Dispatches from the media apocalypse
In saving news, culture is key.
Without serious intervention, newsrooms are going to disappear. Changes to social media and the advent of generative AI threaten their businesses and the impact of their work. They need to own their online presences outright and build direct relationships with their communities-and they need to do it now.
Social media audiences are plummeting. Less than 35% of internet searches lead users to click on a website. The views and engagement that newsrooms depend upon to survive are disappearing.
It’s happening quickly. Semafor’s Max Tani reported recently:
Washington Post CEO Will Lewis is introing the paper’s new “Build It” plan today. In a meeting with staff, he noted that the paper lost $77 million over the past year, and saw a 50% drop off in audience since 2020: “To be direct, we are in a hole, and we have been for some time.”
Addressing this challenge will require radical changes to how newsrooms invest in and build technology.
In this post, I’ll attempt to describe the challenges in more detail and then discuss how they can be more adequately addressed.
