I’ve been asked today to talk about future challenges in journalism and the news business, and I will. But first, a pretty big cautionary note. It has always been nearly impossible to predict the future, which is one reason journalists should generally avoid the temptation. It’s hard enough to be accurate about what’s happening in the present. And don’t get me started on predictive polling.
But it’s especially difficult to see into the future right now because we are living in an era in which two powerful influences – artificial intelligence and a fierce authoritarian assault on press freedom – threaten to shake our foundations and change our profession and our society in ways we can’t truly fathom.
I grew up in journalism in a much different and – for many of us – a much more confident time. For better or worse, my generation of U.S. journalists was unburdened by self-doubt and, I might add, self-criticism. We were confident in our mission, our methods, our news judgment – and, for the most part, even in our employers. The task of a young journalist was to learn the ropes, not to reposition them. Business was mostly strong; In my early years as an editor at The Wall Street Journal, I was admonished to hire more and faster because we had so many pages to fill.
Moreover, we were secure in our belief that the journalism we practiced was a valuable, even noble, pursuit – one that the public we served generally recognized as worthwhile and one that could change the course of history. Trying to emulate our heroes, from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to Molly Ivins and Sir Harold Evans, we didn’t so much fear the government as look forward to holding it to account.
We also didn’t give much thought to business models or emerging newsroom technologies – these seemed like peripheral issues and, in any event, other people’s concerns across the then-sturdy wall between the newsroom and the business team. And, of course, speaking of the lack of predictive ability, we couldn’t even imagine SmartPhones and the Internet, let alone social media, AI, or President Donald Trump.
Today, I miss that sense of confidence, even as I see that much of our certainty was unwarranted, a product of insularity and considerable industry-wide arrogance. Many of us certainly didn’t think about the unconscious biases that enfolded us: about our elite educations, about gender and sexuality, about what was going on in rural America, about the domestic and foreign cultures we parachuted in to cover, about racism in our society and in our newsrooms. In retrospect, there is much not to like about the journalism that we venerated as we engaged in it—more than I had recognized when I was immersed in, and sometimes blinded by, the action.
Our comeuppance – in terms of the precarious health of our businesses, public distrust in our work, and our vulnerability in the face of censorship and other government intrusions – has to make us, at the very least, more self-aware and more urgently focused on how to fight our way through our many challenges.
But, despite our profession’s self-inflicted wounds, I remain entirely committed to the belief that a free—and even sometimes outrageous, undisciplined—press is essential to democracy and to informed decision-making, just as it was in the past. Personally, I can’t imagine that changing. But there’s no disputing that we have a great deal going against us these days–and I can’t imagine that changing any time soon either. It’s a familiar litany:
- Authoritarian leaders around the world call us the enemy of the people, enact oppressive laws, and pursue abusive litigation aimed at intimidating us and crippling our organizations.
- We face physical dangers – injury, death, and imprisonment – not just in war zones but in our peacetime cities and towns. And it’s only getting worse.
- Journalists – and especially women journalists – are subject to a plague of doxxing, swatting, and other brutal attacks unimaginable before the advent of social media.
- There’s censorship and self-censorship imposed to avoid trouble with the authorities. On top of that, we are challenged by many news organizations’ financial instability and our own rising job insecurity, especially as artificial intelligence takes hold in our newsrooms.
We know with painful clarity that these issues are a threat to us today and certainly tomorrow. But – do they also define our longer-term future? At the risk of appearing naively optimistic and breaking my own rule against predictions, I think the answer is a qualified no.
An article of faith for me – which I am confident is also an article of fact – is that the public wants and needs accurate information. And we, the news media, are the most skilled and reliable purveyors of it. That sounds ridiculously obvious, yet it has been widely disputed. Some say we live in a post-fact society. That we can’t reach a common understanding of what’s factual because – as the adage often misattributed to Mark Twain states – “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
We hear that misinformation and disinformation predominate on social media, that bad actors – human and otherwise – can spread conspiracy theories and blatant falsehoods that they deftly disguise as truths, and that millions of people can’t tell even the difference. That more people get their news from sources that don’t report honestly or check their facts than from news organizations that do.
