High-quality free news is going extinct

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that both CNN and Reuters are moving to put paywalls in front of their content. Ironically, you probably won’t be able to read that article unless you are a subscriber to the WSJ. Quality news isn’t getting harder to find, but it is getting harder to afford. The cause of this isn’t a single factor, rather a blend of social phenomenal that are all colliding to form the state of the web in 2024. Advertising revenue, while not flat, is dependent on eyeballs on pages. With the introduction of better large language models, copycat sites have begun to spring up, rewriting stories via chatbots. These are next to impossible for news outlets to chase down, and can flood search results to drown out real stories. News outlets are increasingly requiring accounts to read free content, in an effort to avoid this, however they still have to compete with fresh content generated from scratch. It is a hard time to be a journalist, at a time when the work they do should be valued more than ever in a rapidly changing world.

How large language models changed the equation

This move to charge for news runs against the culture of free that has grown over the past two decades. For much of the internet’s life, most content hasn’t cost a cent, with the understanding that users would pay with their attention (which equates to advertising dollars). To combat pirating, companies got much better at automatically taking down direct copies of work such as songs or articles.

Content ID makes matches based on seconds of matching audio or video. In other words, it doesn’t just make matches when a whole thing has been copied and uploaded. It makes matches when just a short clip is found. And short clips are often present in videos making fair use. - The EFF, on YouTube’s Content ID system

This dynamic begins to shift when the content that is copied can be altered effectively so that the originally meaning and intent is kept, but the exact words are different. Nobody can claim copyright over an event that happens, even though researching and reporting on that event takes copious amounts of work. Services like byword seek to exploit this by enabling content generation, through copying, at scale, and seek to capture ever larger portions of the search traffic that quality news outlets depend on to thrive without a paywall.

Goyanes et al. summarize the phenomenon well in the abstract of The culture of free: Construct explication and democratic ramifications for readers’ willingness to pay for public affairs news

Specifically, the culture of free is a strong orientation to considering news as a public good that must be free of charge, rooted in customs/habits of free consumption on the Internet over decades, fueled by free competition, subtended by advertising, and a lack of interest in the news more generally.

In order to shift the mindset of readers on the internet from an advertiser supported model (which is being eliminated as an option because of AI), readers have to see the value in paying for news. They have to recognize both the labour and work that goes into writing a quality story, and believe that reading that story will present some tangible benefit in their lives. The percentage of people that pay for news has increased from the days in which paywalls were less prevalent, but appears to be leveling off ^[1].

In combination with this leveling off effect, many news consumers appear to be incredibly price sensitive. News tends to get cheaper with scale, but scale requires reaching a broader audience, making the below chart even more interesting. Readers both want cheaper news, while also wanting news more specific to their interests. This is particularly true for younger readers.

Being priced out of the truth

When reading news from a particular news source, there are no algorithms prioritizing engagement (although there are dynamic headlines). Assuming that the paper that you are reading from is of sufficient quality, you can have a high degree of confidence that the headlines are well researched and supported by facts. When someone sends me a text claiming something extravagant, one of the first things I usually do is google it, and look if any of the major news outlets have published on it.

Once I find an article that either disproves or supports the claim, I’ll want to share it with the person who originally texted me. However, I cannot do this if the article is paywalled ^[2]. This leaves the person in the dark, and forced to take my word for it (which they may be less apt to do if they know we disagree on the issue). Quality news is a lot like a quality diet, you get what you pay for, and if a plate cannot be filled with fruits and vegetables, junk food will swoop in to take up the free space. Even services that help readers discern which sources are trustworthy cost money. Researching facts takes immense effort, and thus usually requires resources to do right.

The future of news

While the overall state of news is consolidating into bigger players (such as the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal), there are cases of independent, smaller news organizations thriving. 404 Media, mentioned earlier in this piece, is profitable. Platformer, run by Casey Newton, is another example of a small group of journalists doing well financially. The New York Times, as a publicly traded company, reveals revenue and subscriber numbers. In Q2 2024, they are estimating subscription revenues to grow by 11-14%.

However, there are many other instances in which publishers are not doing well. This leaves a lot of people in the dark, unable to hear about local news in the same way that they once did.

The loss of journalists contributes to the exponential growth of news deserts in large swaths of the nation — and that’s disastrous when misinformation is rampant - Margaret Sullivan, as quoted by Oliver Darcy in CNN

Niche news is expensive. Both 404 media and platformer are priced at $10 a month at the time of writing. I subscribe to 404 media and it is good journalism, however I view a part of that subscription as the cost of supporting small publishers. I believe that as more years go by, there will be 5-6 large news outlets all priced within $4-6 per month, smaller outlets around $10 per month, and little else. All of those outlets will seek to engage with their readers directly, either through apps or emails, in order to better protect their content from scraping. I hope that more outlets provide paid subscribers with dedicated RSS feeds.

If nothing else, this change in the internet should highlight the real value that human journalists provide in helping us uncover things about our world, and in putting in the work to verify details about an event. If you can, support a media outlet that matters to you.