By Matt Wolfbridge
I have worked in and/or adjacent to the journalism industry for 15 years now. From this front row seat, I observed countless dubious initiatives foisted by tech platforms onto publishers. Remember back in 2016 when Facebook promised live streams were the future of the platform, providing financial incentives for news organizations to broadcast streams only to rugpull everyone a year later? Anyone else remember Facebook Instant articles? What about Facebook Watch pages? Don't forget the time they inflated video metrics by up to 900%.
Similar stories of Big Tech's wanton disregard and at times outright hostility towards the news industry litter the last decade. But the story doesn't start there.
The story starts with You Want What We've Got: Big Tech vs. Big Journalism by Jason Whittaker.
The book, released in May 2026, covers the history of how we got to now: a moment where Big Tech has essentially dismembered the journalism industry. Starting with the advent of the desktop computer and the popularization of the internet, You Want What We've Got covers the now decades-long interplay between major institutional players in news like The New York Times, The Washington Post, et cetera (the titular Big Journalism) and a tech industry that went from embryonic to hegemonic over the last 30 years.
What I appreciate most is that Whittaker never lets Big Journalism off the hook (in fact my first question for him is about this), and he discusses what the news industry has gotten wrong and continues to get wrong. While the tech industry is a genuine and obvious villain, establishment media institutions will not be earning sainthood anytime soon.
Whittaker has been writing about digital technology's relationship to journalism for some time now. Spurred by, in his words, "the eyewatering profits of Big Tech companies" he published Tech Giants, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Journalism in 2017.
Our conversation is below and has been lightly edited for clarity.
Typebar Magazine: Early on in the book you talk about the formation of the Fourth Estate but how the romanticism of a lone journalist taking on The Man stopped being an accurate depiction of journalism very quickly into the history of the industry. Established (that is, moneyed) entities like political parties, aristocratic interests, etc all realized the power of the press. The press would, of course, realize its own power and become its own force with its own interests.
I think it's an interesting choice to begin a book about how Big Tech rug pulled Big Journalism (thereby putting democracy at risk) with why we shouldn't necessarily romanticize the journalism industry.
Why was it important for you to do that?
Jason Whittaker: I’ve been teaching journalism history for two decades now, and the transformation of journalism from the lone editor such as Daniel Defoe or William Cobbett into mass media over the course of the twentieth century has long been well documented, and in the early years of my teaching corporate behemoths were media companies such as Time Warner and BMG. When I was working as a journalist, there were fewer and fewer outlets for independent journalism and while, in retrospect, journalism was going through a kind of golden age – at least in terms of the financial rewards – it was also clear that the transformations of the 1980s and 1990s had transformed it into a system of leverage for better profit margins.
The saddest, most tragic example of this is in local journalism, and here I will romanticise for a moment. Throughout the late nineteenth and earlier parts of the twentieth century, local journalism was something thoroughly embedded in the town or region where it was located. The national media didn’t care much about whether the streets were kept clean, whether students were learning in school or if the hospital was looking after patients, but this was the focal point for local democracy for all its flaws and sometimes haphazard nature. The collapse of local journalism, which as the Cairncross Review pointed out in 2019 saw a 25 percent decline in journalists and a nearly 70 percent decline in review between 2007 and 2017, owed a great deal to the internet of course, with revenues swallowed up by tech giants. However, it also owed a great deal to monopolisation and consolidation of local media into a few companies who demanded operating margins that frequently exceeded 30 percent – and to keep those profit margins would frequently engage in the most egregious cost cutting.
I don’t have a simple answer to the issue of local journalism, but consider it the most pressing that we face because of its impact on communities’ sense of agency. You may not feel that you can do much about the conflict in Iran, or who will run the national government, but you can get involved with making your local school or hospital better if you know what’s going on. I also don’t believe that big journalism – stringing together local and regional titles for efficiencies – is the answer, because in the end the bond between those who produce the media and those who read it becomes too attenuated, making it easier to slash and burn when profits fall. What is important is that the first step towards a sustainable local media requires local advertising, and I’m impressed by the number of small publishers who are working on building their own media sales networks because they know that in the end platforms such as Meta and Google will take the vast majority of profits.
