- Trust and human authenticity are the last defensible moats available to knowledge creators. The internet and then mobile phones eliminated the marginal costs of distribution and consumption of information and encouraged publishers to "think globally" chasing revenue. But in journalism, scale is a false god, and generative AI is Big Tech’s latest siren song. The only viable path to local news sustainability runs through genuine service to community and human engagement held as core values, not marketing gloss.
AI is a useful tool, but as infrastructure, not our personality. We are in an AI bubble, and when it bursts, journalism must seize the narrow window it creates: a chance to rebuild locally rooted audience relationships and revenue strategies independent of platform dependence. And we need to do it before the bubble merchants move on to their next grift. - The fall is coming because delusional beliefs in the c-suite are a red flag. They indicate either an enthusiasm for the griftalicious "say anything to prop up the valuation" or, possibly worse, an endemic savior complex in the room. Neither is good for the pragmatic decision-making necessary in a rational organization.
Which is to say: Technology is not inevitable. "The goal of those who deploy the rhetoric of technological inevitability, (Margaret Heffernan) rightly insists, 'isn’t participation, but submission.' “Anyone claiming to know the future,” she adds, 'is just trying to own it.'” - Yes, legacy media is a mess, but that is not a fact separate from the crushing debt service imposed by a string of unwise mergers and acquisitions, some of which were good-faith attempts at synergy and others were just Alden. The value of and potential for sustainable local journalism still exists, it is just buried under a mountain of corporate bad decisions.
- That said, the future of journalism is already here - INN has 500 non-profit newsroom members. Not all of them are what we expect from general-purpose community journalism but most are small and locally-focused. LION Publishers tell a similar story. That is what change looks like. It has been 10 years, give it some time.
- Creators will be important to journalism, but not only, forever and always as independent voices and businesses separate from institutions and editors. Chesterton's Fence would argue that the old system of institutions developed for a reason - efficiency, social capital, stability. The dysfunctional anomaly is not groups of journalists collaborating under a single roof but hundreds of newsrooms aggregated under a single corporate entity. Small newsrooms and individual creators will reaggregate into collaboratives, LLCs and C-corps (and hopefully B-Corps) that will resemble "legacy media" but on a continuum of operational structure more "confederation" than "command and control."
- With due respect to many friends, the article is not dead. It remains the single-most efficient delivery mechanism for the explanation of the complex narratives that are our world. It can be improved. But the inverted pyramid of newswriting is already perfectly designed for today's attention economy: Read the lead and you understand the relevance and key developments of the story; read the first few paragraphs, and you comprehend the context and key details. Interested to know more? Read the rest. Or not.
Getting people to pay attention to the news is about quality, relevance, accessibility and resonance. Short video is fine, but there is nuance between awareness, understanding and marketing of the news. Reach people where they are (TikTok) and they will learn and develop trust in you / your newsroom. Want people to read more news, on your own site and possibly pay for it? First try designing websites that are not better used as medieval torture devices.
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