Journalism is facing its crisis moment with AI. It might not be a bad thing. - Poynter

Good morning, everyone. Tom Jones is off today, but the team at Poynter is keeping tabs on the latest media news and analysis. Here’s what you need to know.

After decades of navigating technological upheavals, the battered and resilient news industry is realizing it’s time to raise its gloves once more — this time against an insurgent troupe of artificial intelligence companies.

While doomsdayers have long predicted that AI would threaten journalism, it’s finally feeling real this month as reports emerge of a sharp decline in search traffic — a once-reliable source that brings an audience to news sites.

Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise and a Poynter faculty member, just returned from a convention of forward-thinkers in the industry. I reached out to ask him what he heard and how apocalyptic their tone was. What followed was a frank but surprisingly optimistic conversation. A version, edited for brevity and clarity, appears below.

Ren LaForme: I saw that you went to the Hacks/Hackers AI x Journalism Summit last week. I wanted to catch up for an urgent reason: I need to know what people are saying about AI right now — as opposed to even a few months ago — because I’ve had my eyes glued to our traffic numbers, and I’m seeing things that don’t look good. But first, I’m curious: Who was there and what did you hear?

Alex Mahadevan: There were journalists, editors, technologists and entrepreneurs who were trying to sell AI tools. Newsrooms of all sizes were represented — The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Associated Press; the big guys. Some great nonprofits: The Baltimore Banner was a local partner — I missed their party, which ended up being a sort of Pulitzer party, the day before — as well The Haitian Times. The vibe was very techy; a lot of hoodies.

It came at a really interesting time, because all of these think pieces and data reports were coming out saying that search traffic was cratering. That cloud was hanging over the whole summit. It was in the backs of all of our minds. One speaker, Courtney Radsch, literally said, “Search traffic is never coming back.”

That said, it was a pretty positive conference, and there were a lot of really interesting AI things that people are doing that will really help journalism. But it felt like we had reached an inflection point. Being at a conference with a bunch of technologists who have lived through the internet age, the social media age, the pivot to video, it feels like we are absolutely in another one of those moments. We don’t really know what it means for journalism yet. But the overwhelming theme of the conference was that it’s time to figure out how AI is going to help us survive the search apocalypse.

LaForme: I want to focus a little bit on why this matters. And I know you said we can’t figure out what it means yet, but there’s a pretty clear line we can follow. 

I started panicking a little bit about Chartbeat’s numbers a few weeks ago when I saw that we were missing double digits of our normal traffic on any given day. And it’s almost entirely represented by search. Over the past 20 or so years, search engines have been some of the biggest drivers for traffic to news websites. Even through the era of social media — sending us traffic and then not sending us traffic and making us pivot to video — search, and specifically Google, has been reliable.

And what we’re seeing now is that less of that traffic is coming in. Is that an accurate summary of what you heard?

Mahadevan: Yes. Across the board, news organizations are seeing the same thing that you’re seeing; that search traffic is down. I won’t name names, but anyone I talked to there was feeling it and seeing it.

LaForme: This is a big deal for a couple of reasons. A lot of news organizations still rely on advertising, and if you’re losing a quarter, maybe more, of your traffic, you’re going to lose a lot of money. But, overall, if fewer people are looking at our work, what are we doing? We publish for people, not for our own amusement. How are we going to get these people back? 

You’ve categorized this as an apocalypse, and it feels like that. I have struggled to convey to people in a way that doesn’t sound very “Henny Penny,” “sky is falling.” But I think we’re in a pivotal moment.

Mahadevan: Yeah. Aimee Rinehart from the AP pointed out in one of the panels that multiple stories have referred to this as an “extinction-level event” in the news. In another conversation, someone brought up the idea of “Chicken Little” and “the sky is falling,” and whether or not that is actually what is happening. But it is.

There are two interesting studies that might make you feel better right now. One is from Nick Hagar at Northwestern, who studied what people are searching for in ChatGPT. Less than 2% of queries are for news-related topics. So people aren’t going and opening a chatbot expecting to find news. They’re going there for different things. Honestly, it’s a lot of not-safe-for-work stuff. But people are not looking to these tools to replace where they get their news.

