The future of journalism

Jonathan Last has an excellent piece at The Bulwark on the clusterf*** that is the Bezos WaPo and what it says about the business model of journalism in America.

“The internet revolution was about lowering to zero the marginal cost of distributing content. The AI revolution is about lowering to zero the marginal cost of creating content. That is going to transform media all over again—probably in ways that are deleterious.

 

“No one knows exactly how it will shake out, but in the broadest sense a few things seem inevitable:

 

·                Commoditized content will be overwhelming, indistinguishable, and free. 

·                There will be so much more content generated that discovery becomes difficult to impossible.

·                If we extrapolate from the Facebook experience, the vast majority of consumers will happily 

             accept AI-generated content, irrespective of its quality. (Or veracity.)

·                This will create a flight to quality among the remaining minority share of the public.

·                Traditional journalism will have to be supported by this minority.

 

“Oh, and by the way: While all of this is happening, America is in the midst of an authoritarian attempt. Meaning that the power of government has been deployed against media orgs that do not accommodate themselves to the regime.”

I just signed up for a subscription to The Bulwark. I’ll subscribe to The Atlantic shortly. I already subscribe to TPM and to Timothy Snyder’s substack. So should you. Real journalism for real people, not phony propaganda.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-washington-post-is-dying-jeff-bezos-will-lewis?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=dena&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

 

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