Journalists’ work forms the bulwark against so many evils that will otherwise go unpunished, and everyone should pitch in to protect this vital industry The Competition Commission’s findings on digital platforms offered South African publishers something rare: acknowledgment that the market is broken. Although platforms accentuated the decline, they didn’t cause the market failure we are experiencing. There is only one way to adequately restore a market, and this is a policy intervention that incentivises and supports journalism as a public good.
When the Competition Commission ruled that Google pay R688-million over five years as compensation for value extracted from the news industry, emotions were mixed. The compensation and acknowledgement of a distorted market brought some relief, but the inexplicable absolution of Meta’s algorithmic deprecation of news content and the failure to combat misinformation in the past decade frustrated those who have watched platforms act with impunity. These findings matter, but let’s be clear about what they are and aren’t.
They’re not handouts: they’re regulatory attempts to correct market distortions caused by dominant players. And although they won’t save the industry, they provide breathing room for publishers to reposition for sustainability rather than merely survive. The question is whether we’ll use that window wisely.
Read Full Article on Daily Maverick
[paywall]
The platforms that disrupted journalism are now being disrupted themselves. Large language models and searches powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are changing how people access information. Already, Google’s AI Overviews are cutting referral traffic to publishers by double digits.
For an industry that spent a decade pivoting to digital, watching that digital strategy come under more strain is cruel timing. But AI presents opportunity as much as threat. Publishers who figure out how to deploy these tools to better serve audiences, expand coverage more efficiently and conduct investigations that once required specialist data skills will have advantages over their human and machine competitors.
The newsrooms that thrive will be those producing audience-centric, original, value-creating journalism that AI cannot replicate. This matters because AI-generated content is flooding the internet. The antidote isn’t to compete with machines on volume or speed.
It’s to double down on what humans do that algorithms cannot: cultivate sources, exercise judgement, hold power accountable and produce journalism that helps people navigate life. Originality and integrity become competitive advantages in an ocean of synthetic content. Journalism is a public good, but it’s not funded like other public goods.
The free market notoriously underinvests in public goods and information, so it’s no surprise that American studies in the ’80s and ’90s showed that even in times of growing revenues and economic activity, profitable publishers failed to invest in newsrooms. We have lost more than half of our colleagues to this disruption, and it is clear the invisible hand of the free market has gone limp. The profit motive will not produce enough of the journalism society needs. It never did, so we need a new approach.
[/paywall]
