Francisco Santos Calderon
Bogota Colombia
The exit of the CNN President Chris Licht Just one year after being named, it is just a symptom of a disease that grows every day, which destroys the media all over the world and facilitates polarization through social networks, which become the mechanism through which people are informed. About 80 percent of the citizens of the United States obtain their news through these means.
I remember very recently when CNN was a vital source of information and showed us the entire crisis live with the Lady Di’s death or the first attacks on Iraq after they invaded Kuwait. CNN was undoubtedly a reference in information, in balance, in technology; brought the world closer to homes in distant parts of the planet.
Today the viability of CNN itself is in question, it lost its balance during the Trump administration, which brought out the worst in the media. From having 1.7 million regular viewers today there are close to 550 thousand. Your universe changed, it’s disappearing with the streaming and social networks and it is no longer essential if you want to be informed.
The New York Times (NYT), a print media icon, dedicated itself to the left-liberal niche and so it has survived; It is no longer a benchmark for serious journalism for those who do not follow that ideological trend, but their niche is very strong, very rich and they pay for the digital subscription, which has allowed them to grow and be profitable. The departure of its opinion editors for being too conservative, one of them gay, says it all for a newspaper that was an example and now follows a very clear political and social agenda.
The Washington Post (WP) after the Trump boom failed to maintain 500,000 digital subscribers -he had 3 million- and today he is in the midst of a crisis of identity and economic results. El Wall Street Journal (WSJ)of a conservative niche but with greater impartiality in the development of the news, has 3.5 million subscribers and left 600 million dollars last year, while the Post, nothing, and the other giant, the Financial Times survives with more than 1 million subscribers.
The rest of the media in the world barely survives. In Latin America almost no newspaper is profitable and the case of Colombia is an indicator. Time and Week they would not survive if they were not in the hands of powerful bankers o The Colombian industrialist of Medellín. If we add the persecution of the dictators who ended the media or the hostility of left and right populists against free speech and information because the panorama is even worse. And that artificial intelligence and its effect is just beginning.
Today the media have two ways of financing themselves, either with a subscription or with clicks that give them the program guideline. Every time a user clicks on it, the medium receives a resource, since it is used by Google, Facebook and other social networks to promote and collect their advertising. With the advent of artificial intelligence, no one is going to go to the media anymore. The search engines with AI, the GPT chat but more sophisticated, will give the person who is looking for all the necessary information without sending it to a medium.
So we are going to have an increasingly segmented world, media where few are involved in the creation of news, since AI is going to do much of the work and edit text or video that humans do today. Perhaps that is the salvation, almost fully automated media with a few content creators and curators who are very in tune with their audience.
It is very probable that the few media that survive are niche, as today are the NYT or the WSJ. The quality of their content and the credibility of their story allow them to continue doing what they do today. But most of the media and the individual’s need for information will be closer to those who produce it and to what interests the user. It’s already happening. Newsletters and applications like Substack, with portals, columns or content from one person or a small group of people to which the user subscribes for a low price, are already the new way.
Yes, I still read the NYT, the WSJ or the FT, but I’m more interested in what Bari Weis’s Free Press has to say on Substack, John Ellis’s News Items or Bill Bishop’s Sinoicism on China. I choose what I want to read and who I believe. It is no longer just the credibility of the medium, it is that of the person, his knowledge, his experience and his positions.
The median reader age for the NYT is 42, the WSJ is 47, and the Post is 47.6. They don’t pick up the young and age like society. Until now, no one has invented the medium that captures the concerns of young people and keeps them hooked for more than a few minutes. Vice, the digital medium that promised to do so, is bankrupt, and although there is still nothing in sight today, artificial intelligence will certainly create content that is closer and closer to the reader’s immediate need or concern. Without a doubt, whoever manages to adapt and deploy this new technology first will show the new way.
I accept it, I am a dinosaur. My appetite for general information, for the different writer and for filling my brain with useful and useless information that appears in today’s media is already beginning to be something of the past, something exotic. That is, the meteorite has already fallen. Amen.