The Urgent Reality for Serious Journalists: How AI Is Separating Winners From Casualties
The New Economics of Attention: Adapt or Disappear
While newsrooms crumble, AI-powered creators are building million-dollar journalism businesses. The divide isn't talent—it's tools.
I. The New Media Battlefield: Why Traditional Journalism Is Losing Ground
The Economics of Extinction
As the LA Times announces another round of layoffs, independent journalist Johnny Harris unveils NewPress—a multimedia venture featuring just three journalists with a combined following of 12.5 million people. This stark contrast isn't simply another "journalism is dying" headline; it's evidence of a fundamental transformation in how quality journalism survives—and potentially thrives—in today's digital ecosystem.
According to Gallup, only 34% of Americans have even a "fair amount" of trust in mass media—down dramatically from 72% in 1976. Meanwhile, content creators like Joe Rogan reach audiences of 11 million per episode and command higher trust ratings than traditional news brands. These statistics aren't anomalies; they're symptoms of a systemic shift:
The collapse of the advertising revenue model. Traditional outlets no longer control the mediums where audience attention resides. When marketers follow the attention economy, they follow it to social platforms, not legacy publications.
As advertising dollars follow audience attention to platforms, media organizations face an existential financial crisis. The trust deficit continues to widen. Audiences increasingly value perceived authenticity over institutional authority, creating an opening for individual creators who build direct audience relationships.
Attribution in digital marketing has become precise and measurable. A recent TikTok campaign I ran cost just $500 and generated one million verifiable impressions with detailed demographic insights—metrics and targeting capabilities that would have been unthinkable in traditional media models.
The economics are brutal but undeniable: the business model that sustained journalism for decades has been fundamentally disrupted. For serious journalists, this isn't just a financial challenge—it's an existential one.
II. How We Got Here: The Three-Stage Evolution of Media
In 1994, a newspaper controlled both what you read and how you read it. By 2024, newspapers control neither—they function as guests on platforms that dictate virtually every aspect of their relationship with readers.
To understand this transformation, we need to break down the three core functions of journalism:
Sourcing: Journalists find unique stories and insights through investigation, interviews, and specialized analysis—the traditional strength of the profession.
Curation: Editors and executives select, frame, and package these insights for maximum relevance and impact on their intended audience.
Distribution: The packaged content reaches audiences through controlled channels.
Traditional media once dominated all three stages. Today, they've lost control of two:
The Distribution Disruption: The cost of distribution has effectively collapsed to zero. Anyone with a social media account can potentially reach millions without the infrastructure that once protected media companies. When The New York Times invests thousands in an investigative piece, it competes for attention with content that cost nothing to distribute.
The Curation Revolution: Algorithms now curate content based on engagement metrics, not editorial judgment. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and X prioritize personalization to maximize their own advertising revenue. Content selection is no longer guided primarily by editors but by engagement algorithms designed to maximize time-on-platform.
The competitive advantage in journalism now lies almost exclusively in the sourcing function—the ability to uncover unique insights and tell important stories that others can't. But sourcing alone isn't enough when your carefully reported story disappears into the algorithmic void.
III. The Adaptation Playbook: How Individual Creators Are Winning
Johnny Harris doesn't call himself a journalist—he calls himself a storyteller. That small semantic difference represents a multi-million dollar insight about what modern audiences actually value.
Harris, who previously worked at Vox, has built a sustainable model connecting directly with millions without institutional intermediaries. According to industry estimates, his YouTube channel alone generates between $11-14 million annually. How has he succeeded where traditional outlets struggle?
His approach incorporates four key principles:
Audience-First Mentality: Harris creates content for viewers, not peers or industry insiders. He prioritizes clarity over complexity and engagement over tradition, making complex topics accessible without sacrificing substance.
Multimedia by Design: Rather than treating video, audio, and text as separate channels, Harris designs stories to leverage the strengths of each medium, creating content that feels native to each platform where his combined audience of 6.7 million followers (5.9M on YouTube, 767K on Instagram) engages with his work.
Example of Johnny Harris's platform-native content strategy. By adapting the same core journalistic insights into platform-specific formats, Harris reaches audiences where they already are with content optimized for each environment.
Acknowledged Perspective: By openly embracing his viewpoint while ensuring fairness, Harris builds trust through transparency rather than claims of absolute objectivity—a quality increasingly viewed with skepticism by digital natives.
