Part of the crisis in journalism is one of image and self-image. Mapping and clarifying what journalism does — leveraging but not defined by advanced technologies, and certainly not superseded by them — is a necessary first step towards putting it on surer ground.
The basic outline of the crisis is well-known and for our purposes can be described in this way: Search engines first and later social networks became oligopolic distributors of content that is unprecedentedly cheap to produce. Newspapers find it hard to compete for traffic and harder to monetize what they can get, resulting in revenue falls despite around twenty years' worth of efforts to generate more competitive content.
I believe journalism will always be at a systemic disadvantage as a way to create content. It's not because of any lack of talent or effort. Simply, its techniques and ethos focus on truth and relevance over volume and emotionality, while social networks reward volume and emotionality and consider truth and relevance immaterial at best. Non-journalistic content simply has more degrees of freedom, so in any social network not specifically designed to give priority to high-quality journalism the former will sooner or later displace the latter. This isn't to say that what journalists do can't go viral at times, or to deny that a nontrivial part of social network volume consists of mentions and reactions to it, but this rarely translates into traffic-related revenue commensurate with its cost or importance. In their quest to learn from successful content creation strategies, newspapers often struggle with an awkward mismatch of traditions and processes, most often ending up with damaged journalistic capabilities and insufficient revenue from their content.
You can, maybe (and the odds would not be in your favor) turn a newspaper into a long-term successful social network content studio. I doubt you can do it while still remaining a newspaper in any meaningful sense.
If journalism is a bad content creation strategy, it's however the best vehicle humanity has ever found for certain kinds of immensely valuable research and expertise. It's a commonplace to say that journalism is the first rough draft of history, but this is but a facet of a deeper fact: while journalism does not replace history, economics, medicine, or indeed any other discipline, it is the unique activity that gathers all of their expertise and day-to-day discoveries and selects and collates them in ways that are relevant to the here-and-now. And it's also, again almost uniquely, the activity that provides continuous adversarial research against those in power. Without journalism as a set of skills and professional responsibilities, power would be opaque in ways incompatible with a free society, or even just one with relatively widespread prosperity.
None of this research and analysis capabilities has or can be replaced by "algorithms" or "AI" deployed by platforms, or even by newspapers themselves behaving as ruthless profit-maximizing companies. They are simply technologies and organizations built for a different purpose and with different capabilities. Seen as a research technology, journalism is uniquely powerful and functionally necessary for much of the political and economic capabilities of modern societies. AI is a much better way to create competitive content for social networks, but it's rubbish at finding new facts, mediocre in its judgment of sources and relevance, and worse than rubbish at the all-important reliability of what they create. It's a surprisingly good technology for some things, and some of what it does can be useful to some secondary activities that take place in newspapers, but it does not do what journalists do that nobody else does.
To survive and thrive journalism has to go back to planning and negotiating from a rhetorical position of strength, which means changing the focus from its poor fit with the extractive economics and nihilistic epistemology of social networks to its extraordinary capabilities as a nexus across almost every kind of human expertise, combined with an unique skillset in finding deliberately hidden truths. What can be more valuable in a world powered — regardless of the self-serving sneering of some — by information and expertise?
But in order to restore and sharpen society's understanding of journalism it must itself restore and sharpen its own self-understanding both conceptually and operationally.
The first step is to de-center metrics describing traffic, views, virality, etc. They are important for specific sources of revenue, but also at the whim of opaque and arbitrary organizations indifferent or sometimes opposed to journalism as a practice, and they are in any case downstream of the core "output" of journalism. To ground reports, dashboards, and planning around them is to already concede the game before it begins: an organization is not defined by what it says it does but by what it measures itself on.
What describes the health and capabilities of a newspaper as such is what can be thought of as its cognitive architecture and functionality: What sorts of investigations can it do? What experts does it have access to? How well and quickly can it do synthesis? What sorts of facts, analysis, and conclusions does it make public before anybody else?
The core of this self-understanding is another form of domain expertise, but here technical and conceptual tools from AI and related fields can be of assistance, partly to provide new frameworks to map and measure expertise and information flows — a largely hidden but key aspect of AI engineering is the ability to do this, one that can be generalized to systems integrating both humans and computers — and partly to "translate" this understanding into the conceptual frameworks and vocabulary of actors in technology and finance who by and large undervalue journalistic institutions because they are looking at metrics that underestimate, or rather don't attempt to measure, their true capabilities and impact.
One of the most important facts in contemporary society is the combination of an enormously increased societal potential for information and analysis with a significantly degraded reality. Newspapers have done their best to report on this while also being one its main causal drivers and victims (and, in some cases, necessary accomplices). But journalism as a set of skills and principles works as well as ever, and in a highly technological and complex global society embroiled in multiple crises of risk and possibility, perhaps more powerful than before. The same technologies and tools that are attacking its viability and claim to replace it can be used to clarify, increase, and leverage this power.
The unavoidable death of journalism is a self-fulfilling narrative that benefits a few who loudly proclaim it and is taken at face value by many more. It's also a false one. Who better than journalists to break the news?
(Originally posted on my blog.)