Warning: The journalistic fuel that’s powering AI search is a dwindling resource
I need you to comprehend my fear and outrage over the impact of Google’s AI overviews on independent media.
I’m not alone. The essays and analyses begging for mercy and lamenting cratering web traffic have flowed like ghostwritten ChatGPT bullet points these past few weeks. Some are manure. Others more enlightened. Extra props to those trying to polish silver linings. I don’t have much to add beyond hopelessness and some basic but essential messaging for anyone who isn’t following the deluge closely. So they can maybe understand how short-term convenience in this realm will surely foster eventual ignorance.
With so much fatigue suffocating me, I tried encapsulating some thoughts on ceding all that I’ve worked for over the past decades in a single post on social media. Something direct and uncompromising, like, These Google AI search results are the nail in the coffin. This is the predictable and painful end.
But while my feelings on the state of media in 2025 are negative, they’re still more complex than a Facebook death knell. Which itself would be a sad semi-ironic venue for such a message, since that monster prevented me from reaching my own followers and those of the outlets I write for long before Google started to bury original news sources in favor of cribbed summaries.
I respect those who are determined to counter the encroaching AI onslaught with their own empowerment and education. Personally, I’m just not itching to upgrade my repertoire to tangle with emboldened robo-powered politicians and litigious corporate villains wielding a thousandfold upper hand. But I’m also not quite ready to surrender. Kind of like a modern DJ who spins vinyl, or a photographer who still stubbornly shoots film to haunt their digital contemporaries.
At this point, as publishers and writers protest and begin to process the reality that those of us who generate the underlying coverage which fuels AI results cannot feasibly proceed under these insulting extremes, years past any promise of the slightest symbiotic progress, the most that I can ask for and hope to accomplish is to make sure that as many people as possible understand what is happening. …
In short, if you care about a website or a writer or some maker of media, it is imperative that you plug into them directly. We can talk about financial help or volunteering later, but for now, I’ll stick to the critical basics—please regularly visit those sites you rely on and enjoy and strive to subscribe to their email lists.
More indictments will follow; for example, of the psychotically technocratic anti-disinformation industrial complex that led us to monopolized distribution. I have a lot to learn and scream about the threat and usefulness of shortcut tech that mistakes the cheap wizardry of aggregation for human reporting that marries info obtained from both live and other sources alike. But this brief column blows straight from the gut. Reactive ignorance and bile to thwart so-called artificial intelligence.
All I ever wanted to do is reach people who need to read the reporting that I have painstakingly produced since 2001. For the reasons suggested above and countless others, that’s getting harder to do every day. Even AI couldn’t put it simpler than that.
