AI could cause newsprint to outlive the hyperlink
What journalists do after Google Zero.
When it comes to journalistic intellectual property — what you and I normally call the news — there’s an inherent tension inside traditional commercial newsrooms between reporters (who do the journalism) and publishers (who have to pay for it).
Reporters tend to be more sanguine about open-sourcing and unpaywalling their best stuff for the largest audiences possible. That big scoop doesn’t get much impact if nobody knows about it! As long as the facts get out there, you’ve done your job for the democracy, right? It’s the boss who has to process the biweekly payroll who’s touchier about PopCrave ripping off a quality reporter’s work without chipping in for salary.
But those traditional newsrooms have been crumbling, shoestring indiedom surging, collapsing the old class division between crusading journalist and bill-paying publisher. There’s a grouchy new synthesis: The ripped-off reporter-businessperson, for whom impact and neglect can look like the same thing.
The excellent records hound Seamus Hughes of CourtWatch, a fellow Project C member who I just bumped into at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in New Orleans, describes the vampire swamp of the digital news ecosystem as scoop-minded indie journalists encounter it:
With 11,000 subscribers, no outside funding, no paid ads, no special SEO magic – we are used to people taking our reporting, repacking it and reaching a larger audience with proper attribution. Hell, we have an entire page on our site dedicated to highlighting that. Having been a terrorism scholar for the last two decades and a reporter for half that time, we knew it was an interesting case so we partnered with our friends at 404 Media to report it out. We assumed that other news organizations would also take notice of our reporting, cite it, and write their own copy. That’s how journalism is supposed to work.
But we don’t think we fully appreciated how much the Internet ecosystem and parts of the established news organizations are parasites to original reporting. [Subscribe to Courtwatch here.]
If you’ve managed to get the goods, it’s often somebody else transmuting your journalistic lead into traffic gold. Maybe it’s some day-late New York Times reporter with slower feet but a huger platform, or some rando creator who’s really charismatic (and more casually defamatory) on TikTok. Very frustrating, this dynamic. And very hard to solve in a digital ecosystem increasingly contemptuous of citing the sources of digital information.
But there’s also something much weirder and bigger happening right now with the third-party extraction of value from higher-quality digital journalism.
In Cannes last week, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince reeled off numbers about the exploding robotic readership of journalists’ journalism. Axios:
Startling stat: Ten years ago, Google crawled two pages for every visitor it sent a publisher, per Prince.
He said that six months ago:
For Google that ratio was 6:1
For OpenAI, it was 250:1
For Anthropic, it was 6,000:1
Now:
For Google, it's 18:1
For OpenAI, it's 1,500:1
For Anthropic, it's 60,000:1
While journalists are starved for attention from flesh-and-blood humans — Pew says just 17% of Americans pay for news — publishers’ eroding traffic from humans on platforms is being replaced by AI training visits.
"The future of the web is going to be more and more like AI, and that means that people are going to be reading the summaries of your content, not the original content,” Prince told Axios.
Put another way: For the first couple of hundred years of journalism’s history, humans were the primary readers of a journalist’s work. But in 2025, a reporter’s most loyal audience is the machine.
It’s the bill-paying publishers of those legacy-type newsrooms who have been most keyed up about this AI scrapage and what to do about it. The word leverage comes up a lot — in the sense of not having any if you’re putting journalism on an open web. The Atlantic:
At least 72 licensing deals have been made between publishers and AI companies in the past two years. But figuring out how to approach these deals is no easy task. Caccappolo told me he has “felt a tremendous imbalance at the negotiating table”—a sentiment shared by others I spoke with. One problem is that there is no standard price for training an LLM on a book or an article. The AI companies know what kinds of content they want, and having already demonstrated an ability and a willingness to take it without paying, they have extraordinary leverage when it comes to negotiating. I’ve learned that books have sometimes been licensed for only a couple hundred dollars each, and that a publisher that asks too much may be turned down, only for tech companies to take their material anyway…
A publisher’s negotiating power is also limited by the degree to which it can stop an AI company from using its work without consent. There’s no surefire way to keep AI companies from scraping news websites; even the Robots Exclusion Protocol, the standard opt-out method available to news publishers, is easily circumvented.
“There’ll be creators who will create for AI,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said of this conundrum, at the Dealbook Summit. “People will figure it out.”
Well, Cloudflare is one of the major tollbooths of the internet, better known for thwarting DDoS attacks, and CEO Matthew Prince’s AI saber-rattling suggests publishers could gain bargaining power by throwing down spike strips on the information superhighway. In March, Cloudflare announced the AI Labryinth, “a new mitigation approach that uses AI-generated content to slow down, confuse, and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and other bots that don’t respect ‘no crawl’ directives.” At what point is it cheaper to pay a publisher to stop triggering higher AI energy costs?
There’s another painful solution to this AI conundrum: slamming shut the borders of the open web. Paywalls on stories had already taken many commercial publishers halfway there. What about turning away from the traffic spigot entirely?
Some larger digital newsrooms are already laying off staff or otherwise hunkering down to prepare for Google Zero, the day referral traffic finally dies. Indie local news publishers I know, already frustrated by the junkiness of digital distribution, are increasingly turning to in-person events, print editions and zines and printed handout cards with QR codes.
A news business still counting on referral traffic is a news business built for the 2010s. The hyperlink is a legacy news medium that might currently be in steeper decline than newsprint. The new question is whether you’ll want robot readers, and if they’re paying customers.
I hate it, man.
Thirty years of old-fashioned journalism killed — I was laid off from my job as editor of a small daily 10 years ago. I’d still be covering my town if I could. Now, nobody is.
I entered the newsroom during the twilight of the Reagan Administration and spent a couple of decades writing from both staff and freelance positions at afternoon dailies (remember those?), morning dailies, weeklies, bi-weeklies, broadsheets and tabloids and at major metros, strong regionals and small locals and the glories of print newspaper reporting will simply never be replicated online. All of that is to say: organic reporting reaching a real readership and delivering a meaningful impact seems well within reach if publishers rediscover the promise of the newsprint medium. It doesn't need to be 'reimagined,' merely revitalized and pursued vigorously as a long-term investment. I pay top dollar to read The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal at my breakfast table each morning because I enjoy the read, the tactile experience and the complete absence of intrusive pop-ups and all with the peace of mind that comes with knowing that what stories I am choosing to focus on is unknown to anyone else other than my wife, who I occasionally disturb with a 'Jesus, honey, listen to this...' The groundwork for a rebirth of print news reporting has already been established.