When Big Tech controls the message
Truth hangs in the balance; local news must build community to remain trustworthy
You’re reading the Your News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models.
In my last newsletter, I wrote about how the medium is still the message (see Marshall McLuhan, 1975) , and how the power-hungry still seek to control it. Those who control the new communications technology can control a community, a region, a nation, and beyond.
In this newsletter we’ll touch on:
The supposed “Golden Age” of news media, disrupted by the internet
How news media can use AI to produce trustworthy news and information
AI’s strategic importance for local media
The threat of mechanized, militarized, phony AI news
There was no ‘Golden Age’
Many people yearn for a simpler time when “news was better,” but that supposed Golden Age never existed. It was just that for most of the post-war period, audiences had few alternatives — three broadcast networks and a local daily. Pretty much all the broadcasters and newspapers covered the same stories the same way. For consumers, it was easy, predictable. Not a lot of choices to confuse you.
During the turbulent 1960s — civil rights demonstrations, the Viet Nam war, plus sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — authorities from the White House on down were appalled by the disruption.
People forget that our government tried to suppress the Pentagon Papers that the New York Times published in 1971 to show how the executive branch misled Congress and the public about the Viet Nam war.
And they forget that most national media at first ignored or minimized the Washington Post’s revelations about Republican corruption in the Watergate scandal. President Nixon threatened legal action against the Post and publisher Katharine Graham. Only later did the rest of the media come around to verify the Post’s reporting. (I began my newspaper career then.)
Enter the internet — total disruption
Traditional media dictated when and where you could get access to news. Broadcast came on a fixed schedule; print arrived once daily. But the internet shattered that scarcity, offering free information 24/7. The audiences fled there, and advertisers followed them.
Digital ads were cheaper on a cost-per-thousand basis, and the results were trackable in actual sales, which print and broadcast couldn’t do.
Traditional media got hammered by cable news networks, streaming, podcasts, and video competitors like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
Follow the money: advertisers flee
Niche print media that offered unique content survived. But even they were threatened by Google and Facebook, which had better first-party data on the outlets’ own audiences.
Papers that failed to pivot slashed staff or shuttered entirely. They’re shadows of their former selves, both as businesses and social influencers. Broadcast media that didn’t offer news 24/7 lost advertisers. They turned to the last mass-appeal product left — the weather. Is it any wonder that weather reports are so long and have scary videos from distant regions? Or that they’re labeled “Storm Center” or “Your Severe Weather Station” to create an urgent need to watch? It’s the most reliable way to still make some money.
And as with every leap in messaging technology — from writing to printing to broadcasting — a handful of global giants emerged. Analysts called them FAANG — Facebook, now Meta (social); Amazon (e-commerce, books, movies); Apple (cellphones, hardware); Netflix (streaming movies, TV series); and Google, now Alphabet (search). Then they added Microsoft (software) as another monopolist.
As the chart below shows, Meta and Alphabet still control nearly 60% of all digital advertising worldwide. And although their revenue is growing, their share of that market has been shrinking steadily, especially in the last two years.
The culprit? AI.
Enter AI and the ‘Attention Economy’
Now we’ve gone from an information economy to an attention economy. The medium is no longer just a message—it’s an ecosystem that has fragmented into millions of voices clamoring for attention.
The new currency is the time and attention that people dedicate to news and information.
Once again, a few U.S.-based companies — Meta, Google (Alphabet), Microsoft, OpenAI (ChatGPT), Apple, and Anthropic (Claude) — are vying to be the information gate-keepers. That’s where the money and power lie. (This week WhatsApp, owned by Meta, announced it is introducing advertising, breaking the app founders’ promise of 11 years ago.)
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg also just announced a $15 billion investment in Scale AI, a company that it hopes will speed up its development of AI tools. Google, Microsoft and Open AI promptly quit using that vendor.
Apple has just announced its new operating system, which embeds AI into all of its hardware products.
A ‘supercharged’ media environment
The Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report, covering 48 countries, is warning of some threats to trustworthy news. Audiences say they want it during this time of “deep political and economic uncertainty.” But media producing “evidence-based and analytical journalism” are not attracting larger audiences.
“In most countries we find traditional news media struggling to connect with much of the public, with declining engagement, low trust, and stagnating digital subscriptions.”
Audiences are migrating to an “alternative media environment” of podcasters, YouTubers, and TikTokers. “Populist politicians around the world are increasingly able to bypass traditional journalism in favour of friendly partisan media, ‘personalities’, and ‘influencers’.”
