AI Unplugged: The Newspaper Wars Aren't Over

Digital distribution has long been heralded as the death of newspapers, but now beleaguered journalists and reporters everywhere have a new worry: #AI.

Welcome to "Churnalism"

News -- the concept -- is a fuzzy topic these days. Conceptually, news involves humans reporting on something that happened. Practically, what passes for news on the Internet is an interconnected web of post-and-repeat sites, with the occasional paywall. A select group of human journalists increasingly do most of the work, and then thousands of web sites copy, summarize, and (often fail to) link to the original content. The data tells the story: from a study of Britain's press (80% of stories were unoriginal) to a study in the U.S. (56% unoriginal).

Search engines have exacerbated the problem by not respecting news site paywalls, forcing newspapers who traditionally relied on classifieds for income to turn to increasingly irrelevant ad revenue that can make you sorry you ever clicked through to the page (ahem).

This ripple effect of copies-of-copies news stories is called "churnalism," a term coined by BBC journalist Waseem Zakir :

Churnalism is a pejorative term for a form of journalism in which instead of original reported news, pre-packaged material such as press releases or stories provided by news agencies are used to create articles in newspapers and other news media. Its purpose is to reduce cost by reducing original news-gathering and checking sources to counter revenue lost with the rise of Internet news and decline in advertising, with a particularly steep fall in late 2015.

For better or worse, over 50% of what we consider news is now transactional, copied from original journalism created elsewhere. And that makes it ripe for AI disruption.

Here Come the AI Journalists

When Yahoo bought Artifact, an AI news paper from Instagram's co-founders, it was the first sign that AI could potentially change how news site operated. The idea being that AI can better curate content faster than a human and thus ensure content is relevant and customized to its audience.

Of bigger concern is generative AI simply copying news from other sources, in the same way that search engines grapple with publicly-accessible Internet content. Simply put, if it's available and readable online, AI crawlers consider it "fair use" and fair game. As a result, eight U.S. newspapers sued ChatGPT's OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the AI was stealing their content without paying them for it.

And then Elon Musk revealed his plans to integrate X's AI, Grok, into Twitter's news curation:

Effectively, his plan is to use AI to combine breaking news and social commentary around big stories, present the compilation live, and allow you to go deeper via chat.

Grok's already up and running (and potentially, screwing up) on X's news front. The twist is that Grok will only reference content shared on X. This both makes the tool less useful (it's essentially churnalism using social media as a vector) and more protected from lawsuits (it's only using summaries from posts on X, not the articles themselves).

All this adds up to AI being actively involved in moderating content. Whether that's a good or bad thing likely depends on how you feel about the state of journalism today.

It Starts (and Ends) with Humans

Last year alone, the U.S. journalism workforce lost 2,700 jobs, and 2.5 newspapers closed each week on average, with revenue declining 56 percent. With reduced staff and real-time pressure to report on news as soon as it happens, these companies have increasingly turned to churnalism.

And yet, despite the fact that many newspapers rely on other newspapers for their reporting, someone -- a human -- actually generates the news first. That news is invaluable: 50% of the top 10 sites in Google's training dataset to train LLMs is news, and those news sites are considered the top 10 best represented sites for English quality sources. We need quality, human-reported journalism for so many reasons, not the least of which being it feeds all the other digital content streams.

As much as churnalism is vulnerable to AI, actual journalism is particularly valuable to generative AI search:

...where it provides real-time information, context, fact-checking, and human language. This is where journalism, including local journalism, could be particularly valuable and thus must be able to monetize. Searching for information about local businesses, community issues, or government is going to be lot less useful if there is no local journalism informing the results. Similarly, journalism that focuses on niche topics, breaking news, and investigative reporting are also likely to be especially valuable to applications that want to provide up-to-date, relevant, and timely information to their users while fighting the scourge of misinformation and low-quality content online.

In short, we need journalists and journalism. We just haven't figured out a way to pay for it.

If You Can't Beat 'Em...

Some news companies are striking deals with AI platforms to monetize their content: Associated Press, The Atlantic, Axel Springer, DotDash Meredith, The Financial Times, News Corp, and Vox Media all made deals with OpenAI, in much the same way that Reddit made a deal with Google to allow Gemini to use its content as a dataset. That's probably the best compromise they can hope for.

Will AI replace journalists? Not necessarily. Will it replace the content farms and churnalism that many news sites have adopted? If Grok is any indication, it already has.

Please Note: The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer or any other organization.