The second is a study we did with Ben Toff of the University of Minnesota. We found that far fewer people are actually using these tools than we think. Less than half of the people we surveyed use them on a daily or weekly basis, or have ever even heard of them. A large portion of the population doesn’t care about these tools, and actually, half of the people we studied said, “I don’t want to get my news from a chatbot.” So that does make me feel better.

These AI technologies are being forced on people. Everyone is downloading ChatGPT, but it’s not like they’re looking at it as a replacement for news outlets. However, Google is inserting AI summaries into all its searches. So it’s not like ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity is siphoning views. It’s Google itself.

Its AI overviews summarize what people ask about, say, the new pope: “Is the new pope a Cubs fan or a White Sox fan?” There’s probably great reporting on that, but users are just going to see the summary — and that’s all they care about. The problem with that is that they’re not clicking through to news sites — the data shows it.

There are two problems here. One is that these AI tools hallucinate and are known for spitting out false information. If people are going to Google, there’s a chance that they’re getting bad information if they rely on an AI summary. And, two, it’s siphoning traffic away from legitimate news organizations that don’t hallucinate.

The other troubling thing is that Nick studied referrals from the chatbots, even though people don’t use ChatGPT for news, and their findings are awful for news organizations. If people do start using ChatGPT for news, then we’re not even going to pick up that referral traffic. It’s just going away.

LaForme: I want to frame my next question in a neutral, non-defensive way, which can be a default when we talk about news outlets and technology changes. I’m thinking back to Craigslist. If you talk to a lot of people in news today, they’ll say, “Oh, Craigslist came for us and took all of our classifieds revenue.” From a newspaper perspective, sure, that’s kind of what happened. But from the Craigslist perspective, and from the user perspective, it was just like, “Well, classifieds are expensive. And you can’t really get them online that well, so we’re gonna make this a little bit easier for people to use.” 

Following that line, if I’m a person searching for some information about the new pope, and I Google it, and I don’t have to click through — casting aside some of the concerns about hallucinations and bad information for a moment — that’s a good, convenient thing.

So, for news organizations, it seems like we should consider reframing our mission, or our tactics, I guess, on how to proceed in this world. How do we? How do we provide value and make money when people have to click through to our websites for these bits of information?

Mahadevan: That’s a good question from an audience standpoint. Obviously, we’re doing a piss-poor job of serving them if they’re much happier with an automated answer from Google than they are clicking through and reading what we have to say. Obviously, there’s friction — you have to click.

LaForme: I’m thinking, too, of all the news organizations 10 years ago that made a ton of money with headlines like, “What time is the Super Bowl?” And I would argue that that was a cheap way for us to earn traffic. So, I don’t know, maybe this is a chance to rethink things. I’m being incredibly optimistic.

Mahadevan: I think the only way forward is to rethink our relationship to the audience. Because the way AI is changing the information ecosystem, if we don’t have a good relationship with our audience and don’t serve them in a way that is different from what they can be served by bite-sized, possibly hallucinated answers on Google or ChatGPT or Claude, then we deserve to die out.

Elite Truong, who was previously VP of product at the American Press Institute, had a really great session about how to experiment with AI with purpose. That’s me paraphrasing it. But AI was actually not a part of the conversation. AI did not come up until, like the last 10 minutes of the session, the entire session was about the audience. How do you look at your audience as if you’re fulfilling their Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? Are you doing a good job of fulfilling each of those pieces of the pyramid?

LaForme: You’re taking me back to freshman year.

Mahadevan: Yeah, like Psychology 101. At the bottom is: I want to have a place to sleep. Are we serving our audiences that way? Fulfilling their basic news needs? And then the very top is your sense of purpose. And are you doing a good job at fulfilling each of those pieces of the pyramid in between?

Her session was fantastic because it wasn’t “Here’s how to do SEO headlines,” “Here’s how to create automated FOIA generators,” which are great, but it’s time to rethink how we’re serving the audiences in the age of AI and how to stand out from the AI slop. It seems like we actually have a really good opportunity. Because people are generally repulsed by AI.

