2025 Reports

Journalism Zero: How Platforms and Publishers are Navigating AI

Brown, Peter D.; Jaźwińska, Klaudia

Early in our first interview, a veteran news executive began the story of their interactions with technology companies over the past decade by taking a deep breath.

“You know,” the executive said, “it’s been a long, strange trip.”

It’s fitting that these were among the first words we heard in our study of the relationship between journalism and generative AI, the latest turbulent phase of the purportedly “post-platform era.” Failed products, misguided strategies, and an incompatibility with the demands of truth-based publishing have characterized many tech companies’ efforts to engage with news organizations, along with inadequate financial support that arrived sporadically and was tied to conditions. The most promising “innovations” in news have instead come from journalists and newsrooms finding strategies that protected them from the business models of platform companies. Nonprofit newsrooms have been forced into existence by Alphabet and Meta’s duopolistic grip on advertising revenue, while direct-to-consumer routes such as newsletters and podcasts have come into their own as social media and search platforms have deprioritized or even removed news.

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism has been researching the evolving relationship between platforms and publishers since 2015. Our 2019 report, “The End of an Era,” documented a period when publishers were coming to accept that the core premise of the social media era — that the future of journalism lay in targeting audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Apple News, Google, and other platforms — was wrong.