ryukoposting 3 hours ago

I think the author is on the right track here. News orgs have responded to declining revenue by making way more of the exact same material fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for. They see AI as a way to cut costs on what they already make, but the problem is that the medium itself is in a death spiral. Making the medium cheaper doesn't change the industry's long term prospects.

It's clear that folks have found new formats for their sources of truth. Whether those new sources of truth are better or worse is irrelevant. You have to meet people where they are. And guess what? They aren't on unusably ad-laden news sites with inscrutable layouts and useless search tools. They're on TikTok.

  • petra an hour ago

    Tiktok and all the other social network are inherently a platform for spreading lies. It's a bad fit for quality news.

    • _bin_ 12 minutes ago

      No, they're platforms for spreading information that place less of an inherent value on the pedigree of the source. This is partially a good thing because opinions and personal experience have a place somewhere in the epistemological hierarchy that mainstream news discounts. Making one's news diet wholly (or even mostly) social media is a mistake, but making it entirely news outlets is little different. I've found a good mix is "reputable" newspapers plus a bit of twitter.

      Of course, I've also read a lot of garbage from those respectable outlets. A lot of slant and a lot of poorly-researched "journalism". This is basically a respectability politics problem; the NPR class is offended more that people have abandoned the trappings of "proper information" than over the information itself.

    • porridgeraisin an hour ago

      > Whether those new sources of truth are better or worse is irrelevant.

    • t-writescode 43 minutes ago

      Ah yes. Lies. That's why it was the first place I learned about just how bad the atrocities in Gaza were; just how bad the damage of Hurricane Helene was; about the murder of George Floyd.

      Social networks are the most democratized ways of spreading information to date. Some of that information is lies, but a lot of people spread fact.

      • jahewson 19 minutes ago

        I’m not sure that citing three things that the traditional media has been happy to report on too is a very good way of making your point. The real danger is the content you don’t see:

        “A [Rutgers Univerity] study […] asserts TikTok’s algorithms promote Chinese Communist Party narratives and suppress content critical of those narrative“

        https://www.kqed.org/news/11999273/tiktok-stacking-algorithm...

      • lazystar 41 minutes ago

        > Some of that information is lies, but a lot of people spread fact.

        And how do you know which is which, hmmm?

        • t-writescode 39 minutes ago

          Fox News and OAN has taught us that even news agencies and journalism aren't the way to guarantee fact or truth.

          Yellow Journalism is a term for over 100 years ago. People lying with a broad audience is nothing new.

          addendum: and how many times have you read a news article from the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal that's in your area of expertise that's made you go "wow, everything they've said here is wrong, said with an agenda, misinterpreted or other propaganda"?

gg82 3 hours ago

Perhaps they could work hard at reporting the news and not reporting their opinion. Perhaps, instead of having a 24 hr news cycle, they could produce less, but higher quality content.

  • dartharva a few seconds ago

    > reporting the news and not reporting their opinion

    That business model has failed over and over in the past few decades.

  • majormajor 2 hours ago

    The things replacing the traditional media in peoples info-diets are VERY opinion-heavy, so good luck with that.

    • oceanplexian 10 minutes ago

      I don’t know, I watch podcasters like Lex and Rogan and for the most part, it’s a conversation, it’s not confrontational, they let the guest speak and let the audience form their own opinions.

      Legacy media seems to always need to insert themselves into the story and push an angle, ask gotcha questions to catch guests out of context and then compress them into sound bites.

      Maybe that’s part of the reason why public overwhelmingly distrusts the mainstream media?

  • afavour 2 hours ago

    > they could work hard at reporting the news and not reporting their opinion

    This is where any discussion about “the media” falls down because it’s too broad. There are news organisations that work hard and reporting the news. That costs a lot of money, though, and a lot of people don’t pay. But someone spouting off their opinion on that reported content on YouTube? Basically free to make and gets the clicks.

    The media is far from blameless but I think we give consumers a pass. They’re the ones choosing the vacuous, empty opinion coverage.