AI is crushing traffic and revenue
The Wall Street Journal reports that AI chatbots are displacing Google searches, cutting organic referrals (unpaid search) at HuffPost, Business Insider, and the Washington Post by roughly half—putting ad-funded models on life support.
Business Insider’s CEO saw this as a reason to announce a 21% staff cut.
What should newsrooms do?
In an interview with Nieman Lab, Richard Gingras, Google’s longtime global vice president for news, believes the goal of a news media organization should be to “create the fabric for the community that allows them to get the information they need and engage with each other.” That way, they can “strengthen the community.”
Gingras recently announced his retirement. He has seen how Google’s ad dominance killed the business model of traditional news media. He also has worked to develop products and services that help news media counter that trend. His advice to news media:
“I generally feel that news organizations need to do more real, thorough research about the markets they’re looking to serve — what you find is that people’s information needs are, first of all, highly proportionate to physical proximity. I want to know what’s going on in my community, in my neighborhood. Next, the city; next, the state; and so on.” — Richard Gingras, quoted in Nieman Lab. (Emphasis mine — JB)
The bright spots: niche and local news
Thousands of outlets thrive by heeding that advice. They are prospering because they build a community around shared interests.
I recently served as a judge for a journalism contest run by LION, the organization of 550 Local Independent Online News publishers. I was impressed with the level of creativity, ingenuity, doggedness, and community impact of the work of very small newsrooms. Several of the entries used AI tools to deepen their reporting.
The small, independent news organizations that are making a difference around the world usually don’t make headlines in the mass media outlets.
Here are a few more examples:
The Institute for Nonprofit News, supports 500 independent news organizations that are “nonprofit, nonpartisan and dedicated to public service.”
Sembra Media (I’m a board member) aims to “empower digital media sustainability to strengthen editorial independence” around the world. We support nearly 1,000 Spanish-language media, mostly in Latin America, and have identified another 2,000 independent news organizations in Europe, Brazil, the U.S., and Canada that meet standards of ethics and professionalism.
Many civil society organizations in the U.S. have been working to help fund local media that can fill coverage areas abandoned by traditional media. Among them: the American Journalism Project, the Knight Foundation, and the Craig Newmark School Center for Community Media, which is working with media that serve various ethnic communities.
I’ve written about Black Community newspapers that sprung up in the 19th century. They often tell stories about black business people, community leaders, and topics that the mainstream press avoided for fear of alienating their mainly white readers.
At the University of Oregon, Damian Radcliffe has been building “a sustainable local news ecosystem” for the state and beyond through the Agora Journalism Center.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization whose goal is to improve schools for all children. They report mainly from eight locations: Chicago, Colorado, Detroit, Indiana, Newark, New York, Philadelphia and Tennessee.
A media lesson from Ukraine: people pay for trustworthy news. The 60-person team at the Kyiv Independent are producing news that is local — the war in Ukraine — but is of interest to business and political leaders around the world. Amid competing partisan narratives, The Independent provides firsthand, on-the-ground war zone coverage. The publication is free, but 19,500 readers pay monthly or yearly to support this reporting.
Final thoughts: AI vs. fact checkers
Mechanized propaganda floods the information ecosystem with deepfakes and fabricated “news.” The tactic is to overwhelm; repeated falsehoods breed belief.
This “flood the zone” technique promoted by media manipulators is designed to confuse people. Most people don’t have the time or the expertise to research every bogus claim put out by interested parties. (Reality Check’s fact-checking service found conservatives were “baselessly claiming” that the Minnesota shooting suspect was a registered Democrat and inaccurately described him as a “leftist.”)
I have to admit feeling depressed when I hear someone repeat with certainty a falsehood that I know has been cooked up in the conspiracy kitchen.
Junk is cheap, verification costly
Jonathan Swift nailed it in 1710, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” And in the age of electronic communication, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”
It’s easy, cheap, and lucrative to promote scary, sensational rumors and conspiracy theories. Verifying rumors takes time and money. So the truth usually does come limping after.
But I am encouraged by all the grass-roots organizations worldwide that are producing trustworthy news and information — in spite of everything.
Remember the words of sociologist Margaret Mead:
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Next time: Some AI tools that small, local media organizations can use to multiply their impact and efficiency.
As always, this is a very sharp analysis of the business of news.