You can read a lot these days about how the emergence of AI and especially the changes in search are triggering declines in the audience for news. While that’s a very real problem, I sense that there’s a pervasive feeling among publishers of a deeper, much quieter crisis in the audience for news that people are reluctant to discuss, and that’s therefore receiving much less attention, and precious little careful thought. This week I want to try to say what I can about it.
The search/AI story is, I think, relatively straightforward. It is affecting peripheral, lower value traffic the most, and, in the aggregate, hitting hardest those publishers for whom such traffic was a larger part of their offering. That is more of a business problem for publishers, candidly, than it is a larger loss for society. Cheap, commoditized traffic was hardly the cornerstone of democracy.
To be sure, if the transformation of search eventually bleeds into most people getting news directly from a chat bot or agent, that could pose a much more fundamental problem. But I continue to think it’s way too soon to be confident that’s where we are headed.
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