Everything goes right
Antidote for the news apocalypse
Two weeks ago the CEO of AI company Anthropic Dario Amodei wrote an essay describing a realistic best-case scenario for AI (Machines of Loving Grace). The essay outlines all the incredible things that AI could help us achieve. After the apocalyptic chorus of people pointing out the downsides of intelligent machines, the essay was refreshing. Disturbing, but refreshing all the same.
I’m going to use that essay today as a model, and make my version of a news media best-case scenario. What if everything goes right? How many ways to go right are there? Do we even know what good looks like for news?
It’s actually been a confronting exercise. Like many people in media, I have been so steeped in decline it’s been difficult to set my mind free.
Here are five ways that news plausibly moves out of the valley of tears and into the light.
1: Necessity over trust
Before I talk about anything else, I want to cover trust.
I don’t think trust is as important as everyone else, in the way that everyone else thinks it is. I’ll explain what I mean in a moment.
There is clear evidence that trust in news media has been eroded over years in many countries. The duration of the downward trend depends on the market and how long trust has been measured, but the US has the best long-term data I have seen. It is dire. More than 70% of people had high confidence in general news reporting in the 1970s. Now just over 30% of people do. There is a corresponding increase in those who have no trust at all in news.
In New Zealand overall trust in news seems to be in freefall, declining from 53% to 33% in the past five years (Trust in news in New Zealand, AUT). Australia has a less pronounced trend of declining trust and increasing distrust over the past 9 years.
Many people believe that the news trust decline is part of a wider trend of a loss of trust in public institutions. This seems accurate for the US, where institutional trust -for example, in the Supreme Court and the Presidency - has declined to very low levels. It is also true in NZ, where over the past five years trust has declined in the courts, parliament, health and education.
The Australian data is more equivocal. Recent sharp drops in trust in health/government post-Covid look to me like reversions to the mean. So I’m not ready to agree that every nation is in the US/NZ boat. However, I do believe that major institutions of truth are challenged, and that the old model of authority is gone.
This situation isn’t going to be solved by head-on attack. Trustworthy people don’t talk about how trustworthy they are. That’s what dodgy people do. You’re not going to reverse a society-wide trend by running some ads with a voice actor telling people your news service is trustworthy. In an environment of general scepticism, blind faith in what someone with a deep voice tells you does not exist. That world is gone.
So I think fixating on trust directly - there were 1153 mentions of “trust” in the 2024 Reuters Digital News Report - isn’t helping.
In my plausible best-case scenario for news, rather than increasing trust in news in general, the trust questions in the surveys become irrelevant. News publishers are no longer part of the group identity “news media”, and instead win loyalty from audiences as individual brands. Those brands are relied on in a world awash with untruth. They become necessary again.
2: Escape from Planet Slop
Generative AI is already flooding the internet with slop. This is the “baby peacock” effect, where the top Google search results turn up 95% cute and entirely fake images of what computers think baby peacocks should look like. Doomers say it’s the end of the web. It could well be the saviour of news.
This is an opportunity for news organisations to become necessary, to become lighthouses in the sea of slop. In this scenario, as the open web is flooded with real-time generated fake text, images and video, provenance becomes a big deal. The source of information is as important as the content, and verified news becomes valuable for the majority of people.
I think this only works if the social cost of forwarding fake news increases steeply. At present, being the person who reads and forwards obvious falsehoods can be relatively painless. In the best case news scenario, people are much more ashamed of being that idiot. The change is is a result of smart marketing and the absolute ubiquity of slop. True news increases in value.
3: Platform regulation
Along with the increased social cost of consuming and forwarding fake news, changes in the regulatory environment mean digital platforms are disincentivised from spreading misinformation.
At the moment real news has a lot of disadvantages on digital platforms: it’s more costly and more boring than fake news. Algorithms naturally prefer fake, misleading and divisive content because it performs better on average than accurate information.
The silver lining here is that digital platforms are “winner takes almost all” - eg, Google in search, Facebook in social - and therefore are big targets. Taking advantage of this market consolidation, legislators make platform companies legally responsible for the decisions of their algorithms, moving away from carrier status to a legal position half way to a traditional publisher.
This vital reform better aligns the interests of the Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and society in general.
At the same time, the EU, Australia and NZ set up licensing regimes for VLOPs. Under these regimes, aggregate social data is viewed as a national resource, and platforms must both carry news and pay a social levy to operate in the market. The levy is funnelled to public interest journalism via legislatively mandated, independent agencies.
Only verified news publishers subject to an enforceable standards regime are eligible for funding.
4: The money flows again
One of the most depressing things about being in news at the moment is the drip torture of declining revenue. Unless you are working for a rare startup that’s managed to make a few dollars swimming upstream, you have lived with reduced costs year after year, trying to keep your head above water.
In the good news scenario, with the uptick in subscriptions driven by news necessity and the injection of public funding from platform levies, people still working in news experience the unfamiliar bliss of being in a growth industry.
This changes the dynamic in deep ways. Innovation becomes more than a means for defending old cost structures. News businesses become attractive investments.
Even in this new, happy world, any big news publisher still carrying legacy costs - for example, broadcast newsrooms - will either close or re-invent itself. Unnecessary costs must be left behind.
There’s also a different spirit within news. The days of cutthroat competition between news publishers are gone. News professionals are more likely to identify with colleagues as individuals and less likely to be blindly influenced by the interests of their employers. The relative importance of the organisation has declined because they are no longer the gatekeepers of attention. Collaboration is the rule rather than the exception.
5: News as a calling
News has always been a calling. There are certain people who are naturally curious and engaged, who are compelled to get to the bottom of things and want to spread the news. These people are the truth-tellers. The flame burns within. They are not cynical, secretly craving power, or fame, or to be a character from Succession. They are the real deal, and in the past many of them have become journalists.
That calling has a better home in the new world than it ever did in the era of mass media. The regulatory environment and rules around public news funding provide disciplined reporting with practical back up. The relative loss of influence of big media companies provides an opportunity for enhanced professional identity, a culture that approaches information dissemination as sacred duty. Young idealists sign up in droves.
Can we do better?
I’ve described one world where everything goes right for news.
News has become necessary again for everyday people.
The interests of digital platforms and society are better aligned.
Subscriptions and public funding have restarted the flow of money.
Investment leads to news innovation, which in turn brings more audience and more revenue.
A new spirit of collegiality between journalists has led to the rebirth of editorial culture.
As I found with Amodei’s essay, there may be elements of this scenario you find disturbing. Perhaps you think public funding of news is dangerous. Perhaps you see the licensing of digital platforms as unfair or unworkable.
In that case I’d ask you for your description of how news gets it right. It’s no good if we continually find fault with the present but can’t describe a better future. And going back to the past is definitely off the table.
Have a great weekend,
Hal
Great article.
I am increasingly worried about ai in the creative world which faces arguably worse headwinds because it is not a simple matter of 'truth' but monetising 'art' or 'design'.
Would be interested in your views/insights on this.