Tech Won't Save Us - What Google Zero Means for Journalism w/ Matt Pearce

Episode Date: August 7, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Matt Pearce to discuss how Google’s use of generative AI is sending far less traffic to all manner of websites, but especially news publications, and what that might mean for the future of journalism.Matt Pearce is Director of Policy at Rebuild Local News and a former reporter at the Los Angeles Times.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson.Also mentioned in this episode:Matt makes the case that unchecked AI may cause newsprint to outlive the hyperlinkAI scrapers are driving traffic away from traditional sites while increasing their operational costs.Learn more about coping with news fatigue.Support the show

What we really think of when we talk about the internet is really a series of companies that are dramatically changing their products in response to AI and AI writ large, which means lots of different things. But it's something that generally speaking has not been good for journalism anyway. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Matt Pierce. Matt is Director of Policy at Rebuild Local News and was formerly a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. One of the industries being hit by the AI hype in the past few years is obviously journalism and the media industry. And there's this concept being thrown around within the industry that I think is actually really important and could have some serious consequences that is worth discussing on the show, and that's this notion of Google

zero. At a point when Google's search engine will stop sending traffic to, you know, not just news websites, but websites around the internet, because they're so focused on serving them AI overviews and AI generated content that is designed to keep them on

the Google platform, looking at ads there, instead of sending them off to other websites where, you know, traditionally people would find their information, right? Google was acting as a search engine, as a directory, not as the place where you get the information itself. But with generative AI and with the changing business models at these companies, that is changing. And so I wanted to have Matt back on the show to discuss, you know, what this actually is, what it means, how this is happening, and what

the broader implications of this are. Are there ways that the media industry that journalists can try to combat this? And what is needed to continue to support news and media, which are so important and essential to our societies and to our understanding of the world around us. So with all that said, I think that this is a great conversation. I really enjoyed having Matt back on the show so we could dig into all this. If you enjoy the conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work, that goes into making tech won't save us every single week so we can keep having these critical,

in-depth conversations. You can join supporters like Dan in Hamilton, Zat, from Melbourne, Australia, Lucille, from Nice, in France, and Yeti in Seattle by going to patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Matt, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. So good to be here again, Paris. I love coming on your show. Thanks so much. It's always great to chat with you. You know, I'm always keeping up with your work and what you're writing about because, you know, obviously it's of interest to me as someone who is at least somewhat adjacent to the journalism world and certainly interested in like When journalism is affected, I think democracy is affected. So we need to be clear out on making sure that it is well funded and robust and these sorts of things. Now, obviously, the past few years when we've been talking about journalism, there's the whole story of layoffs and things like that. But I feel like that's all couched under this broader kind of discussion of like the effect that AI is having on journalism and, you know, on media more broadly. And so I just wanted to start with like a broad question before we dig into specifics that we want to talk about.

read in this conversation. What do you see with how these generative AI tools that we've started to see over the past few years are really affecting the practice of journalism, but also the business of journalism as well? Yeah, it's really remarkable what's going on because you're seeing the impacts both on the producer side in terms of how news companies are thinking about using AI tools to produce journalism or make it more efficient. And then on the consumer side, tons of consumers now are using AI to look for answers to questions that might previously they would have found in a reading a newspaper article or listening to a podcast or something. And then one of the really big stories that's happening here is the change in distribution,

which is that you have a growing disconnect between those news producers and news consuming audiences in the sense that increasingly AI-dominated platforms and increasingly this is Google, Still, and probably soon to be once the largest source of referral traffic on the internet, Google's increasingly using AI summaries of all sorts of content on the internet, and news publishers are noticing referral traffic plummeting. And so one of the lines that I have on this whole phenomenon is that hyperlinks, which were once the backbone of how journalism was disseminated on the internet, is now, like, you should think of it as a legacy media technology the same way that you think of newsprint and reading of journalism

an in print, except I think the hyperlink might actually be more endangered than newsprint at this point, and it's something that is at risk of going away sooner than newsprint is. And part of that is because of AI and the changes in how consumers are getting their information. That's really interesting to me, because last time we talked, we were talking about these like bills to try to get Google and meta to pay journalists, to pay news organizations money to try to produce more work, more high-quality work, things like that. We've seen that happen in Australia and Canada, and there was a push to try to do something similar down in California where you are. And so that's what we were discussing. And of course, one of the big kind of tech people

pushback to that is like, this is a link tax. And the link or the hyperlink, as you're saying, is so fundamental to the internet. And you're like, you know, risking, destroying that or, you know, make it something that that people do less or whatever as a result. There was this one big concern about what these bills were going to do to linking, which the bills were not explained. explicitly targeting anyway, more in a rhetorical way than actually like a policy way. But then we're actually seeing these companies like erode the quality of the link, basically try to keep people on their own platforms rather than linking them out. And I don't see that same degree of concern for the link from these same folks in this

moment with what is going on there. Well, what's funny is that I think the way that we talk about the internet and the way that we talk about journalism are kind of stuck in the problems of the 2010s and you kind of see it all over the place. And like, anytime someone uses the phrase clickbait, you're talking about. a phenomenon. Like, that was an artifact of the 2010s because if you go around talking to journalists and publishers in 2025, oh, for the days when people are actually clicking on anything, like, you know, if you just look at what exists on your phone, which is how most

people consume a lot of information now, just use Facebook almost as the canonical example here because, so you have this fight between news publishers and the tech industry, specifically the American tech industry in Canada. Canada wanted these American tech platforms to pay. Canadian news publishers for scraping their journalism. Facebook, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg said, no, fuck you. We don't think that journalism's worth that much to us. And so it blocked journalism from being posted on meta products in Canada. So I'm not Canadian and I'm not in Canada right now.

