1 week ago
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The idea of serving the public has been baked into the bones of journalism ever since the profession was created.
Whether it was quality information to inform the citizenry, or sensationalism and gossip, newsrooms and editors have had the desires and needs of their audiences, noble and ignoble, front of mind.
But this relationship is changing in important and dangerous ways – the latest change in 50 years of technology-driven disruption to our media and public life.
Let me explain.
If you use a search engine such as Google, you will have noticed that in recent times when you ask for information on a topic you are served a neat precis of the main facts at the head of the search results. There are links for further information if you want it, but most people are content with the summary.
The summary is written by artificial intelligence – by robots – which comb the work of humans, including the work of journalists, to compose the key points.
That means that fewer people are clicking through to news media outlets in search of the news. So far the trend is small, but everyone expects it to increase. And that undermines media business models. Fewer eyeballs on a media organisation’s website or app means fewer subscribers and fewer advertisers willing to pay to reach the diminishing audience.
Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the issue of accuracy of the robot-generated summaries, because most of them are accurate enough. The bloopers are embarrassingly bad, sometimes dangerous, but also increasingly rare.
This is because the AI companies – Google, OpenAI and the rest – are signing deals with media companies that allow them to use content written by journalists, including decades of media archives, to train and feed their robots.
Most of the big media companies have signed some kind of deal, and it is easy to understand why. Media business models have been repeatedly strained, even broken, by successive waves of technological change.
The money on offer for licensing content to the AI companies is almost irresistible. When everyone is doing it, who dares to hang back?
Ethical media companies hedge their agreements with caveats designed to give them some control, and to protect their reputations.
But that can obscure the underlying mechanism – a breach in the relationship between journalists and their audiences. A transfer of power from media brands to AI brands and their owners.
Artificial intelligence is so new, and its development so fast, that only fools would make predictions with confidence. Perhaps there is a bubble, and perhaps it will burst. Perhaps within months a different model will have emerged.
But I fear that if the current trends continue, media organisations may quite rapidly move from a business-to-public model, to a business-to-business model.
The AI companies will intervene between journalist and audience.
Today 22% of Australians pay for news, according to the University of Canberra’s annual digital news report.
That suggests some brand loyalty. But 22% is obviously not even close to a majority. Once most households bought a newspaper. Now, quality commercial media is no longer a “mass” business. It is a service for an elite.
Those who don’t pay get their information from free-to-air television (still important, but declining fast), social media (still growing) or the many free outlets including influencers, podcasters and political partisans. Some people avoid the news altogether. In this country, we can be grateful that free outlets include the public broadcasters, which are widely trusted and hold themselves to standards of accuracy and impartiality.
Now more than ever, quality news media brands depend on their relationships with audiences for relevance and financial survival. And yet, in the deals with AI companies, they may be trading away the very things on which that relationship depends.
Does it matter if journalists are researching and writing content for use by AI businesses, rather than as a direct service to the public?
It very much does.
These are the risks.
First, most obviously, if the journalism doesn’t serve the interests of the people who control AI, then content may not be published, or may be distorted or suppressed. We already see that happening in some of the search results served up by Elon Musk’s Grok.
Second, we lose one of the main benefits of accessing a media site’s webpage, app or channel. You learn about the things you didn’t think to ask about, curated into a package by humans exercising judgment.
An AI-dominated model, on the other hand, responds only to questions about specific topics, or what it divines about you from your previous searches. It does not care about you as a fellow citizen.
Third, if media companies lose a direct relationship with their audiences, they will become more vulnerable to attack. How likely is it that the public would know or care about, let alone rally to defend, a media organisation that had annoyed the government, if the information it had produced was consumed mainly as part of a mashup of multiple sources?
And would the sense of public duty and public purpose, which still motivates the best newsrooms and journalists, survive if the direct relationship with audiences was severed or weakened?
There is no point pretending that change is not happening, or that it can be avoided. But the risks need to be addressed.
Media organisations need to get into the game, protecting their brand by delivering high-quality content. They need to make that content, including their archives, easier to search. They should offer subscribers their own in-house question-and-answer robots. This is already happening in many media organisations, but probably not fast enough.
It is so much easier, when budgets are strained, to outsource the functionality to big tech, which thus increases its dominance and control.
Perhaps the world’s public broadcasters could collaborate to build their own AI engines, trained on factchecked material, and remaining in public hands.
Or perhaps the audience will grow dissatisfied with the mashups and the impersonal voice.
Perhaps people will value, and pay for, the original, the textured, the in-depth. The interviews and the observation and the bearing of witness that forms the heart of journalism.
We should hope so.
The relationship between journalist and audience is key to trust, to robustness, to the ability to bring attention to uncomfortable issues and unwelcome news.
It is crucial to the idea of the public, and the public interest.
We lose it at our peril.
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Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and author. She is an honorary principal fellow of the Centre for Advancing Journalism and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns Guardian Media Group