Much of this is true, of course, and yet… When I hear it, I’m reminded of all the people all over the world who go to great lengths to find out what is really going on in their countries and in the wider world. They recognize spin and misinformation when they see it; they long for facts.
I know from my Reuters days that North Koreans, at great risk to themselves, go to significant, and generally illegal, lengths to gain access to internet, radio and TV reports from foreign media. That Iranians have long relied on the BBC Persian service for news beyond the reach of government propaganda, that residents of China constantly invent new ways to evade the nation’s Great Firewall, that foreign services all over the world subscribe to Reuters because they believe it is accurate and because they need reliable news to make intelligent foreign policy decisions.
And that’s really the key: We need facts to make decisions. We may be entertained by falsehoods but we are enriched by facts.
People sometimes talk about news as if it is all political news. It’s not, of course. Planning a vacation or business trip? An accurate news report about strikes at the Frankfurt Airport is useful. Looking to buy a house? Accurate reports on housing prices in different neighborhoods are vital. Investing for the future? Factual reports on the economy and the markets will help; misinformation and conspiracy theories can ruin you. Choosing a school for the kids? Reliable information about schools in your area is essential. Following Tottenham Hotspur or the New York Liberty? Don’t you want your news site to get the scores right?
Without accurate information, honestly gathered, we are, quite simply, destined to be lost and confused about pretty much everything—including our own self-interest.
Putting it perhaps too simply, everyone relies on facts all the time, and journalists are in the business of delivering facts. Which makes me think – possibly, again, simple-mindedly – that it must, at its heart, be a pretty good business.
We hear that no one trusts or believes us. But that can’t be true either because people act on what we publish all the time – in small ways (when the news source we often say we trust the least – the weather report – says it will rain, we bring an umbrella), and in really big ways, as when an investigative reporter uncovers wrongdoing and people go to prison or get released from prison as a result.
Take The Wall Street Journal’s investigative reporting on how Theranos’s technology didn’t work and how the blood-testing company covered up the fact that it didn’t work, and how that damaged some patients’ health. Despite Theranos’s denials and its deployment of a fearsome lawyer to try to undermine the reporting, attack the reporter, and intimidate The Journal, the company was forced to settle with the SEC; founder Elizabeth Holmes and a senior colleague were convicted of fraud and each sentenced to more than a decade in prison; and Theranos was dissolved. People believed – and acted – on reporter John Carreyrou’s stories because they were meticulously reported and checked and because they were accurate and held up under all scrutiny. Also, because he had a personal reputation as an ethical journalist.
Stories with real impact – meaning people believed them and then did something about it – abound in our time. Journalism has never meant more to me than when two Reuters journalists in Myanmar gathered unassailable evidence, including gruesome photographs, to document the massacre of 10 Rohingya Muslims and to draw the world’s attention to the unfolding tragedy (which, sadly, is ongoing). Our two brave and skilled reporters, Wa Lone and Kya So Oo, were arrested, wrongly convicted, and sent to prison for 561 days, but they got the story (and, incidentally, the Pulitzer Prize ) and at least the world knew. And other stories by multiple news organizations in that period and since have contributed to the release of hundreds of trafficked Rohingya on fishing boats and in slave labor camps outside Myanmar.
John Carreyou, Wa Lone, Kyaw Soe Oo, Daphne Galizia, and countless other journalists can produce stories like these – as well as accurate reports on housing and markets and medicine and science and sports and power and corruption – because they have a set of skills and ethical standards that are specific to this profession. Interviewing skills. Investigative skills. Data skills. Skepticism of official statements. Reliance on multiple sources. An ability to track down hard-to-find people and documents. Meticulous verification of both information and images. Rigor in seeking comment. Insight in providing context. Clarity in communicating.
Bystanders with cellphones can’t match us in any of these areas. Their contributions are sometimes useful and sometimes even essential, but they can’t do the job that we do. Neither can generative AI. It can’t replicate these human skills but – but here’s another potential asset as we assess the future of our profession – it can help us deploy and amplify our skills. And, in fact, help us enormously if it doesn’t kill us first.