But my understanding is that if you try to post news stories on Facebook and other meta services in Canada, you'll get a blockage basically saying, like, sorry, the Canadian government with its burdensome regulations is preventing you from fully using. Facebook products. Let me just step in and confirm to you that that is exactly what happens. Amazing. When you try, yeah, because I have tried to do it. Yeah. What you end up having to do is like, if you're in Canada and you want to post something like that, you end up having to use a VPN to pretend you're not in Canada because then you can post it, but then nobody in Canada will

actually see it. It's just for like the non-Canadian people. Isn't this the spirit of the internet to like get around rules and regulations to do kind of infringing activity? No, so like this was very controversial, right? Because this huge company is like poking the busybody Canadian government in the eye for these burdensome regulations. And what's so funny is that like I'm sitting here in California, we don't have some sort of link bam on journalism and Facebook. But I pop open my like Facebook feed. And it is like the most disgusting, completely non-information AI generated slop like you couldn't believe. It's like you're not seeing journalism in California when you're popping open California,

the Facebook. What's happening here with AI and its relationship with the news publishing industry is that one of the other artifacts of the 2010s is that we used to think of platforms and publishers as these different entities. Like publishers of the marketplace, they're connecting the providers of information with the consumers of information. I think this is still kind of how we talk about the differences between these different participants in the marketplace. But really what's going on with generative AI in particular right now is that what we used to call the platforms, Google, meta products, they are taking on the characteristics of publishers. They are, in a way, generating their own content and then creating these sort of walled environments where they want users to stay on their services and they're behaving lefts like marketplaces and more as publishers that are generating their own content. It's just there's a kind of labor arbitrage happening with these new kinds of mega publishers, formerly known as the platforms, where unlike a traditional publisher, they're not paying, or at least not paying nearly as much to generate the content that you're seeing on their services. And so it's a really odd relationship because I think the way that we talk about what's happened to the Internet and what's happened to publishing and search and referral traffic all over these.

last few years alone has not caught up with the material conditions of how people are actually engaging with information online. So that's what makes these regulatory struggles really interesting is because the way that people talk about the regulatory struggles, like what happened in Canada is also a bit trapped in the past, but the internet is changing almost faster than regulators can keep up because a few years ago when that legislation was being created, people are like, I don't get what the big deal is. People are choosing to post new stories on Facebook. Why does Facebook have to pay for that? Hey, I don't get what the deal is with Google. Google sending you a mountain referral traffic. They're taking little snippets from your

stories and people are clicking on them. It's a fair exchange. Like now that relationship is much different. A lot of publishers are reporting that referral traffic from Google is plunging. And the more that they're adding AI generated modules to their services, the more that referral traffic is decreasing. And so what we really think of when we talk about the internet is really a series of companies that are dramatically changing their products in response to AI and AI writ large, which means lots of different things. But it's something that generally speaking has not been good for journalism anyway. That's fascinating because part of the debate or discussion in Canada is kind of like, should we get rid of this bill so that we can post news on

meta again and whatnot to like get this traffic back. It feels like the conversation and the way those platforms work has already moved on from that era when that discussion was relevant like two to three years ago because they're much more focused now on getting you to ask an AI a question and delivering that response like on the platform itself, on their little kind of chatbot service feature, whatever you want to call it, instead of pushing you out to some other kind of service. And you we're mentioning how, you know, especially a platform like Facebook is filled with all this generative AI content. And the company has been explicit in that, you know, in saying that it wants you to engage with chatbots and all this kind of stuff instead of real people. It's like

the platforms themselves have completely moved on from this notion that they are going to be providing information, this kind of source of information to just like, how can we maximize the engagement? How can we maximize the amount of time on platform, regardless of what that means, regardless of the type of information that people are then consuming at the end of the day. Well, and the consumer relationship is also changing, too, because if you look at some of the consumer studies about how people are using AI, one of the very top uses is for companionship. And so companionship is not one of the traditional relationships between writer and reader, which has kind of been the backbone of journalism or even, I don't know, the Enlightenment

for the last couple of hundred years, it's something more like a synthetic person who will chat with you and you can maybe like spitball ideas off of, which is not the relationship that people have with journalism or really any other kind of writing. I mean, there are certainly like versions of this in the form of parisocial relationship that people have with content creators. And usually this is more frequent on like video based platforms where there actually is interactivity between like a streamer, like Hassan Piker who he has like an extremely active chat that he might be reacting to in real time. That's actually something that like not to defame Hassan here, but like it's a little bit closer to the kind of behavior that a consumer is having with a generative AI chat agent, which is something that like journalism in general is just not very well oriented to adapt itself to because there's like one characteristic that tends to define journalism over other types of content creation. It's the need to be accurate. And it's hard to be accurate in a conversation because I love going on podcast. I also know that I'm much more in danger of bullshitting on a podcast than when I'm writing something.

Never on tech won't save us, though. Never on tech won't save it. You're only getting the highest quality stuff when I'm coming and talking to Paris. Also, Canadians, people of Canada, take it from me a Californian. If you get rid of that law, referral traffic is not going to be coming back to new sites from meta. Those days are over. It's like at least take advantage of the $100 million a year from Google for the next five years while you can have it and then figure out how to retool and whatnot. And, you know, talking about Hassan, at least he's a real dude and not, you know, a generative AI chatbot. That's something we can definitely say for him as a positive for engaging with him over, you know, chat GVT or something.

I think he's a dude. I haven't met him. I think he's human. Who knows? He could be, he could be totally AI generated. But, but no, I mean, that is the fundamental difference where you see journalists are trying to figure out how to react to this environment of, you know, synthetic AI agents and synthetic people even. And a lot of us are leaning into our humanity. It's humans who have consciences. It's humans who care whether, you know, in my case, I'm here in Los Angeles where secret police who are masked and, you know, not identifying themselves are kidnapping my neighbors off the streets. Like, that's something that I as a human journalist have a lot of feelings about. I think it's really important. But, you know, an AI agent is not going

to care the same way unless it's been prompted. too. So, like, you're seeing a lot of journalists reflect on what it means to bring our humanity to the work in an era where the technology, like all technology, has an element of dehumanization in it. I don't know, man, the Grock companions that Elon Musk just released, they might care about this, too. You know, you never know. Well, I mean, you know, that's really disturbing. I'm sorry. If you need to get sex from the Mecca Hitler AI agent, then, And I mean, I guess I can't stop you to each their own. But I would say at least go to only fans.

