The End of Publishing as We Know It, byAlex Reisner
Do a Google search these days and above all the clickable results will appear an AI overview of the information you seek. One major study found that these overviews have produced a 34% drop in search engine traffic to outside websites.
What does this mean for publishing? The Atlantic’s Alex Reisner qualifies it as a near extinction level event, writing, ”the institutions that comprise our country’s free press are fighting for their survival” amid a tectonic shift in how people use the internet. This comes just as (a handful of) publishers had found renewed success with paywalls that ChatGPT easily bypasses and repackage.
There’s some hope. Specialized outlets may fare better than general interest titles. And publishers have the options of inking deals with AI companies or filing intellectual property lawsuits.The problem is that AI platforms make it all but impossible to determine the value of each bit of original content, leaving publishers unable to negotiate.
Substack, YouTube and other new publishers in the “creator economy” are showcasing solid journalism. However, “investigative journalism that exposes corruption…comes with a serious risk of legal repercussions, and requires resources…that tend to be in short supply for freelancers,” writes Reisner.
You might think that AI companies would want human-run publishers to thrive as a means of training their bots. Reisner grimly notes that, “in fact, there are signs that AI companies believe publishers are no longer needed.”
Is Jeff Bezos Selling Out The Washington Post?, by Clare Malone
Clare Malone’s New Yorker piece on the Washington Post’s “identity crisis” during Trump’s second term also speaks to the broader crisis afflicting legacy news and the increasingly dense web connecting America’s wealthiest and most powerful people, conflicts of interest be damned.
A Kennedy Center reception in March for the premiere of a documentary about Katherine Graham, the Post’s storied owner during its Watergate-era halcyon days, felt like “a wake for the Graham family’s Post.” That’s unsurprising given the past five years at the paper having seen several rounds of layoffs and rudderless leadership installed by owner Jeff Bezos. Bezos declined an invitation to the reception, opting instead to attend the Academy Awards.
Malone writes of widespread outrage in the newsroom over leadership blaming it for the paper’s grave problems rather than its own lack of a coherent business strategy. She adds that, “at a time when mainstream media outlets are widely distrusted, the number of people who want to pay for quality news in America is distinctly smaller than the number of those who want to order two-ply toilet paper that will arrive the next day” from Amazon, the e-commerce behemoth Bezos founded.
Bezos’ plans for the Post’s future are murky, but not his priorities. The evening after announcing the paper’s opinion section would focus exclusively on free markets and personal liberties, he had dinner with Trump.
The Concorde-and-Caviar Era of Condé Nast, When Magazines Ruled the Earth, by Michael Grynbaum
The Times excerpts media columnist Michael Grynbaum’s new book on the history of Condé Nast, with this snippet dishing on the glossy’s 1990s golden days–specifically, perks and expense accounts that to journalists under 30 may as well have existed only on Mars.
There was Art Cooper, the editor of GQ, hosting dinners in Milan to which he billed Condé to fly out his food critic from New York for the sole purpose of choosing wine pairings. And photographer Irving Penn shattering a hundred Cartier glasses in order to find the most photogenic shard. Concorde flights to Paris. A company account at the Four Seasons Grill. Reporters’ mortgages personally underwritten by Si Newhouse.
Money was no object. It seemed reasonable at the time, since “Condé’s editors were the original influencers, their lives a top-to-bottom marketing campaign for the company that hired them,” writes Grynbaum.
In truth, Condé even at its height was generating measly profits compared to more abstemious rivals. In 2008 came the “end of fiscal magical thinking.” Fortunes have reversed to the point that Condé recently switched from Microsoft Word to Google Docs to cut corners. Maybe that was a bridge too far for Anna Wintour, who last week announced she would leave her perch as Vogue editor-in-chief after 37 years at the helm.
