Declaring platform independence

The last few years have been plagued by the collapse of discoverability on the internet, which have helped fuel the destruction of many media companies’ already fragile business models. AI slop, AI-powered bots, and tech companies’ obsession with shoving AI into every part of their platforms have made the internet noisy and hard to navigate. Social media, meanwhile, has fractured. It’s harder than ever to sustain an ad-supported media business by doing commodity journalism and hoping to win the traffic slot machine on an increasingly broken internet.

This state of affairs has been devastating for media companies and the journalists who work for them. But the AI-ification of the internet and the end of easy traffic created by SEO-ing and keywording every article to death offers a huge opportunity for media companies (and independent journalists) who believe that their audience is other human beings, not a search or social media algorithm.

Along with three other reporters, I cofounded 404 Media, an independent, journalist-owned publication. We decided early on that we’d show our readers who we are and how we do our reporting; that we wouldn’t hide our perspective on the topics we cover; and that we’d be transparent about the challenges facing not just our business but the media industry more broadly. We’ve found that this approach has made people trust our reporting more, not less. We also decided that we could not build a successful business that relied on constantly changing our strategy to suit whatever social media platform happened to be driving traffic or paying media companies at the time.

Older internet technologies — namely email and RSS — are still some of the best for directly reaching readers, and newer decentralized ones like Mastodon’s ActivityPub and Bluesky’s AT Protocol look increasingly promising. We’re using these tools, combined with very public explanations of why we’re using them, to build a sustainable future for our company, one that is hopefully replicable by other small newsrooms. The fracturing of the internet has been painful, but it’s also given us the chance to rebuild the media by focusing on our shared humanity.

Media companies that replace their writers with AI, continue to chase traffic by doing the same articles everyone else is doing, and focus heavily on appeasing social media platforms will continue to struggle. Media companies that invest in quality journalism that is not easily replicated by machines and who treat their audience with respect by giving them articles, video, and podcasts that respect their time and humanity will earn readers’ trust and subscriptions.