Note that this is a different article from the similarly titled "Is the Media Heading Towards an Extinction-Level Event?" that appeared in The Atlantic February 2nd.
The media basically just copies from each other and writes the same ten pieces over and over again.
Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?
Ads are scarce, search and social traffic is dying, and readers are burned out. The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press's relationship to its audience.
It would be nice if you stopped lying to that audience all the time.
And as far as an audience being "burned out:" maybe you could stop the endless Cycles of Crisis where one Outrage is only displaced by the next Cause for Alarm and then that is replaced by the next Moral Panic.
Maybe your liberal readers -- who are highly neurotic, as every survey shows -- wouldn't be so burned out if you weren't constantly lighting their nervous systems on fire with your panic pornography.
...
A report that tracked layoffs in the industry in 2023 recorded twenty-six hundred and eighty-one in broadcast, print, and digital news media. NBC News, Vox Media, Vice News, Business Insider, Spotify, theSkimm, FiveThirtyEight, The Athletic, and Condé Nast--the publisher of The New Yorker--all made significant layoffs. BuzzFeed News closed, as did Gawker. The Washington Post, which lost about a hundred million dollars last year, offered buyouts to two hundred and forty employees. In just the first month of 2024, Condé Nast laid off a significant number of Pitchfork's staff and folded the outlet into GQ; the Los Angeles Times laid off at least a hundred and fifteen workers (their union called it "the big one"); Time cut fifteen per cent of its union-represented editorial staff; the Wall Street Journal slashed positions at its D.C. bureau; and Sports Illustrated, which had been weathering a scandal for publishing A.I.-generated stories, laid off much of its staff as well. One journalist recently cancelled a networking phone call with me, writing, "I've decided to officially take my career in a different direction." There wasn't much I could say to counter that conclusion; it was perfectly logical.
Keep talking that hot, sweaty sexytalk.
"Publishers, brace yourselves--it's going to be a wild ride," Matthew Goldstein, a media consultant, wrote in a January newsletter. "I see a potential extinction-level event in the future." Some of the forces cited by Goldstein were already well known: consumers are burned out by the news, and social-media sites have moved away from promoting news articles. But Goldstein also pointed to Google's rollout of A.I.-integrated search, which answers user queries within the Google interface, rather than referring them to outside Web sites, as a major factor in this coming extinction.
I know sites that are moving to this model.
The media is going to be linked less and less. People are just going to use AI to digest their stories.
I expect the media will, in its death throes, sue. They can't claim copyright because the stories will be rewritten. But they'll claim unfair trade practices. It's worked before.
In International News Service vs. AP (191
, INS, I think, was paying stringers to copy stories off the walls at AP's offices. Then INS would write them up.
AP couldn't sue for copyright infringement because the stories were rewritten completely. But the Supreme Court held that there was a property right in the story, and that there was some protection from unfair poaching.
That will be the new case. But it won't be quite the same, because INS' stories were competing in time with AP's. That is, the INS stories were being delivered at about the same time, taking AP's advantage-of-publishing-first away. In the new situation, these stories will have all gone out into the world before AI begins very rapidly rewriting them.
According to a recent Wall Street Journal analysis, Google generates close to forty per cent of traffic across digital media. Brands with strong home-page traffic will likely be less affected, Goldstein wrote--places like Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Daily Mail, CNN, the Washington Post, and Fox News. But Web sites that aren't as frequently typed into browsers need to "contemplate drastic measures, possibly halving their brand portfolios."
What will emerge in the wake of mass extinction, Brian Morrissey, another media analyst, recently wrote in his newsletter, "The Rebooting," is "a different industry, leaner and diminished, often serving as a front operation to other businesses," such as events, e-commerce, and sponsored content.
They already do this. They're all front companies for George Soros' vicious transnational socialism and of course the Democrat Party.
And Pfizer.
Etc.
In fact, he told me, what we are witnessing is nothing less than the end of the mass-media era. "This is a delayed reaction to the commercial Internet itself," he said. "I don't know if anything could have been done differently."
People like Glenn Greenwald and Megyn Kelly keep repeating the idea that the media will transform from one made up of trusted institutions to trusted individuals. Sites with strong, independent, unique voices.
Hey! We've got some strong, independent unique voices right here! Maybe we'll be fine!
I know one thing: AI might be able to quickly rewrite boring AP headlines but they'll never be able to crank out gems like:
Cash App Cougar Fani Willis: Yes, I Paid Taxpayer Funds to Hire a Human Meat-Mallet to Pound My Snizz Into Thin Tender Strips Like Veal Scallopini
Well, maybe AI will be able to do that.
But not for four or five years.
We've got time, still.