The future of journalism
Jonathan Last has an excellent piece at The Bulwark on the clusterf*** that is the Bezos WaPo and what it says about the business model of journalism in America.
“The internet revolution was about lowering to zero the marginal cost of distributing content. The AI revolution is about lowering to zero the marginal cost of creating content. That is going to transform media all over again—probably in ways that are deleterious.
“No one knows exactly how it will shake out, but in the broadest sense a few things seem inevitable:
• Commoditized content will be overwhelming, indistinguishable, and free.
• There will be so much more content generated that discovery becomes difficult to impossible.
• If we extrapolate from the Facebook experience, the vast majority of consumers will happily
accept AI-generated content, irrespective of its quality. (Or veracity.)
• This will create a flight to quality among the remaining minority share of the public.
• Traditional journalism will have to be supported by this minority.
“Oh, and by the way: While all of this is happening, America is in the midst of an authoritarian attempt. Meaning that the power of government has been deployed against media orgs that do not accommodate themselves to the regime.”
I just signed up for a subscription to The Bulwark. I’ll subscribe to The Atlantic shortly. I already subscribe to TPM and to Timothy Snyder’s substack. So should you. Real journalism for real people, not phony propaganda.
Jeff Bezos is killing the WaPo
“The internet revolution was about lowering to zero the marginal cost of distributing content. The AI revolution is about lowering to zero the marginal cost of creating content. That is going to transform media all over again—probably in ways that are deleterious.
“No one knows exactly how it will shake out, but in the broadest sense a few things seem inevitable:
• Commoditized content will be overwhelming, indistinguishable, and free.
• There will be so much more content generated that discovery becomes difficult to impossible.
• If we extrapolate from the Facebook experience, the vast majority of consumers will happily
accept AI-generated content, irrespective of its quality. (Or veracity.)
• This will create a flight to quality among the remaining minority share of the public.
• Traditional journalism will have to be supported by this minority.
“Oh, and by the way: While all of this is happening, America is in the midst of an authoritarian attempt. Meaning that the power of government has been deployed against media orgs that do not accommodate themselves to the regime.”
I just signed up for a subscription to The Bulwark. I’ll subscribe to The Atlantic shortly. I already subscribe to TPM and to Timothy Snyder’s substack. So should you. Real journalism for real people, not phony propaganda.
Jeff Bezos is killing the WaPo
There is a guy down the block who wears a MAGA hat and whose truck has an “I Love the Constitution” bumper sticker, which I assume, but do not know means he owns firearms and really likes the 2nd Amendment. I doubt if it is because of the love of the Fourth Estate beyond America’s versions of Pravda. A lot of politicians have had problems with the press, but Trump is the only one who has outright sought to destroy it. Whether it is getting CBS to take the knee because of Paramount’s desire to conclude being bought out, Bezos bending the knee with the Washington Post to curry favor or cutting off funding for PBS and NPR because facts have a liberal bias, or his general claim that anything he does not like is “Fake News”, he is going after the free press with a vengeance. It is a bit amusing to see Murdoch stand up to him on Epstein, which should be a reminder to him that at the end of the day the oligarchs care mostly about money and his economic policies, especially tariffs, are not those of a stable genius. Do not even get me started on the Robert’s Court’s views on religion. You would think that after all the horror caused in the last 100 years in the name of religion, that SCOTUS would show some respect for Jimmy Madison who understood the role religion had played in the almost perpetual state of war among European nations during the leadup to 1789. Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians is the latest example. The First Amendment is first for a reason and between Trump and SCOTUS, it will be the first to go.
The potential for AI also being employed on the consumption side of journalism I think should to be considered here. Bots will be reading content and filtering for possible human attention. The WaPo’s experience with its non-endorsement is sort of a non-AI precursor to this I think. The Post not endorsing Harris had zero negative political consequences for Harris. Objectively it did not serve at all to boost Trump. Had they endorsed Harris the political consequences were also expected to be nil. But there was nonetheless a strong reaction in the consumption of WaPo via dropped subscriptions. The newspaper violated an important and almost tribal obligation to say it supported Harris and even though its decisions about news coverage details over decades were way more critical for buttressing support of liberal and normally Democratic public administrations it “needed” to be punished and was punished. AI is going to be powerfully infused into the consumption side of journalism following patterns like we saw among lots of WaPo readers. This will be across the political spectrum and very likely that those controlling the construction of LLMs will have the capacity to constrict that spectrum and also the diversity of journalism concerning other fields also. Human experience tells me that these capacities are almost certainly being built into these systems deliberately and will get used.