Indeed, I have serious doubts that AI will, in the end, be good for our civilization. Its energy needs are voracious. And its power to facilitate and proliferate evil may end up being beyond our control. Someday, perhaps we will face the AI apocalypse.
Nonetheless, as a profession and an industry, we have been too slow to harness the positive uses of generative AI and to let it work for us as an incredibly high-powered assistant. We are getting there, though, and when we do, we will be able to do a better job of what we already do so well. And that actually bodes well for the future of journalism – if not necessarily for the human race.
With these assets – the public’s fundamental need for accurate information, our unique skills and exacting professional standards in reporting, interpreting, and sharing it, and stronger technology to amplify our skills – we are better equipped than we might think to continue to matter in society.
Set against these assets are our considerable liabilities, as we’ve discussed. But we have means of addressing them.
Our financial difficulties are well-known. But, while many of our businesses are troubled, our industry has a lot of life left in it – and actually appears to be growing overall globally. Though the numbers are down sharply over the past decade, a recent survey still identified more than 8,000 local news providers in the U.S. alone. Many of them are recent start-ups, local independent not-for-profits that rely on a combination of donations, subscriptions, ad revenue, and in-person events to support their work, much of which is excellent. Indeed, live journalism – including interviews, panels, discussions, briefings, festivals – now generates a sizable percentage of revenue among smaller publishers in the U.S.
For nearly everyone everywhere, diversification of revenue streams has become essential. Globally, according to the latest World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) survey, “other” revenue sources (those not related to circulation or advertising) are growing fast, providing 23.8% of publishers’ revenue, an increase of 5 percentage points since last year – and about as much print circulation now provides. A lot of that comes from live events. Meanwhile, some news organizations are deriving substantial revenue from licensing content to AI and also to platforms and search engines, as provided in recent laws enacted in Australia and the EU.
On the cost side, new technologies, including artificial intelligence, should help reduce costs and improve the bottom line for many news organizations. This will be accomplished in some cases by replacing journalists and other staff doing work that can now be automated – as has nearly always happened with tech innovations in the past – but also by increasing efficiency in processes on both the news and business side. Among other things, AI can save and generate money by helping flag manipulated images and deep fakes, customizing news feeds to boost engagement, optimizing pricing and ad targeting, and surfacing and posting evergreen stories just as they become newly relevant to news consumers. Though AI summaries may pose an underlying threat, It’s still too early to tell how much they may undercut traffic to news sites and whether publishers will find a legal remedy through litigation, as Penske Media recently commenced, or through legislation.
I am most worried about government crackdowns, and personally, I am appalled, embarrassed, and deeply worried about the rapidly growing threat to press freedom in my home country. As professionals and as an industry, we must fight it harder than we are doing. We must do so:
- through solidarity among news organizations in the face of repression. Newsrooms are simply too isolated from each other, especially at a time when common interest outweighs competitive concerns.
- through acts of principle and, when necessary, of resistance;
- through the development and maintenance of newsroom cultures that cherish independence and will fight for it;
- through extreme transparency to show the public how carefully and ethically we go about our work;
- and through doing what we do best and most usefully, producing journalism that is valuable to our audiences and that holds up under security.
In my view, our real limits, in the end, won’t derive from our business challenges – which we can manage – or from the march of technology – which we can harness – but from our own limits. Limits to persistence, creativity, resilience, commitment to principle, and – to put in bluntly – courage.
In some eras, we may be lulled into the belief that journalism doesn’t require courage, at least not outside war zones. But in our times, there is no avoiding it, whether we’re engaging in conflict reporting, uncovering government and corporate corruption, confronting oppressive laws and suppressive litigation, or resisting government pressure not to publish.
So far, we’ve seen myriad acts of courage – think reporters on the ground in the Middle East, Ukraine, Russia, Hungary, Ethiopia, Sudan, the Philippines – but far too much anticipatory compliance by news organizations. Far too much shrinking in the face of abusive litigation and in the face of corporate and government threats.
The bullies are ascendant worldwide. The question is: Will we stand up to them?