They pay their content creators like really good revenue sharing rates, better than almost every other creator platform. So pay your labor, folks. I was just surprised Elon Musk released his AI girlfriend for everybody else to date too. But anyway, this is not a pathway I want to go down in this conversation. What were we talking about again? I forget. So let's pivot back.

You mentioned how referral traffic. has been dropping from Google and, you know, not really coming from many of these other kind of chatbot platforms like Open AI or Anthropic or something like that. There is this concept that is floating around called Google Zero. Can you talk to me about what that is and what it would mean for the business model that so many journalistic outlets have been built on for the past couple of decades, I guess. So Google Zero is basically the catchphrase, and I may be misattributing this, but I think it came from Nealai Patel, who's the editor-in-chief of the verge. But it's this concept of the day that referral traffic from Google ends. So for people who are not

in the know, in the journalism industry, Google has for quite a long time been the number one source of referral traffic. And when we say referral traffic, we're talking about human beings who are clicking through to news websites. And so news websites have data analytics tools that tell where their audiences are coming from. And so Google is reliably the largest outside source of traffic. I run a non-monetized substack. And, you know, when I look at the analytics for my substack, Google, I think, is the largest third-party source of referral traffic for me, and that's in 2025. So for people who are thinking about, you know, how do you acquire new readers and grow the audience that you have, Google has long been seen as, you know, one of the top

portals to do that. And back when I was a Los Angeles Times reporter, I was hired in 2012, Well, basically to harvest Google search traffic by writing these kind of shoddily put together aggregated imitations of associated press stories that we would publish on our site, and they would draw tens and tens and thousands of readers. And to be honest, what's funny about when you talk to people in the journalism industry about their relationship with referral traffic is that it's really complex because a lot of it's like pretty low quality traffic. It's people who are visiting a website once hoping to get usually.

free information rather than high-quality readers who are going to come in and maybe buy a subscription and continue to be a loyal reader of the journalism that you're producing. That was not the relationship that a lot of news sites had with Google's search traffic throughout their history. But there was a kind of like from a business perspective, a volume logic to it, which is that like, okay, if you attract 100,000 readers to a story, like maybe a handful of them would purchase subscriptions and become returning customers, and you would have a direct relationship with them. That's one way in which you can kind of justify being on the marketplace of the open web and being findable on search. The other piece that is a big deal is you could

harvest dollars from those readers through digital advertising and selling ads next to the news stories that you're writing. One of the realities, though, is that Google is also an advertising monopoly on top of being a search monopoly. And I don't sling around the word monopoly in a descriptive sense. Federal courts in the United States recently have found that Google has unlawfully monopolized pieces of the general search and digital advertising marketplaces and charge some participants in those marketplaces higher than market rates if they have been more competitive marketplaces. And so, you know, a lot of news companies, instead of being able to harvest the kind of dollars from that traffic that they could have in a more competitive

marketplace. We're seeing a lot of those revenues go to Google instead. And so it's not like a simple subjects like describing the ways in which Google dominates the marketplace because there are, you know, there is some give and take in there. There was this period where, okay, if you subjected yourself to Google's monopoly, you would in exchange get some audience acquisition. But the deal, I think a lot of publishers have felt the deal has gotten worse. and worse over time. And so that has caused the news industry, I think, to get more belligerent toward Google, or at least parts of the news industry, to get more belligerent toward Google as a source of traffic. And so Google Zero, you know, hypothetically, if Google just

exits from referring any traffic at all to news outlets, whether that's next year or two years from now, or three years from now. So if a lot of news outlets have built their business models around acquiring audiences from Google, Google Zero requires that they have to think about, like, how are we getting journalism to people if we can't get it to them through Google? And so Nicholas Thompson, he's chief executive at the Atlantic, told his staff at a company-wide meeting earlier this year that they should assume that traffic from Google should drop toward zero and that the company needs to evolve its business model.

But that naturally leads a lot of people to say, evolve our business model toward what? Like, I have a Gmail account. Google is in my inbox. It sorts my newsletters, for example, into the primary tab, the promotions tab, the social tab. It's actually like a really big deal if Google, in its algorithm,

sorts a newsletter into the primary tab versus the promotions tab. And so even if you try to extricate yourself from a Google search market, you're still participating in the versions of the internet that Google has built for all of us. It's so hard to escape, right? Like even when you try to take yourself away from it,

there are so many ways that Google is still so important to how we use the web, how it shapes our experience of it, what we interact with. And of course, you know, you were talking about how even when you started in journalism or at the LA Times specifically, and so many other journalists have had this experience, too, of writing these stories that are kind of designed to get this traffic, which, you know, is a whole industry called search engine optimization, which was so key and in such a big focus for such a long time. I want to talk about the implications of this Google Zero and the dropping

traffic and what that is going to mean. But I wonder, like, should we have seen this coming. And were news organizations preparing for this at all? Because, you know, I feel like a number of years ago, we already saw Google move forward with like the featured snippets where even before generative AI, it would kind of like pick a piece from a news website and kind of append it to the top of the results. And so you could click through to the article, but the answer was often there already if you didn't want to. You know, we already had these efforts by like Google and Apple to control the relationship through like Google News and Apple News. I wonder how you see the way that these companies have been evolving for a while and whether it felt kind of inevitable that they would eventually try to capture even more of this relationship and even more of this traffic for themselves.