Platform Fluidity: His content moves seamlessly across platforms, meeting audiences where they already are through both short-form and long-form formats adapted to platform-specific consumption patterns.
These principles aren't just working for Harris. They represent a replicable model for journalists who understand that in today's media landscape, controlling your relationship with the audience is the only sustainable path forward. The good news? New tools make this possible at a scale previously unimaginable for individual creators.
IV. The AI Accelerant: Transforming the Journalistic Workflow
What if a single journalist could perform the work of a graphic designer, researcher, editor, and fact-checker—simultaneously? That's not science fiction; it's the new reality of AI-augmented journalism.
The key insight: AI won't replace the sourcing function that gives journalism its value. Artificial intelligence can't generate truly unique stories by exploring the world or building trusted relationships with sources. But it can dramatically enhance the other two stages of the journalistic process:
AI-Enhanced Curation:
Analyze which angles of a story will resonate with specific audience segments
Optimize headlines and framing for engagement without sacrificing journalistic integrity
Identify patterns in audience feedback to refine future content
AI-Powered Distribution:
Automatically repurpose long-form content into platform-specific formats
Generate supplementary visuals, charts, and graphics that traditionally required specialized teams
Optimize posting schedules based on platform-specific engagement patterns
For journalists concerned about maintaining their professional identity in this new landscape, consider this framework:
Double Down on Unique Sourcing
Identify your irreplaceable expertise and access
Focus reporting resources on stories only you can tell
Build direct relationships with communities, not just sources
Leverage AI for Content Optimization
Use AI tools to test multiple framing approaches for the same core reporting
Employ language models to adapt content tone for different platforms
Create visual assets that previously required dedicated design teams
Embrace Multi-Platform Distribution
Treat platforms as distinct environments, not syndication channels
Use AI to transform core reporting into platform-native formats
Measure engagement across platforms to refine distribution strategy
This isn't about abandoning journalistic principles—it's about ensuring those principles reach audiences in a transformed landscape where attention is the scarcest resource.
Conclusion: The Winners and the Left Behind
The future of journalism doesn't belong to institutions or to algorithms—it belongs to journalists who understand how to harness both human insight and technological capability.
Traditional media institutions still possess tremendous advantages in sourcing: experienced reporters, institutional knowledge, and established access. What they've lacked is the nimbleness to adapt to changes in curation and distribution. Individual creators like Johnny Harris have shown that when you combine compelling storytelling with platform fluidity, audiences follow.
The winners in this new reality will be those who maintain their core journalistic function—finding and contextualizing important information—while embracing new tools that amplify their reach and impact.
For serious journalists ready to adapt, AI isn't an existential threat. It's the most powerful ally they've ever had in ensuring quality journalism doesn't just survive, but thrives in the platform era.
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AI engineer turned content strategist. As the son of veteran journalist Edward Girardet, I bridge data science and storytelling to revolutionize content marketing. My newsletter delivers practical AI tools and frameworks that help brands and creators craft targeted stories that resonate with specific audiences and drive measurable engagement. Join me at the frontier where algorithms meet storytelling.
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I agree with Bill's comment below, "The limitation of AI--at least until now--is that it is trained to expertly reshape and organize what is already there." The problem is two fold, that a lot are relying on AI to generate their content from limited external inputs of their own reporting along side what the bot is able to scrape - pretty soon though, journalism will be nothing more than feeding notes into the machine, so everyone can generate the same content. A true reporter, who can be first on the scene, or has access to things privy to others, AND can leverage AI for speed and efficiency will win out. Great article.
Not bad as an analysis of the current evolution in journalism. In fact, the core characteristics that have always made journalism work remain the same. The tools are changing. The core goals remain the same. It has always been a mixture of investigation, analysis, and storytelling. The role of a gifted editor is to understand the public perception and how to shape the presentation of the news so that readers can best relate to and understand what is being communicated. As a development expert at the World Bank once put it, one of the key roles of the role of journalism has always been to act as an interpreter, taking the information developed by experts and presenting it in a form that is understandable to the public at large. The limitation of AI--at least until now--is that it is trained to expertly reshape and organize what is already there. That can be extremely useful, but it can also limit the scope of what is being reported to what is already known. The strength of the human journalist is his or her ability to expect the unexpected and to make sense out of it when it happens. .