too cheerful about the future, which could hold in store the end of the traditional news agency.
That’s according to a new survey of over 280 media leaders from 51 countries conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ). It found that on average, the sample of editors, CEOs, and digital executives expect traffic to their websites to plummet by 43 percent over the next three years — which would be a disastrous blow to their commercial operations.
Traffic to news sites has already been plunging, a trend that preceded the AI boom but only accelerated as chatbots like ChatGPT began to replace the search engine. Analytics data cited in the RISJ report shows that web traffic directed to news sites from Google Search has plummeted 33 percent across the globe.
With omens like those, Nick Newman, senior research associate at the RISJ, predicts the “traffic era” of the early internet, which once sustained traditional publishers, may finally be coming to an end.
“It is not clear what comes next,” Newman told The Guardian. “Publishers fear that AI chatbots are creating a new convenient way of accessing information that could leave news brands — and journalists — out in the cold.”
“But tech platforms do not hold all the cards,” he added. “Reliable news, expert analysis and points of view remain important both to individuals and to society, particularly in uncertain times. Great storytelling — and a human touch — is going to be hard for AI to replicate.”
Some publishers seeing the writing on the wall have pivoted to embracing AI tech. But the way it’s being deployed in many cases is almost certainly a miscalculation, imperiling fundamental tenets of good journalism by introducing hallucinating tech into the loop — which is to say nothing of the coincidentally-timed layoffs that have been hamstringing the industry.
Some cases seem more innocuous. The New York Times, for example, has been using AI to help craft headlines. But in an alarming recent demonstration of how the tech can go drastically wrong, the Washington Post launched a feature last month for producing personalized AI-generated podcasts that would relay the newspaper’s latest stories, which immediately sparked uproar both internally and externally. The podcasts were riddled with factual errors and in some cases even editorialized on developing stories. The venture was resoundingly mocked online, and WaPo staffers fumed against leadership, calling it “astonishing” and a “disaster.”
But the logic behind these moves is that desperate times call for desperate, extremely ill-advised measures, and the industry is desperate indeed. According to the RISJ report, only 38 percent of the surveyed media leaders say they’re confident about journalism’s prospects in the years ahead, a staggering 22 percent drop from four years ago.
To navigate these waters, the publishers emphasized doubling down on some aspects of what makes journalism unique, like original investigations, on-the-ground reporting, and human-oriented stories. On the other hand, they said they’d scale back general news and service journalism, which they expected to be commoditized by AI. They also favored pivoting journalists into content creation, such as making shortform videos, to gain a foothold in social media.
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