This is one of the great, I mean, it borders on a theological debate inside of the journalism industry, which is how much of the journalism industry's failure to be a more vital presence on the internet is its own fault versus the fault of platforms versus the fault of the regular. I think my own answer to cheat a little bit on all of this is that, yes, like all of it is true. Everyone sort of failed in their own particular way. There were a lot of news companies that over-indexed on how much they could rely on third-party technology platforms as their method of distribution. They're like, hey, this is great. We can access all these great new audiences that, like, you know, if you're the Los Angeles Times, you don't have to distribute to your own audience base in Southern California anymore. suddenly you've got not just the rest of the U.S., but this whole world marketplace that can come and read your digital journalism.

And Google and Facebook would be some of the great tools for connecting you with those audiences. So, you know, if there was some sort of logic to it, but, you know, we can also see in retrospect that giving away your distribution to third-party platforms that didn't really care about your fate was actually kind of a bad bargain. On the other hand, these companies, and like Google's an unlawful monopoly, it has an illegal business model. Meadows currently on trial for allegations of having monopolized the social media markets, and that's by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. We don't know how that case is going to come out. But there is this corporate element with that, like, when you have monopolistic marketplaces, by definition, that means that you don't really have viable alternatives. And so it's one thing to go to the news industry and say, hey, you were really stupid thinking that journalism could be free and that you could make money

from it at scale. But at the same time, you know, they're also competing in these marketplaces where by definition there weren't really better actors around that they could have patronized. I mean, this is one of the challenges of the news industry is like, well, maybe we need to like boost our bargaining power with these monopolies by forming, you know, consortiums to negotiate over the value of journalism. Like, that's underlying a lot of the legislation that I was talking about. The problem is that Google, possibly meta, are still monopolies. And, like, one of the definition of a monopoly is that they can degrade their own product without worrying about losing their consumer base. So there is, like, a potential contradiction in a bargaining

approach with a monopoly. But, you know, this is also the fault of regulators for not noticing sooner that these platforms really were devouring the entire marketplace and stifling innovation. So part of it is on regulators too. But I think this is a subject that provokes some of the most heated debates inside the news industry because somebody was to blame for everything being so bad and who is it? Because the answer to these questions tells you, like, whose fault it was. But I do want to say that there's something really interesting happening in the news space that's actually coming from the tech side of the industry. It's like a, it's a weird piece of maybe good news. I don't know. But Cloudflare,

which is one of the toll boosts of the internet, it's internet gateway that essentially protects websites from, for example, distributed denial of service attacks. It's the service that basically tries to keep websites online. It has noticed that AI has started to take over the open web. And Matthew Prince, who's the CEO of Cloudflare, recently released some statistics about the changing composition of audiences over the open web. And so 10 years ago, he says Google crawled two pages for every visitor. It's sent to a publisher. Six months ago, that ratio was six to one bots crawling to human visitors. And now, for Google, it's 18 to one ratio of bots to humans.

You know, for Open AI now, the bot to human visit ratio is 1,500 to 1. And for Anthropic, it's 60,000 bot visits to one human visit. And so one of the bizarre dynamics that's now happening is that it's no longer humans that news outlets are producing journalism for. your most dedicated reader on the internet is a machine. Like machines, machines, like another business is the closest reader of your work. And I do think that is something that is a fundamental change

in the nature of the economic plumbing of just being online. Well, and you're certainly not getting those bots to like buy a subscription, right? Even if there was this question of like, are these readers that you're getting through search engine optimization, really going to subscribe, really going to be high quality, who are going to subscribe, who are going to come back, who are looking for that in-depth journalism and not just like the quick piece. A bot is not subscribing. A bot, I would assume, is not looking at digital ads and making any money that way, but it is kind of using bandwidth of scraping

the website to try to get these articles and stuff, right? That's so interesting because it's different from the traditional copyright fight that is like the central and existential question of all this AI training, which is that like, aren't these companies that are just taking content for free and just using them for their own economic benefit. Does that seem like fair use? Maybe not. One of the really interesting battlegrounds over this question, which is not over copyright, but over access, is Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is one of the great hyperlink-based traditional web-based platforms on the internet. The basic premise of Wikipedia is that you have a bunch of human beings coming to a web page and jointly editing articles that cover the breadth of human experience. and knowledge. But what Wikimedia has noticed, that's the parent organization for Wikipedia, is that bot traffic has skyrocketed.

Like, large language models are trawling Wikipedia like crazy to train their models on what Wikipedia editors are generating. And so scraping, they said, has become so prominent that their outgoing bandwidth has increased by 50% in 2024. And they said a recent analysis showed that at least 65% of our most, most expensive requests, and these are the ones they can't serve from caching servers in which are served from the main databases instead, are performed by bots. So we're actually talking about crawlers not just being expensive for the AI companies that are operating

them, which need to consume extraordinary amounts of energy and water in order to power these models. They're imposing costs on the sites that they are crawling. And that's something that's like a much weirder element of the debate that's like weirder than copyright because it does get to this question of access and like what does it mean to be on the internet to have open access and throwing your gates open to the world and trying to share knowledge with humans and, you know, you're being punished by machines instead for trying to do something kind of idealistic. And so for Wikipedia, the other reason that this is dangerous is that like, yes, it's imposing costs that are generated by other companies, machines. But if we're talking about

a world in which those human beings, instead of going to Wikipedia, they're going to chat to BT to look for the equivalent of a Wikipedia article. That means that that human being is not themselves going to Wikipedia and looking at that article, but also contributing to that article. It's a volunteer-based system for generating knowledge rather than the more professional-based system for generating knowledge, which is what the journalism industry is. But it has the exact same problem, which is that without the ability to have the labor of knowledge production somewhere in the process, you just end up with these bots that become snakes eating their own tail because they're, they've already ingested the human generated content on the

internet. They're undermining the sort of ability for humans to keep generating that content. And so eventually there's going to be this knowledge collapse that happens because people aren't creating original high quality information anymore because they can't pay for it. Well, and you're also not seeing like the Wikipedia request for donations or anything like that, and you're probably like paying a subscription fee to chat GBT or to Anthropic or something like that to access this service and to give it money for it to go take this content off of someone else and, you know, kind of mix it up and kind of position it to you in a different way, rephrase it and, you know, give you access to it.

