While artificial intelligence accelerates, local news reporting is going about as fast the other way. At the root of both trends are companies run by the brightest minds in the world who have overlooked some obvious implications of what they have set in motion.
Exhibit 1, The 2023 State of Local News, Medill School of Journalism, Nov. 16, key bullet points in the executive summary:
- Residents in more than half of U.S. counties have no, or very limited, access to a reliable local news source — either print, digital or broadcast.
- Newspapers are continuing to vanish at an average rate of more than two a week.
- In addition to losing almost a third of its newspapers, the country has lost almost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists — 43,000 — since 2005.
- The footprint for alternative local news outlets — approximately 550 digital-only sites, 720 ethnic media organizations and 215 public broadcasting stations — remains very small and centered around metro areas.
- At a time of industry-wide economic disruption, news organizations located in affluent or growing communities with diverse sources of for-profit and nonprofit funding are most likely to develop sustainable new business models.
- Reversing the decline in local news will necessarily involve multiple stakeholders pursuing complementary programs and objectives that target funding to communities and news outlets most at risk.
The report opens with there’s “both good news and bad news for local journalism this year.” Oh, brother. Sounds like an echo of the recent turn from doomsaying climate trend news to straining to inject hope.
Maybe the more apt way to put it is that the business of local news has been so eviscerated that we as a country may finally be moved to save community journalism and, no shit, democracy while we’re at it. Them’s the ultimate stakes.
Exhibit 2: Silicon Valley ditches news, shaking an unstable industry, The New York Times, Oct. 19. Some excerpts:
- If it wasn’t clear before, it’s clear now: The major online platforms are breaking up with news.
- During the rise of the consumer internet roughly 20 years ago, companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter embraced journalism, and articles from traditional media companies appeared on their platforms.
- “Every internet platform has a responsibility to try to help fund and form partnerships to support news,” Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, said in an interview with the chief executive of News Corp several years ago when Zuckerberg was still trying to court publishers.
- With Meta and X no longer dependable, publishers have grown more reliant on Google. For more than two decades, publishers big and small have packaged their content to rank highly in Google’s search results, a practice called search engine optimization.
- Many news companies have struggled to survive after the tech companies threw the industry’s business model into upheaval more than a decade ago. One lifeline was the traffic — and, by extension, advertising — that came from sites like Facebook and Twitter. Now that traffic is disappearing. Top news sites got about 11.5 percent of their web traffic in the United States from social networks in September 2020, according to Similarweb, a data and analytics company. By September this year, it was down to 6.5 percent.
- Even Google … has become less dependable, making publishers more wary of their reliance on the search giant. The company has laid off news employees in two recent team reorganizations, and some publishers say traffic from Google has tapered off.
- Privately, a number of publishers have discussed what a post-Google traffic future may look like, and how to better prepare if Google’s A.I. products become more popular and further bury links to news publications.
A silver lining is that less dependability will lead to less reliance on the aggregators, whose mess of information and misinformation is mainly a diet of cotton candy with the same effect on the body politic as the fake food on the human body.
Meantime, though, the search and social media companies have taken most of the business that would fund journalism from traditional sources, for better and worse. Other than some lip service they’ve since stopped bothering with, funding for actual journalism has largely been drying up.
Exhibit 3: “An illustrated guide to ‘pink slime’ journalism,” Poynter Institute, Oct. 5.
Some excerpts:
- Pink slime sites are frequently produced via automation and templates. Look for text that’s more generic than expected, or articles that are pure information without context. That’s a giveaway you’re looking at a pink slime website.
- Often, they’re funded by outside companies with a partisan source of financing.
- These outlets claim to cover local and hyperlocal news, sometimes taking advantage of news deserts.
Salt Lake Tribune Editor Lauren Gustus, in her Nov. 30 letter to subscribers, observed the stakes in the 2024 elections in Utah and the nation, along with the need for a strong, fair-minded, independent Fourth Estate in a crucial context with that.
Global pushes around the world — Australia, Europe, Canada, California, and in our Congress since 2020 — to tax or otherwise compel the search and social media companies to help fairly fund journalism look an awful lot like the impetus of retreat from the last of lip service about their civic responsibility.
Meantime, the exhibits abound concerning the rise in propaganda, misinformation, disinformation and all, metastasized with the blossoming of generative AI. I think Google will still let you find all that easily enough.
A sort of dry rot has set in the giants’ foundation that probably should concern them well beyond what happens to journalism in America. We’re only a canary, but maybe also a warning they overlook to their own peril.
Don Rogers is the editor of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.