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.