And in short, it might say that it originally comes from this link if you want to go check it out for more. But we know, as you were saying, that a lot of people are not clicking through to those links. And, you know, we have a growing number of evidence that that's not just for Wikipedia and not just for news publishers, but even just for, like, websites more broadly, you know, as you're saying about the broader open web that the Cloudflare CEO was talking about. And you were kind of picking up on one of the other points that I wanted to present to you. but, you know, it really feels short-sighted in a sense, right?

Because if you are kind of decimating the business model of, say, news publishers or any of these other websites that are creating the content that the AI tools need in order to update and train their models, then at some point, like, we can already quibble with the quality of what is coming out of these models anyway, but like it has to lead to a point where this declines even further, right? because you're not getting new content, you're not getting high quality content. You know, maybe it's poorly written stuff.

Or as you're saying, maybe it's even just more AI generated stuff that's being fed back into the bots. And it's like, I don't know, it sounds like a mess. Oh, it is a huge mess. And ironically, AI is here because AI is a kind of solution

to the biggest problem that we face cognitively, which is that there's too much fucking information. Like, there's, there's too much information now out there for humans to sort of sensibly consume and to be able to sort through in an intelligent way. And I mean, this is this is kind of always been true to a degree since the day of like mechanical reproduction. You know, people have never been able to read everything. But there are all sorts of these anecdotal evidence points that you're just overwhelmed by information and consumers report, you know, in the journalism world, that

it's becoming increasingly hard for them to tell like what is real news and what is quote unquote fake news or lower quality stuff. So AI is a new thing that can actually theoretically read everything and could theoretically try to solve that cognitive problem of finding you the most relevant information that you actually want. And this was the business proposition that made Google monopoly in the first place is that it's crawlers for the highest quality crawlers in search, and it would find you the highest quality search results

as it scraped the entire open web. So now generative AI just takes a step further and actually generates those answers themselves rather than just generating hyperlinks to other people generating that information. So publishers are like, they're not stupid. They know that in order to have high quality knowledge, you have to pay for it.

They're the ones to stop with the bill. And so they're like, you know, we would love to strike deals with these AI developers to get fairly compensated for all this crawling that's happening because obviously there's economic activity happening here. Seems like we should probably get paid for it because we're paying for it. But one of the challenges that publishers have when dealing with AI companies is that they don't feel like they have much bargaining power with these AI developers.

First, because there's not like a great marketplace that's been established, a lot of the deals that have been struck between news companies and AI developers. The terms are pretty secret. And so you don't know precisely like what's being negotiated over and what's been agreed to and the value of it. The other reason is that like when you're a publisher and your negotiating with an AI company, like theoretically at any point, the AI company, which is probably maintaining a position of copyright that like, well, this is actually all fair use

anyway, and so we can just scrape your stuff if we want to, like, they can always walk away from the bargaining table with a publisher in a way that a publisher can't really walk away from the bargaining table with AI because, you know, a lot of AI crawlers will kind of ignore robots TXT commands to, you know, not crawl their stuff or at least not elicitly access it without permission. This is part of what Cloudflare is trying to do on behalf of publishers now. It represents something like 20% of the websites on the internet, which is kind of a crazy stat out its own. But Cloudflare is like, we as the sort of anti-DDOS service are going to start to add AI crawlers into the category of intrusive visitors that could damage websites and say that

like we're going to presumptively block those AI crawlers unless they have agreements in place with those publishers to pay for their work. And so what But Cloudflare is trying to do is to introduce friction into AI crawling so that there's more incentive for AI generating companies to negotiate with publishers over the value of their content. One of the problems is that we don't actually know if this is going to really work yet. And the other thing is that, like, again, we don't actually know the true economic value of journalism to AI companies, partially because AI companies may have already crawled most

of the content that's been online anyway. And so the newest stuff might be lower values than the libraries that have already been consumed. And so these are a lot of the kind of bizarre mechanical problems that kind of make this such a daunting problem for the news industry to deal with. And so this is kind of different for smaller publishers, though, and independent publishers and a lot of people who are my peers in the industry who are going independent, like you're probably not generating enough journalism or enough content for your stuff to actually be all that valuable to. AI. So unless you're part of some sort of like collective bargaining regime where you're just getting your piece for being crawled, then, you know, larger companies are essentially giving you the leverage to get better terms from an AI developer. You're kind of just stuck thinking about what is your relationship with going direct to consumer? And like, what does even going

direct to consumer mean if you're on the internet when you're being intermediated by all these different services? There's a lot of things to be considering there, right? And a lot of reasons to see that the leverage that these publishers have is limited, both when you think of news publishers, but also book publishers and you imagine, you know, movie studios and I don't know, anyone else whose content is really being gobbled up by these things. There's two other pieces of this that I wanted to present to you to kind of see how you feel about that, right? You know, you talk about how these companies have limited leverage. You know, obviously the AI companies have trained on their work anyway, likely. And they're also very powerful. They have a lot of money behind them.

They have a lot of influence and momentum behind them as well. You have to imagine that maybe if governments weren't trying to, like, change legislation or stop regulatory efforts to help the AI companies and instead were more focused on, you know, maybe passing legislation that was kind of bolstering the position of news publishers, that that would help to a certain degree or trying to set some sort of framework that would at least give them some degree of compensation, if not saying you can't just train on all this. And, of course, you know, one of the recent developments that we see that is, somewhat related to that is, you know, we have a number of these cases working their way

through the courts in the United States. I would imagine in other countries as well. I know some Canadian publishers have been suing some of these AI companies as well. And of course, you know, there have been some recent decisions that have basically seemed like, you know, for the most part, wins on the part of the AI companies saying that they can't do piracy, but their training on this work could potentially be considered fair use. You know, there's obviously some caveats there. It's more complex than my very, very short kind of framing there. I wonder what you make of those recent decisions and kind of the lack of support that government has given to news publishers during this whole transition, this whole change, this whole moment of AI hype.