    • jahewson 11 minutes ago

      This strikes me as kind of a naive take in 2024. Even the AP has been pushing a politicized agenda. The newspaper I paid good money to read for many years is now unreadable propaganda. I’ve been forced to get my news from X if I don’t want censorship, and oh my does X have its flaws.

      It’s hardly surprising, look at who is graduating from journalism schools, what they are taught and what their agenda is. The consumers did not create this problem, they’re simply powerless to resist it - except that they can take their attention elsewhere, and that is exactly what they’re doing.

      Information being bottlenecked through a handful of institutions has been increasingly harmful to society and is what has led us to this very moment. Let the people speak.

shikon7 3 hours ago

I would think that scale would actually greatly benefit journalism. Why is there no Netflix or Spotify for journalism? I'm thinking of something that provides affordable, comprehensive, high quality and individually recommended articles, at a scale that provides large sums of money for journalism.

A single newspaper subscription is often more expensive than Netflix, offering far less production value. No wonder classical journalism is losing market share among young people to more affordable and relatable formats.

  • afavour 2 hours ago

    I think one of the big reasons is cost. Spotify and Netflix are able to trade off their vast libraries of back content (some of the most popular streaming shows are still The Office and Friends). The production cost on those is long since paid and they can just rake in money from it.

    Not so for journalism. There are very few pieces people will return to years after they’re written. It requires constant publishing of new content and to make good content costs money.

  • benreesman 2 hours ago

    Big Tech / AI Bloc absolutely has an aggregated journalism portfolio: it’s a huge, debatably dominant part of the advertising duopoly’s suite of offerings. Some of the “content” they pay directly for via creator subsidy, some of it they crowdsource, for some of it they control the views of on what is left of legacy media, but almost all of it runs through them one way or another.

    It’s a matter of opinion how that’s going I suppose.

  • blackeyeblitzar 3 hours ago

    Apple has a News subscription that is sort of what you’re imagining. But I think the race to bottom on journalism will lead to worse quality news. Will it be worth paying for at that point?

    • raincole 3 hours ago

      The biggest competitors to the news are random people (by "random" I mean they don't care about journalism at all, not they are not famous) on TikTok and doing Podcast.

      The quality has been abysmal already.

collinmcnulty 4 hours ago

The crux of the problem is the money though right? I want this, but how will anti-scale journalists make a living? I pay for a couple patreons for journalists I like (shoutout Molly White) but that doesn’t seem like a complete answer.

skybrian 3 hours ago

I don’t expect people to get their news from AI chat, but the training data might improve the results a bit when current events are somehow relevant to the question.

Meanwhile, as a source of revenue for news organizations, it seems no worse than advertising, particularly since unlike ads, it doesn’t require them to degrade their websites.

The money might not last and they shouldn’t count on it continuing. But it seems okay to take it when it’s available?

Havoc 3 hours ago

For most people the minimum acceptable quality of journalism is quite low and AI journ may be enough.

It’s a bit like people saying they want organic cruelty free food if you interview them. Yet the cheap stuff sells too.

If you actually subscribe to the wsj/economist/whatever - adds up quick. So few do it.

No market means not much room for journalists. Doing journalism better won’t fix that unfortunately

  • jaredwiener 3 hours ago

    There is a constant conflation of the two sides of journalism - the news gathering and the writing/distribution.

    AI can only do the second half. They need information to write about.

    If the money goes away to support the whole enterprise, who actually makes the phone calls?

byyoung3 2 hours ago

The hallucination problem is mostly solved by the best models. Especially for writing news stories etc. This profession won't exist in 10 years.

  • poincaredisk 2 hours ago

    How do you imagine models writing news stories without primary sources? In many cases (not all, since social media exist) models can only write about something by plagiarising something a journalist wrote.

    • add-sub-mul-div an hour ago

      People have been so thoroughly manipulated to distrust institutions that they no longer understand the basics of those institutions. It reminds of a few weeks ago when so many people appeared surprised that publications made presidential endorsements, because that's opinion and why are they not only reporting on facts?