Research on AI disclosures is finding that when people see an AI disclosure, they don’t want to read on because they do not like AI. So journalists have this interesting opportunity to reconnect with audiences and show why human journalists can provide them value.

Lost in all this is a big question: What is our business? What’s our business model? Why do we like search traffic? Search is good because it brings people to our site. Why do we need people to come to our site? So we can sell advertising? But what is the business? It’s a complicated question. What actually is AI upending? This business model that we’ve been holding on to by the skin of our teeth for the past however many years. Maybe it is time that dies out. It forces us to think of new ways to make money.

LaForme: That’s a delicious question and potentially a real silver lining. If you look at how things have gone since the decline of newspapers and broadcast news as these monopolies on information sources, news organizations have been following others in terms of their business model. We’ve not been leading. We haven’t been leading for 30 years. And, yeah, maybe it’s time to sort that out on our own. The status quo is in the ground. It’s cold.

Mahadevan: My dream is something like this: There’s a middle aged NIMBY who lives here in St. Pete, and a 20-something who just moved here and is trying to get into the dating scene. A story comes out in the Tampa Bay Times. It’s a five-paragraph story about a new restaurant — a Melting Pot is opening up on Central Avenue.

That news is important to those two people in very different ways. The NIMBY wants to complain about the Melting Pot coming in and what it means for the zoning. The 20-something might just care about the menu, or what even is the Melting Pot? How can one five-paragraph story serve those two people the same information, but in different ways?

For the young person, it might be a vertical video on Instagram created with Kapwing that’s really buzzy and pulls out the very specific things that matter to them. For the NIMBY, it might be a newsletter. That’s like the dream of personalization from AI.

A news story is just a piece of — I know this sounds very dystopian — but the news story is a piece of data, and then how we get it out there is what matters. The problem is, where are the humans there? And that’s the question that I don’t quite know the answer to. The humans have to be able to report the story.

We’re at this weird period where AI is upending the information ecosystem, but also equipping us with tools that can help us do more meaningful work and connect with more audiences. AI intersects with our industry in basically every way. And wasn’t that kind of like how social media did it, too? And the internet, too? It’s not only changing the way we do our jobs. It’s also changing the way our work gets out there in the world. And that is really scary. But it’s also, like you said, a really good opportunity to rethink what it means to be a journalist, and what it means to serve people with journalism.

By Ren LaForme, managing editor

By Rick Edmonds, media business analyst 

I’m always on the lookout for an upbeat story about the local news business (a long such story is coming soon, I promise). This week, though, several developments were not positive and the ripples extended beyond their hometowns.

Alden Global Capital bought the Santa Rosa Press Democrat on May 1. This week NewsGuild chapter officer Phil Barber told me by email the expected cutting began. Barber said that all news employees have been offered voluntary buyouts on the not especially generous terms of one week per year of service up to 15. Management did not say how much of a staff reduction they were aiming for via buyouts and layoffs.

A decade ago, a group of wealthy Sonoma Valley residents bought the Press Democrat looking to do a good deed for the community rather than make big profits. They were model owners, supporting high journalism performance, until they weren’t. Once the paper was put up for sale the first bidder was Hearst — pretty much the best chain owner you could find. Instead, and unfortunately for the community and the Press-Democrat’s journalists, it went to Alden’s MediaNews Group.

The bad news continues. On Wednesday, the nonprofit National Trust for Local News announced that it sold off more than half the papers in its first venture, a group of community newspapers in Colorado. Those in suburban Denver were unloaded, leaving the Trust with smaller papers in more remote towns. Sarah Scire of Nieman Lab has a tough piece that says the sale was to Times Media Group of Arizona, a bare bones operator.

The Trust hired veteran publisher Tom Wiley as CEO last month replacing co-founder Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro. He will be taxed with retooling a promising and well-financed concept that so far has not delivered.

Another ambitious nonprofit venture, the American Journalism Project’s Houston Landing, closed abruptly earlier this spring, after fewer than three years publishing. Currently, the NewsGuild chapter said it is pressing for better severance packages than first offered. I suppose that makes sense, but the main event for the several dozen displaced reporters and editors will be finding new jobs in a tough climate.