Well, something that I could say in the United States, at least, is that nothing's really going to be over on this question, probably until the U.S. Supreme Court weighs in on the underlying copyright question of whether the basic premise of AI crawling and training is fair use or not. Lower courts are going to rule how they're going to rule, but this is all going to get appealed by either side, probably up to the Supreme Court. And I would have to imagine, given the stakes, the Supreme Court would take it up. And with this Supreme Court, I honestly don't know how that would go.

I mean, there are really interesting crosswinds on the subject of copyright and AI training, because on one hand, you do have the American tech industry that is lobbying very aggressively to try to ward off this existential threat that is posed to their business model if AI training can't be considered, very suddenly they have to, like, they have another expense to add on top of their already kind of unprofitable technology right now. But Congress in the large budget and tax bill that President Trump recently pushed through and signed into law, they were briefly considering a state-level moratorium on local regulations of AI companies. Because really, in the United States because it's a federalized country. There's a lot of activity at the state level

on regulatory questions. You have a lot of states that are considering how to regulate AI and how to negotiate some of these relationships. And so the AI industry had briefly convinced some lawmakers to try to insert a federal ban on state level legislation that would regulate AI companies. So interestingly, this caused a lot of blowback and not just from the traditional news industry, but I think some conservative media also cares about. copyright, and there's also a populist wing inside of the Trump movement that is much more skeptical of tech. And so that clause was taken out of that law that was passed. And so, you know, you do see these pushes and pulls, even inside of the MAGA movement, about what exactly

their relationship is with the tech industry, because it's highly conflicted, because you turn around and you look at Canada, for example, Canada, of course, tried to pass a digital services tax on American and tech companies and the Trump administration threatened Canada with additional tariffs if Canada didn't drop the tax, which Prime Minister Mark Carney did, which I know has caused some consternation to our friends in the North. Oh, yeah. I'm very annoyed. I'm very mad.

Paris I've seen. I mean, and so there's a bizarre like trade war element in here too, which is that domestically, you know, the Trump administration kind of has a conflicted relationship with the tech platforms because it is his Justice Department and his federal trade community. that are currently prosecuting Google and Meta on what seemed to be pretty valid antitrust claims. And so there is this regulatory effort that's happening in the U.S. that is kind of consistent with what the Biden administration was doing before Trump came back into office. But when the threat turns external, so to speak, we're talking about other nations trying to regulate these

same companies, suddenly this is a threat to American dominance on the global stage. And China sort of cited as an example of, like, well, if we regulate these American companies, companies, maybe China will become the preeminent supplier of these tech services around the world. You know, there's also that trade element of like, oh, Canada's just trying to extract wealth from American companies and like, you know, why doesn't Canada come up with its own version of Google, you know, if you want to like tax American tech companies. But I think one of the fundamental principles to think about here, and I say this as a proud but brotherly American, which is that trade wars are class wars in the sense that like our news

industry is very closely intertwined with Canada. Like most American newsprint comes from Canada. And so the Trump administration has repeatedly threatened tariffs that would drive up the cost of doing journalism in the United States because Canada is a preeminent supplier of newsprint. And so the war that we're kind of waging on Canada is something that hurts us here at home. And the other thing is that it's like not really a fair fight for Canada because, you know, America is like a net importer of products, but we export a ton of services, like my substack,

like 15% of the subscribers are not from the U.S. Like, that is economic value that I am theoretically generating that is not going to get tariffed in a trade war over the value of physical goods. And so when other countries are talking about versions of trying to capture in the form of tax value from the American production of intellectual property, this is when the Trump administration gets really defensive. the Trump administration seems less defensive about trade wars over physical goods. And so it's very interesting to notice that dichotomy in how the United States is positioning itself with

the rest of the world in terms of how the tech industry is regulated. There was a moment where the European Union, I think, was talking about potential like tariffing services, which would have hit, like, tech companies rather than just goods. And I was like, do it. Like, let's go for it. Like, you know, scorched earth. Like, you know, I really want to see that. And have a ton of allies, you know, join in as well and do the same thing. Well, and this is the thing, too. It's like these are American companies, yes, but like these are companies that are also not paying their fair and share of taxes in the United States either.

And like part of why the United States is exporting so many services or intellectual property is kind of as a tax evasion measure too. And so the way that other countries are trying to figure out ways to tax and capture economic value from these American companies is also a struggle for us. locally. And it's something that's a big challenge for U.S. States because part of what I'm doing when I'm arguing for economic subsidies for local newsrooms is to say that we should probably capture some of the value being generated by these tech platforms that have created advertising monopolies. And it's a huge fight. And so other countries are leading the way and showing how it

can be done. But for Americans, like we are kind of trailing the world. And it's not as if we're gigantically benefiting from having Google exploit us versus a company that has a different nationality at the top. So, like, this is what I mean when I say that the trade wars are kind of class wars in the sense that, like, the average American journalist out there is not benefited from launching trade wars with other countries that are trying to pursue the same kind of economic regulations in, you know, this kind of marketplace that we are. Yeah. And, you know, the flip side of that is when I argue for more like digital sovereignty, say in Canada or Europe or something like that, it's like, let's do our own thing, but let's not just replicate the problems

of these existing companies that we're dependent on now. Let's not just make our own versions of that. Let's actually think about something very different that's not so exploitative that actually has greater public benefit. I don't think a lot of governments are super interested in that idea. But we'll see. I wanted to pivot, you know, as we start to end off our conversation, to think about where things go from here. And there's one thing that I want to address specifically. And then we'll talk about kind of bigger picture, right? And that is when we hear about the difficulties that traditional media is facing, Often one of the responses we can hear is that, oh, you know, there's so many more creators and independent journalists who are just going their own way in the creator economy or the subscription economy or whatever you want to call it. What do you make of that argument that this is kind of, you know, a reasonable path to address some of these issues of, you know, lack of coverage, you know, the problem with some of the coverage in traditional media organizations, obviously the news deserts that we've seen kind of continue to grow, you know, obviously you're focused on local news, which is a big problem, not just in the United States, but in many

parts of the world. So what do you make of that argument that that is kind of one of our paths out of this? A lot of the most interesting innovation in the news space right now is happening in what we think of as the creator space. And when I say creator, I'm thinking in my head of people who are usually platform-based or are independent and they're existing outside of a traditional news organization or company. A lot of times we're just talking about a more kind of casual sensibility, usually video-based, but maybe also newsletter-based. So you're seeing a ton of journalists, kind of like myself, you know, I took a buyout from the LA Times a year ago. You know, I couldn't stay there anymore under a kind of crazy billionaire and deteriorating conditions.

