The idea of serving the public has been in the bones of journalism since the profession was founded.
Be it quality information to inform the public or sensational stories and gossip, news editors and editors have always prioritized the desires and needs of their audiences, be it highbrow or lowbrow.
But this relationship is changing in important and dangerous ways, the latest change in 50 years of technology-driven disruption to media and national life.
Let me explain.
If you use a search engine like Google, you’ve probably noticed recently that when you ask for information about a topic, the key facts appear exactly at the top of the search results. There are links to more detailed information if needed, but most people are satisfied with the overview.
The summaries are written by artificial intelligence, i.e. robots, which scrutinize the work of humans, including the work of journalists, to formulate important points.
This means fewer people are clicking on news media for news. The trend is small so far, but everyone expects it to increase. And it undermines the media business model. Less attention to a media organization’s websites and apps means fewer subscribers and fewer advertisers willing to pay to reach a shrinking audience.
Let’s set aside for the moment the question of the accuracy of the summaries generated by the robot. Because most of them are accurate enough. Failures are embarrassingly vicious and sometimes dangerous, but increasingly rare.
That’s because AI companies like Google and OpenAI have agreements with media companies that allow them to use content written by journalists, including decades of media archives, to train and feed their robots.
Most major media companies have some type of contract, and it’s easy to see why. Media business models have repeatedly been strained and even broken by successive waves of technological change.
The amounts offered to license content to AI companies are almost irresistible. Who dares to step down when everyone else is doing it?
Ethical media companies circumvent agreements with caveats designed to give them some control and protect their reputations.
However, it can obscure the underlying mechanism: the breakdown in the relationship between journalists and viewers. Transfer of power from media brands to AI brands and their owners.
Artificial intelligence is so new and its development is so fast that only a fool could make confident predictions. There is probably a bubble forming and it will probably burst. We’ll probably see another model in the next few months.
But I fear that if current trends continue, news organizations will move from a business-to-public model to a business-to-business model very quickly.
AI companies will intervene between journalists and viewers.
According to the University of Canberra’s annual Digital News Report, 22% of Australians now pay for news.
This suggests some level of brand loyalty. But 22% is clearly far from a majority. In the past, most households bought newspapers. Today, quality commercial media is no longer a “mass” business. This is a service for elites.
Those who don’t pay get their information from free-to-air television (still important, but rapidly declining), social media (still growing), or many free outlets, including influencers, podcasters, and political partisans. Some people avoid the news altogether. In this country, we can be grateful that free broadcasters include public broadcasters that are widely trusted and adhere to standards of accuracy and fairness.
Now, more than ever, quality news media brands rely on relationships with their audiences for relevance and financial survival. Nevertheless, in dealing with AI companies, you may end up trading the very thing that the relationship depends on.
Does it matter if journalists research and write content for use in AI businesses rather than as a direct service to the public?
That’s very true.
These are risks.
First, and most obviously, if journalism is not in the interests of those controlling the AI, the content may not be published or may be distorted or suppressed. We’ve already seen that happening in some of the search results provided by Elon Musk’s Grok.
Second, you lose one of the main benefits of accessing a media site’s web pages, apps, or channels. You learn about things you never thought to ask that were packaged together by human judgment.
AI-driven models, on the other hand, only respond to questions about specific topics or what they inferred about you from previous searches. They don’t care about you as a fellow citizen.
Third, when media companies lose their direct relationship with their audiences, they become even more vulnerable to attack. If the news outlets that have plagued the government were primarily consumed as part of a mashup of multiple sources, what are the chances that the public would know about them, care about them, let alone rally to defend them?
And will the sense of public duty and public purpose that still drives the best news editors and journalists survive even if the direct connection with the audience is severed or weakened?
There is no point in pretending that change is not happening or that change is avoidable. But risks need to be addressed.
Media organizations need to get in the game and protect their brands by delivering quality content. Content, including archives, should be easy to search. You need to provide your subscribers with their own in-house Q&A robot. This is already being done by many media organizations, but perhaps not fast enough.
When budgets are tight, it’s much easier to outsource functions to big tech companies, which gives them more power and control.
Perhaps the world’s public broadcasters could work together to build their own AI engines, trained on fact-checked material and put into the hands of the public.
Or audiences may become dissatisfied with mash-ups and inhuman voices.
Perhaps people will appreciate and pay for something original, textured, and deep. Interviews, observations, and testimonies are at the heart of journalism.
We should hope so.
The relationship between journalists and audiences is key to trust, robustness, and the ability to draw attention to uncomfortable issues and unwelcome news.
It is of vital importance to public thinking and the public interest.
we risk losing it.
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Margaret Simmons is an award-winning freelance journalist and author. She is an Honorary Chief Research Fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Journalism and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns Guardian Media Group.
