For the better part of the 21st century, journalism’s relationship with Big Tech has resembled an uneasy truce. Media outlets depended on platforms like Google and Facebook for visibility, while these tech giants relied on journalistic content to keep users engaged. But truce has given way to conquest. Today, Big Tech doesn’t just distribute news. It absorbs it, fragments it, and, in some cases, replaces it.
In an earlier era, the concern was aggregation. Google News pulled headlines and excerpts from publishers, offering a convenient way to browse the day’s events without necessarily clicking through. The model was frustrating for publishers but not existentially threatening. Traffic still trickled in, and ads still supported much of the business. That is no longer the case. Today, Google’s search ecosystem has become an endpoint, not a pass-through. Featured snippets summarize key points from articles, often satisfying casual readers before they ever reach a publisher’s page. Voice assistants read aloud truncated versions of reports. Google has transformed from a gateway into a walled garden, one where news is consumed but not necessarily paid for.
Facebook, once a dominant force in news distribution, has pulled back in a different way—through neglect. In the mid-2010s, news publishers were encouraged to prioritize Facebook traffic, reconfiguring their strategies to chase algorithmic favor. Then, without warning, Meta shifted gears, deciding news was more trouble than it was worth. Political scrutiny over misinformation made the platform wary of its role in news dissemination, and with each algorithmic adjustment, journalism’s presence in the feed dwindled. In some countries, Facebook has outright blocked news content rather than comply with regulations requiring it to compensate publishers.
The latest, and potentially most disruptive, shift comes not from search or social media but from artificial intelligence. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its competitors represent a fundamental challenge to journalism’s economic model. These systems can summarize news articles, extract key details, and even generate readable (if not always accurate) dispatches on current events. The problem is not that AI will start conducting investigative journalism—no language model is breaking into corporate boardrooms or filing FOIA requests—but that it may erode the incentive for people to seek out original reporting. If a chatbot can synthesize the day’s events in seconds, why subscribe to The New York Times?
In response to these pressures, media companies have pursued two primary survival strategies: paywalls and digital advertising. Each comes with its own set of challenges.
Paywalls have proven effective for a select few legacy outlets with strong brand loyalty. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal have built substantial subscriber bases, and niche publications like The Information and The Athletic have found success targeting specific audiences. But paywalls create their own economic distortion: they incentivize news organizations to prioritize content that subscribers are willing to pay for, often at the expense of public-interest journalism. Investigative reporting is costly and uncertain; listicles, service journalism, and lifestyle coverage are predictable revenue drivers. The more paywalled news becomes, the more the general public is left with a diluted information ecosystem dominated by free, lower-quality content.
Advertising, once the backbone of journalism, has been thoroughly monopolized by the same tech companies that have siphoned off traffic. Google and Meta capture the lion’s share of digital ad spending, leaving publishers to fight over diminishing margins. The consequences of this dynamic are evident in the media industry’s trajectory over the past decade: mass layoffs, the collapse of local newsrooms, and an ever-growing reliance on clickbait tactics to juice engagement.
Some experiments—The Guardian’s voluntary donation model, Substack’s newsletter economy—offer alternative paths. But these models rely on direct audience loyalty, which is difficult to scale. A handful of journalists can thrive independently, but an entire industry cannot sustain itself on reader goodwill alone.
One possibility is adaptation: a hybrid future where AI handles commoditized news—earnings reports, sports scores, traffic updates—while human journalists focus on investigative and narrative-driven reporting. But this scenario assumes that AI’s impact will be additive rather than extractive, a prospect that remains uncertain.
Another possibility is intervention. Governments in Australia and Canada have pushed for laws requiring tech companies to compensate news publishers. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act seeks to curb monopolistic platform behavior. But enforcement is inconsistent, and Big Tech’s lobbying power far outstrips that of the media industry. In the United States, where the press was once considered the fourth estate, journalism now competes with Silicon Valley for legislative attention—and loses.
Perhaps the most pessimistic outcome is the continued erosion of independent journalism as a viable profession. The institutions that once set the standard for news may shrink into boutique outlets for the elite, while the broader public is left to navigate a landscape dominated by AI-generated summaries, misinformation, and engagement-optimized content.
The existential question is not whether journalism will survive, but in what form. A world in which news is dictated by algorithmic incentives and platform economics is one where the role of journalism as a democratic safeguard is increasingly tenuous. If journalism cannot outlast Big Tech’s disruption, it will not be the tech companies that suffer, but the public that relies on them for information—whether they realize it or not.
Written by Ananya Karthik