You see a lot of people like me from my generation, I'm a millennial, saying that like we're kind of tired of waiting for the traditional news industry to innovate its way out of this. Like, why don't we just hang out the shingle and do it ourselves? And so you do see a lot of like interesting voices trying to find niches in the creator economy. The thing is, there are niches out there to be had, but I have to like heavily asterisk some of this. So one of the statistics that I recently came across is a stat from U.S. trade authorities. It's from the national income and product accounts that describes basically economic activity in the United States. And one of the stats in there for U.S. consumer spending on newspapers and periodicals, which is a very

broad category that can capture all sorts of stuff. And so this is not like a perfect stand-in for all journalism economic activity. But one of the things that that stat said is that U.S. consumers are now spending an equal percentage of their household income on subscriptions now as they were in 2007. And there had been a huge dip in spending on newspapers and periodicals. And the U.S. from 2007 down to rock bottom in 2015. And so now we're back to U.S. consumers spending an equal share of their income on newspapers, period, which is actually really impressive because the economy has actually gotten bigger since 2007, which means that, like, in terms of just raw dollars, you know, the American consumer is now spending more on journalism than they

were in the past, which is a kind of bizarre thing to think about. But when you look around at what's going on in the subscription side of the economy, What you see are a lot of people who've gotten a lot, a lot smarter at figuring out how to extract direct dollars out of those direct consumer relationships that a lot of us have been working on. And so for traditional newspapers, this looks like dynamic pricing that kind of picks up data off of customers

and then decides how much they can bear in terms of subscription pricing before they cancel, which means that a lot of American local newspaper subscribers are paying much different rates for the, their local journalism. A lot of local people, even for just like a kind of increasingly hollowed out hedge fund newspaper, paying more than $1,000 a year for a print subscription, which is a lot of money. If you look at the creator side of the space, you see people have gotten really smart about having membership tiers. You know, you can have lower contributors that get access to fewer

services, and then you've got your bigger spenders who are willing to give more money for the kind of work that you're doing. You've got the tip economy. You see all these structures that have kind of emerged all around us in all these different spaces that are creating ways for us to get more money out of the people who are our biggest bands. I think this is reflective of what's happening to the economy in general, which is that consumer spending is reorienting itself around the super spenders in almost every economic category that you think of. And so you see this when you fly in a plane, you know, there's all sorts of different tiered seats now. It's not just like first class and everybody else. They're like layers and more dynamic pricing that are integrated. And so

something that the news industry and creator economy has mirrored from the rest of the U.S. economy is how to get better at extracting money from consumers. The problem is the fundamental existential problem for somebody like me who cares a lot about local journalism in particular is that the dollars that you are spending to obtain journalism now are obtaining a lot less journalism than you were in 2007. Like when you were buying a newspaper subscription today, you're paying for a lot less journalism than you were in 2007. And one of the fundamental issues on the creator side of the economy and something that is inherently, I think, a limiting factor is that you're not going to get the same kind of division of labor that you do in a traditional newsroom that is going to allow you to produce a ton of ambitious stuff. Like, you are a small business person.

You have outsourced some of the back end of your business to, you know, TikTok or substack or whatever platform you're on. They've done a good job of essentially automating the business side of being a creator on the internet. They've made all that stuff easy. You don't have to hire a business manager necessarily to make money from being online. But you are the star. And if you get sick, you're not producing, you know, any content anymore. You're not making money. And so most small businesses, there's a ton of them.

They're also, like, not super efficient economic drivers. They don't create a ton of jobs relative to larger companies. And so the other thing is that, like, you have to, as a lot of business, the result, charge more money to your consumers in order to survive. So the kind of like the balance that the creator economy has to walk here is, are these economies like the United States, like Canada, now wealthy enough that the individual kind of like super consumer, if you can just get a handful of them, can they sustain someone who's creating the kind of work that they like at a level that is durable? Or are we all going to be headed back

toward a rebundling where people are going to look around and say, I'm subscribed to so many freaking different substacks and patrons that, like, this is taking a huge chunk out of my budgets and people have got to go. At some point, somebody might look around and say, actually, we can get a better bargain for all these consumers if we roll all these people back up into traditional looking companies or consumer bundles. That's one of the challenges that's in the creative space, which is that you don't have the same kind of productive power that you do when you're in a big company. And I know we all kind of like don't like big companies,

but they are sort of marvels of production. And so this is the sort of awkward dance that I feel like I'm watching in the creator space. As you were talking about that, what immediately came to mind was like the video streaming services, right, and how they were going to change everything. And now there's this discussion about how they basically like became cable again to a certain degree, you know, like rolled these things back up, became these small number of big services that changed.

