In 2024, more for-profit newsrooms will produce content using AI in an effort to reduce costs and increase pageviews. They will be joined by thousands of other businesses, industries, and marketers who will use AI at scale to try and gain attention and leads by any means necessary.
Marketers are already bragging about their ability to “steal” traffic by generating thousands of articles near-instantly on subjects likely to attract attention for their clients. For private equity firms seeking to maximize investment in their portfolio of advertising-funded publishing businesses, the allure may be too much to resist. Over the last year, more publishers have chosen to create AI content; more publishers have also unquestioningly run sponsored content from marketers who used AI. This trend will accelerate next year.
In a world where the web is flooded with robot content, traditional search engines will be less effective ways to find information. Vendors like Google will prioritize providing quick answers to user questions using their own AI models instead of primarily displaying listings that click through to websites. SEO, in turn, will stop being an effective traffic-building tactic.
Social media will begin to follow in its wake. AI-driven bots will overcome obstacles created by social media platforms in order to share messages and seek to sway opinion at a far greater rate than we’ve seen previously. They will be enabled by new models that allow them to seem more natural; they’ll be motivated by the election.
Cutting through the noise to inform the public will be harder than ever before — and more important than ever before.
Newsrooms will need to build direct connections if they are to survive. This means moving beyond the traditional idea of an “audience” to engage with readers, members, and volunteers in a participative manner. They will need to listen, converse, and adapt to what their communities tell them they need. They will need to adopt a service-oriented approach rather than one of institutional authority. In doing so, newsrooms must deliver unique, irreplaceable value to their communities.
While simple reporting may be approximated by AI, deep journalism cannot be. Software agents cannot speak to sources, uncover misconduct, follow leads, or speak truth to power.
Because AI models replicate the biases and systemic injustices of the data they’re trained on, they also cannot speak for diverse communities. They can’t elevate points of view and highlight the lived experiences of underrepresented voices, because those points of view and lived experiences are also underrepresented in the datasets they were trained on.
AI can’t investigate, it can’t represent, and it can’t advocate for change. It also can’t, by technical definition, create the kind of truly original work that is worth sharing.
Newsrooms that commit to AI-driven storytelling as a way to cut costs while increasing output will be lost in a sea of similarly bland content and spammy marketing. Newsrooms that cling to traditional SEO and social media tactics will find that they become less and less effective in the face of more and more noise.
In contrast, the newsrooms that survive the flooding of the web are going to be the ones that report deeply, commit to diverse representation, invest in investigative journalism in the public interest, and choose to meet their communities where they’re at by doing things that don’t scale to engage them.
These newsrooms are more likely to be smaller nonprofits that already report in the public interest, which support themselves through membership communities of people who pay simply because they want the journalism to exist. They’re more likely to build teams that are more representative of their communities. Some are already building “street teams” of diverse volunteers who can reach out to groups they are a part of. They’re reporting new stories that other newsrooms have failed to uncover. They’re reaching out across community spaces and new social media platforms, with a bias towards experimentation and learning. They’re collaborating by republishing each other’s stories and building coalitions across organizational lines.
These tactics are already working; these newsrooms are already growing. When the web floods, they will lead the way.
Ben Werdmuller is an independent technology leader working in public interest journalism.
