Opinion from Washington Post: "The real wolf menacing the news business? AI."

[EXCERPT from Washington Post opinion piece by Jim Albrecht - former senior director of news ecosystem products at Google]

The news publishing industry has always reviled new technology, whether it was radio or television, the internet or, now, generative artificial intelligence. After all, newspapers long had a monopoly on the distribution of information, and each innovation pared back the exclusiveness of that franchise.

The news industry’s problem has also been my problem. For the past seven years, I ran a team at Google focused on making the web ecosystem more hospitable to news publishers. We built products to make the production of expensive journalism cheaper (giving them cutting-edge AI document analysis and transcription tools), to make it easier for people to buy subscriptions, and to let publishers showcase their editorial viewpoints and thus find their audiences more effectively. In aggregate, these things delivered billions of dollars of value to publishers around the world.

But they did not fundamentally alter the fact that the internet had hollowed out the value of the daily newspaper.

Read at the Washington Post for the full piece >