Autopsies on the Landing are still being conducted but the consensus to date is that it aimed too big and too broad in the nation’s fifth largest metro, which is already well served by its newspaper and a host of broadcast media and specialized outlets.

By Amaris Castillo, staff writer

The Trump administration abruptly canceled scores of scientific research grants at universities across the country, according to The New York Times. Correspondent Steven Lee Myers reports that it’s part of a campaign against experts who track misinformation and other harmful content online.

“The campaign stems from an executive order that President Trump issued on Jan. 20 vowing to protect the First Amendment right to free speech, but the scale of it has prompted criticism that it is targeting anyone researching misinformation,” Myers wrote. “The intent, the critics have said, is in fact to stifle findings about the noxious content that is increasingly polluting social media and political discourse.”

The grants varied widely. For example, one funded research that explored the myriad ways to evade censors in China. Another sought to design a tool to detect fabricated videos or photos generated by artificial intelligence.

Lisa K. Fazio, an associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University, had a grant that was canceled. According to Myers, Fazio’s grant studied how the repetition of lies reinforced them.

“When you ask Americans, these are things they’re really concerned about,” Fazio told the Times. “They want to know what can be done.”

Marshall Van Alstyne, an economist at Boston University who is considered a foremost expert on network business models, lost a grant his team was using to research on “ways to encourage social media users to verify the sources of their posts to incentivize accuracy,” the Times reported. Referring to censorship, Van Alstyne said “that’s not really the nature of our research.”

Myers details how the National Science Foundation, which is a government agency funding much of the country’s scientific research, began canceling hundreds of grants last month.

“The cancellation has jeopardized research in universities in virtually every state,” Myers wrote, “leaving researchers scrambling to find funding for projects that in many cases are only partly completed.”

By Angela Fu, media business reporter

Roughly 190 public broadcasting officials from across the country have flown to Washington, D.C., to strategize at NPR’s headquarters and lobby lawmakers to preserve federal funding for public media, NPR reported Thursday.

The officials work at local stations, which are most vulnerable to any cuts to funding for public media. While federal funding makes up roughly 1% of NPR’s budget and 15% of PBS’ budget, it can constitute over half of the budgets of smaller local stations, especially those located in rural areas.

Public radio and television stations receive federal funding through grants from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, an independent nonprofit that was created by Congress. As the branch of government that holds the “power of the purse,” Congress is responsible for approving funding for CPB. For the current fiscal year, CPB received roughly $535 million — more than 70% of which will go directly to over 1,500 local stations.

President Donald Trump and his administration have tried multiple times over the past month to interfere with CPB, attempting first to fire three of its board members and then later directing the board to stop funding NPR and PBS. The attempted firings led to an ongoing lawsuit in which CPB is arguing that as a private organization, it is not subject to the president’s authority.

Trump is also reportedly considering asking Congress to rescind $1.1 billion in previously approved funding for CPB. (CPB receives funding two years in advance.) The White House’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 calls for the complete elimination of funding for CPB.

In the face of these threats, public broadcasting stations are running awareness campaigns and launching donor drives. They must convince an increasingly skeptical, Republican-controlled Congress to protect their funding. At a House subcommittee hearing in March, Republican representatives argued that NPR and PBS are “biased” and that federal support for public media is unnecessary at a time when many Americans have internet access.

Supporters of public media, however, maintain that millions of Americans rely on NPR, PBS and local stations for reliable news and educational programming. That is especially true, supporters say, in rural areas and during disasters that may temporarily wipe out cell and internet service.

Want more? Follow us on Instagram. We drop fresh memes every Friday — tailor-made to amuse even the most jaded media lifers.

• A new one on press freedom from Poynter’s Amaris Castillo: “Legal support for journalists is evolving to meet rising threats to press freedom.”
• For The Bulwark, Will Sommer writes, “Trump White House Sharpens Its Knives for Politico’s Owner.”
• Vanity Fair’s Natalie Korach writes about “The Israeli Reporter Getting the Scoop on Trump’s High-Stakes Diplomacy.”
• The latest from Dick Tofel and his Second Rough Draft newsletter: “Four Reasons for Hope in a Time of Fear.” 

Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at tjones@poynter.org.

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