What AI means for the business of: journalism
The first in an occasional series where we look at the second-order effects of AI on particular industries and roles.
The web made print a vestigial business line for news publishers. AI is poised to do the same thing to the web. Our digital lives will be increasingly split between
AI interfaces and agents traversing the legacy web for task completion and information
gigantic algorithmic social platforms that distribute creator content for entertainment and
an archipelago of high-trust private communities or group chats for connection and collaboration.
Journalists are fighting a rearguard action on the first and have never overcome the unequal power dynamics of the second. However, it is that archipelago of high-trust communities where journalists are uniquely capable of building thriving businesses.
Not Google Zero, but Web Zero
Publishers talk about an AI era of Google Zero, when search traffic to their sites goes to zero. AI responses drop Google click throughs to news sites in half. For those hoping to build a business in the AI footnotes, the picture is tough. When Google provides an AI response, 1% of people will click on a citation. The average AI response from Google contains 12.6 citations. Distributed equally, that would mean a Google AI response has a 0.079% likelihood of resulting in traffic to a cited source.
However, this isn’t an algorithm change affecting purely search. This is an interface change, closer to the move from print to digital than Google releasing the Panda search update. The challenge is not if AI interfaces take over search, it’s if AI interfaces take over everything.
Instead of solely focusing on negotiating how much we can get paid to write for machines, understanding where journalism can survive and win in the future requires us to widen our aperture and look to the opportunities created by the fracturing and reshaping of our social platforms.
The Platforms’ Collapse of Trust
The social platforms are in the midst of a decade-long collapse of trust that required a pivot from authentic human interaction to creator content. John Burn-Murdoch of the FT reports that “The shares of people who report using social platforms to stay in touch with their friends, express themselves or meet new people have fallen by more than a quarter since 2014.”
Main characters, reply guys, brigading, cancellations and harassment all made it better to consume than create. One deck quietly passed around Twitter leadership in 2021 suggested that if the trendline continued there would be no one creating original tweets by 2030.
Even LinkedIn has now shifted to prioritize performative business over business. It oscillates between “I’m humbled to announce” and “Six business lessons I learned from my internship at Goldman”, while introducing Snapchat-like Stories and Games.
In its place, the real conversations and connections migrated to an archipelago of WhatsApp groups, Slacks, Discord servers and Signal chats. This is the Archipelago of Trust: self-selecting focused communities loosely bridged by mutual members and bounded by common norms.
The birth of the organizer class
In place of a creator class, the archipelago of trust is birthing a new organizer class. Their high-trust communities range in formality but are uniformly invite-only or referral-based. They treat platforms as utilities and prioritize conditions that sustain candor and comfort: members have to know who else is in the room and have well-defined norms for what gets shared beyond it.
These archipelago communities scale fractally. Trust and breadth of participation are inversely correlated with group size, so they use segmentation and subdivision to optimize for trust and evolve their role from catalyst to connector, bridging ideas and people across different groups.
Journalists are well suited to thrive in the archipelago. They can convene the right group and have the skills to catalyze conversation. However, too often, publisher community strategy has been indistinguishable from narrowcasting. Members get exclusive emails, periodic zoom calls or gather to listen to journalists. This is not community, it’s an audience with the house lights up. A thriving community with low churn is defined by the majority of energy and value coming from members interacting with each other, not listening to us speak.
Platforms in the Archipelago of Trust
Unlike the legacy social platforms, the platforms underpinning the archipelago are more utilities than Leviathan, where the organizers own the relationship not the platform. Members don’t sign up for the platform, they sign up for a specific organizer. Migration is a viable option and the revenue mix is flipped from classic platforms with the majority of revenue captured by the organizer not the platform.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Substack and its writers have succeeded on the exact same archipelago dynamics. They saw the evolution of trust, connection and community before anyone else and succeeded by building with an archipelago mindset.
Substack made the locus of trust the writer: People sign up for Heather Cox Richardson not Substack. It predominantly acts as a utility, providing infrastructure with an offramp. And Substack flipped the revenue mix so that 90% of the revenue accrued to the locus of trust: the writer.
The final lesson from Substack is that people now trust brands far less than people. Consumers are more likely to trust the Tiktok star rehashing an ABC news article than ABC News itself. In the archipelago of trust, the brands can help drive acquisition and bridge between different groups, but it does so to buttress the individual organizer’s central relationship with their community, not the other way around.
The archipelago rewards explorers not laggards
Where the archipelago diverges from Substack is that there are diminishing returns to latecomers. A new Substack writer can burst on the scene and build an audience within their target segment, even if that space already contains innumerable others. That is less true of communities defined by member-to-member interactions. If all the key CTOs are already in a thriving focused community, their propensity to join another perfectly overlapping community is low.
Late entrants can still succeed by drawing a different overlapping circle in the Venn diagram or carving off niche segments from a larger community, but it is far far easier to be first. Those who have been previously content to see others play explorer while assuming their brand position will enable them to enter late and dominate will turn up to find the land taken and their brand inadequate to overcome their tardiness. There’s an archipelago of opportunity that journalists have the qualities to win, but doing so will require boldness and speed. To the explorers will go the spoils.
Great thoughts on journalists as explorers. I’d add that we need to realize no one is coming to save us. I came up through legacy media, was published in all the snooty magazines and today find myself on my own. That’s not a bad thing. The future belongs to the enterprising writer who will build his own thing rather than contribute to someone else’s empire.
And here I am on the Archipelago of Opportunity, having adopted early and built trust + audience. Yay. But it still hurts my feelings when a book agent ghosts me. Here I am standing in the future and looking longingly backward. It’s like Lewis and Clark saying, “Nah. Let’s head back to St. Louis.”