There’s no shortage of handwringing over the loss of trust in news. I find this focus misguided. You cannot control others, and this is a time of low trust in all manner of institutions. Often, the concerns about trust are subtly put on the audience, as if the news industry is being victimized, rather than focusing on the product.
The new Reuters Institute Digital News Report shows this. Consumption is shifting to platforms and creators despite people ranking them as less trustworthy. Meanwhile, the top reason people pay for news is “to get useful content I can’t access any other way.” Better to focus on that – and how to build connections that go beyond feeding people information.
“People are shifting their consumption to the platforms that they appear to trust least,” Jim Egan, one of the report’s authors, told me on The Rebooting Show. “That's because convenience beats concern."
In today’s newsletter: why news needs more community models; Breaker’s Lachlan Cartwright’s scouting report on the characters of the 60 Minutes saga; and PvA Field Notes on the decline of gatekeepers, Anthropic’s doomer balancing act, and elder Gen Z’s advice to younger Gen Z.
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Community is the future of news
News publishers are facing a bleak future unless they radically rethink their approaches. The new Reuters Institute Digital News Report is bracing reading, filled with warning signs:
Younger audiences haven’t lost news habits; they’ve had them. 56% of people aged 24 and under have never been in a regular habit of reading a newspaper.
News is permanent renters. For the first time globally, social media and video networks (54%) now outrank news organizations' own websites and apps (51%) as a source of news. Owned digital properties have lost 12 percentage points of reach since 2020.
Subscriptions have hit a wall. Paying for online news has flatlined at 17% across 20 markets. Growth will be harder with the top of funnel being constricted from simply less people coming to publisher sites and apps.
AI answers are good enough. Use of AI chatbots for news rose from 7% to 10% globally. Only 42% of AI chatbot news users say they always or often click through to original sources.
Creators are winning on performance. Respondents ranked news creators above institutional news providers on being easy to understand (+16%), entertaining (+19%), relatable (+6%) and up-to-date (+5%). They did not judge creators more authentic (even) or trustworthy (-11%).
“Don't think that currently younger news audiences are going to grow up and acquire the news habits of their parents,” said Jim Egan, one of the report’s authors and senior research associate at the Reuters Institute, on The Rebooting Show. “The way I would put it is that older people are becoming more like younger audiences rather than the other way around."
This all adds up to news being a feature, not a product. OpenAI’s short-lived Pulse feature radicalized me to the future being personalized news updates being mixed in with life updates delivered by AI agents. This is inevitable, and it’s “good enough” for the majority who are not news junkies.
That is why publishers will continue to include news as part of broader product bundles, as The New York Times has successfully done. They will lean into creators, either finding them in-house like The Boston Globe’s Emily Sweeney or developing partnerships with them.
But most critically, news needs to embrace community models. Eli Pariser, who coined the term filter bubble and is arguably the Oppenheimer of clickbait as the founder of Upworthy, charted out the coming shift from a platform era to an agentic era. Most news publishers are not well positioned with their existing products.
The reality is news publishers need to balance their broad mission mandate with a 1,000 true fans community model for their diehard supporters. Building direct relationships is not enough. News has been too distant from the communities it is supposed to serve.
Breaker’s Lachlan Cartwright broke down the characters of the 60 Minutes drama.
"Scott Pelley has a rep and that rep is for being somewhat insufferable. This isn't the first time he's gone off. This happened back when David Rhodes was running the network and there were some pretty intense contract negotiations. He'd hired Ari Emanuel over at WME, they were trying to shake CBS down for more money. And David Rhodes called Pelley's bluff and punted him to 60 minutes and brought in another anchor. So Scott Pelley went into that meeting with Nick Bilton, I bet you, thinking I'm gonna go down in a blaze of glory, even though he says differently. TV and media is made up of characters. And we need more of them, not less."
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Reports from the field on gatekeepers, Gen Z fatalism, Substack’s ad play
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The death of gatekeepers: Charl XCX is releasing B-sides of her music on a private Instagram account and vinyl. Underlying this: getting back control from Spotify and Apple Music. Makers in media have gotten a raw deal as financializing middlemen have eaten with their take rates and taxes.
Scenes from the rebundling: Substack has taken forever to support advertising/sponsorship. It finally rolled out a tentative program to matchmake between sponsors and publishers. Troy sees this as “setting up the supply side.”
Gen Z is still pissed off: A couple hundred Stanford grads walked out on Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s graduation speech over Google’s business deals with the IDF. VC Vinod Khosla admonished the students for not being more pro-AI. FNer Micah: “That generation has grown up listening to people like Sundar promise how technology will improve everyone’s lives and they have a lot of anxiety, eating disorders, and job uncertainty to show for it thus far.”
Sensible Gen Z-to-Gen Z advice: “Faced with such fatalism, self-help seems essential. Disruption is real and it’s hard and we’ve made it through before. You can do more than you think you can; you are more malleable than you think you are. You don’t choose the game board but you choose how to play it. Relish the pivots; ride the waves; recite the Serenity Prayer every morning and chase sunsets at night. I won’t tell you that the future’s smooth sailing. But what a thrill to be alive!” Jasmine Sun in “The old world is dying”
Anthropic’s doomerism brand: AI is a weird technology, so it deserves weird companies led by weird people. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is a confounding character. He build the leading AI lab on the back of constant doommongering. That seems strange, only his core audience has been risk-averse CIOs and AI researchers who truly believe they are building a digital god. That positioning is more difficult with a very important constituency: the government.
RIP how-to content: Spare a thought for the Course Guys. They had a good run; AI is compressing the market for self-help books, Tim Ferris notes. His sales have fallen off a cliff as AI chat bots have filled the void of telling people how to get ahead without just putting in a ton of work. FNer Danny: “AI in this context means - we are coming down to a new two-way value exchange. One thing we know from previous huge shifts is that monetisation comes in many forms, with many writers having fanatical fans.”
The talent premium: The Bulwark has 1 million email subscribers and an impressive 14% conversion to paid. It is forecasting $30 million in revenue with 50% growth this year. The Bulwark and The Dispatch launched at the same time from similar angles of disaffected republicans who couldn't reconcile with MAGA. At the time, I thought The Dispatch had a better angle by not being Never Trump. The Bulwark ended up ahead, in large part because it developed new talent like Tim Miller.
Bread and circuses: The White House as backdrop to a UFC fight was too much for Caligula, although it pales in comparison to the Shah’s Persepolis party, which spent as much as 2% of Iran’s GDP on a party.
American trillionaire: Elon Musk becomes the first trillionaire, capping an only-in-America story that, depending on your point of view, is either an inspiring tale of a builder or a handy symbol for a pivot to anti-oligarch, anti-AI left populism. Musk’s popularity cratered as he got more political.
Fox is buying Roku: The $22 billion deal is about “building the everyman streaming platform with ads.”
Knicks in five: I’m on record saying NYC is a terrible sports town, but I have to give credit for the spirit of the city over the past week, particularly on Saturday night.
I was most impressed by this set up at a local weed dispensary.
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