charge an increasing amount of money to access them. It's like promise change, but it didn't actually change a whole lot. And I'm very skeptical that there's enough people to continue paying all these subscriptions for all these individual creators to do these sorts of things. You know, like I obviously subscribe to some small creator things, some like worker owned publications. But when I think about like traditional media, like the ones that I subscribe to are like the Financial Times and Bloomberg, you know, very well-resourced publications that provide really high-quality journalism. It's like it feels like you need this kind of high-quality reporting to encourage people to subscribe, but getting that high-quality reporting also requires the resources that those

subscribers would provide. And it's like so it feels like it's this kind of loop, right? Like if the quality isn't there, you're going to have a hard time attracting subscribers, which is then going to make it hard for you to have the resources to provide the high-quality in the first place. I love that you brought up FT and Bloomberg because something that is also reflective of the super spender economies that we now live in, which is now reflective of the tax bill that Donald Trump just passed into law, is that spending power, we have spent this conversation talking about consumers and relationships with consumers and AI companies, but a lot of spending

power is increasingly being shifted to companies. And so a lot of purchasers of subscriptions to a place like Bloomberg or F.T. are, you know, group subscriptions to corporations that can afford to spend a lot more on premium journalism production than, like, your individual consumer has. And, like, you look at, like, the U.S. tax code now, or, like, the law they just passed, you know, it's gigantic tax cuts for corporations. It, you know, is getting rid of some of the welfare net for poorer people. It's like a huge wealth transfer from poorer people in the United States to companies and also the people who own those companies. And so, like, when you look around at what's doing pretty well in the journalism world when almost everybody is struggling, it's premium upmarket business brands that are

generally better positioned because their customer base is in the part of the economy that's getting tax advantages. And so we don't normally think of businesses or corporations themselves as consumers that shape the way that journalists are producing information. But, like, I also have a print-ft subscription because it's a great product. And I also, I will just say that I'm borrowing somebody else's Bloomberg subscription because subscriptions for these places can be pretty pricey, but they have the money to hire incredibly talented journalists who are producing really, really good business reporting.

And so it's hard not to read them because you're just not going to get that quality of work elsewhere in the economy. And so that also becomes a fundamental, like, democratic fairness issue, which is that, of course, we are trapping a lot of our very best and highest quality journalism behind these paywalls because purchasing power has been relocated from consumers to companies. It's a serious problem, right? And I wanted to ask you about one other kind of aspect of this before I let you go, which is that you wrote this piece recently where you kind of said that newsprint might outlive the hyperlink, you know, going back to what we were talking about

at the beginning of this conversation. I kind of have like two pieces of this question. The first is that do you think like a return to print or a reemphasis of print is part of journalism, response to this? And just more broadly, how do you think the media industry needs to pivot if we are really headed toward this version of like Google Zero, where the referral traffic is seriously declining? And, you know, this kind of search engine optimization or trying to get this search traffic is not going to be, or even the social media traffic is not going to be nearly as effective as it was in the past. Like, what is the real response to try to make sure that journalism remains something that can be produced in a reality?

robust and high quality fashion because we know that's so important for not just people's understanding of what's going on in society, but I would argue the maintenance of equality democracy, which, you know, in our countries is obviously something that we feel is very important, right? You know, I am a fan, of course, of structural solutions and even in my current job, you know, I spend a lot of time thinking about tax code and the way that, you know, tax codes and other government programs can create incentives for having, you know, more vibrant local newsrooms. So period. I'm an advocate for structural change. I'm an advocate for unions. They used to be a union president and the power of journalists. But I do also think that there is like fundamentally a responsibility by consumers in here to want better for themselves because I can't make people want something that they don't want. And I think what we're seeing in the AI era, which has been obvious for a while now, but that like in the era of information overproduction where a lot of the economic development that's happening on the internet is figuring out

increasingly sophisticated ways for companies to scrape every millimeter and millisecond of attention that we've got. This is sort of damaging to our attention spans. It's becoming damaging to our ability to write, which is what's happening with generative AI right now. People are engaging in a lot of cognitive offloading by letting generative AI summaries do their critical thinking for them. And so part of what I'm thinking about, like, having a future for Newsprint is that it is a technology that is much less hostile to human cognition and learning than the technology that we have right now. Just go talk to a university professor you know about what's going on with their students and be alarmed. That said, you know, it's like,

it's hard to make an argument that Newsprint is going to be the future of media because I know that I'm a nerd, you know, with my print FT subscription and London Review of book subscription and, you know, watching the mail for the latest print edition to show up. I would love a print Ft subscription. I don't think I can get it in the region I'm in, but that sounds wonderful. No, it's, it's so good. I really enjoy reading it. It's, and it's just like there is something to be said that, like, what we also hear from consumers is that they're exhausted about all the information that they're getting like news fatigue is a subject that we talk about all the time and you know if you're on the internet you're being bombarded with information all the time so why wouldn't

you be tired with a newspaper at least you can subject yourself to torture for 30 minutes in the morning i don't mean to be atavistic about this stuff i also think that like there are a lot of economic limitations on re-exploring print as a medium for for journalism and for learning because You know, on my end, they're trying to tariff the source of the newsprint in the United States. And there's only so much productivity that you can ring out of, like, shipping print around to people's houses delivered by people in cars that are burning gas or whatever. It's much easier to have higher efficiency delivery on the internet. It's just that, like, it's also hard to make the case that if we're being bombarded by information, like, one of the solutions that problem is to have less of it. Like, I don't think that's a viable solution either, and I don't think anyone likes the idea of that.

So I think what I'm saying is that we kind of do need to have a consumer movement that affirmatively wants and asks for and consumes like better quality stuff than people are getting served now because you have to have some self respect here. And I can't I can't make you have self respect for yourself. You're still scrolling on the Facebook feed with all the like bizarre AI generated slot. Like if that's what you want like Godspeed to you, but I can't make you love yourself. And so that's my request. It's like a whole other conversation, but I've been doing so much lately that they try to like reduce my screen time, block my apps, like spend less time on social media. Like, I'm totally down this pathway.

And I'm sure we'll be talking about it more on the podcast in the future. But Matt, it was fantastic to talk to you to get your insight on all of this. I think it's such an important topic that we're going to keep watching. And I'm sure you'll be back on the show to talk more about it in the future. Thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. Paris, it was a real treasure. Matt Pierce is Director of Policy at Rebuild Local News and used to be a reporter at the Los Angeles Times.

Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Houston. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to Patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.