TBM: You say in the book that we shouldn't view the fall of the journalism industry as "inevitable technological determinism." I think a lot of people have that knee jerk reaction, like the newspapers were plodding, cold-blooded dinosaurs competing with the nimble rodents of Big Tech. Why was it important for you to dispel that myth? And what do you think all the publishers who survived had in common?
Whittaker: If we consider media companies in the round, whether it’s the Koenig steam-powered press used by The Times in the 1810s through a whole range of media such as film, radio, television and, of course, digital media, these organisations are technology companies. They have been responding to innovations – whether transport, consumer tastes and markets, or new forms of distribution – for centuries. The biggest problem for any organisation is when it becomes too comfortable in its success, and this is not simply a problem for Big Media, as the examples of Kodak or Blackberry show. The companies which have survived – and in some cases flourished – today were the ones who either didn’t have huge sunk costs and related profits in legacy formats such as print or broadcast television, or realised at the right time that their audiences were moving to new platforms they would have to follow. Timing is especially important for the latter: being first does not always guarantee success, as Time-Warner discovered with its Pathfinder website in the nineties, and it’s sensible to learn from the mistakes of other companies.
TBM: Last summer, The Wall Street Journal reported that The Onion was making a killing on its print business and had just signed a deal with Barnes & Noble. The article mentions other successful attempts at digital enterprises launching print businesses. Is this a fad or the start of something meaningful? And if it's a fad, how else can journalism disentangle itself from technology they don't control?
Whittaker: I absolutely love that The Onion has enjoyed print success, and Private Eye is a favourite of mine which has long resisted the move [to] online. I wouldn’t describe these as fads, but I do think their print success is because they are niche interests. The transition away from print news actually began in the sixties and seventies when more people in the UK and USA began to get their information from television news, and I would place the transition of news production and consumption towards electronic media on a longer timeline than I cover in the book. With regard to the decline of print, pandemic lockdowns demonstrated a major weakness for distribution, but wider economic forces were already pointing up to flaws in that distribution network with fewer and fewer newsagents or shops on the high street willing and able to sell print copies.
TBM: In the book you discuss how the internet's initial disruption to Big Journalism wasn't from Big Tech but was from individuals like Matt Drudge who had less reason to make nice with industry power players and could therefore publish more aggressive stories that grew increasingly appealing to audiences becoming wary of establishment talking points. I feel like we're seeing the same dynamic at play to some degree in 2026. Material conditions have only decayed and establishment outlets have shown themselves to be increasingly out of step with people on a variety of issues. A guy like Hasan Piker gets popular because he's making people feel heard in ways establishment actors don't.
Yet what's different is now there exists a mechanism for Big Tech to siphon revenue away from anti-establishment upstarts.
People could point to Piker's material wealth (his "infamous" $2.7 million home) as proof that the system is working fine for rewarding news personalities. But like many major streamers, he is probably underpaid relative to what he brings a platform like Twitch, and relative to what someone of his popularity would've been making on TV in the mid-90s. You can see similar dynamics with Substack, a platform trying to seduce all the writers into what Max Read recently called "YouTube-for-words" in his post on moving to Patreon.
The media disruptors that could become the establishment by taking on the establishment, and make money in the process, now can't actually make much money or not enough to meaningfully affect change. How accurate of a read do you think this is of our current moment? How can we possibly get out of it without massive government intervention that we know will not come without...uhh..lots of things going differently?
Whittaker: This is a really interesting question but one that I’d frame differently. While the business of journalism is incredibly important to sustain news production and distribution, I would also argue that throughout the twentieth century it became more concerned with maintaining the business of journalism – which is why so much of it seems out of step with people’s genuine concerns today. I like Hasan Piker, but I’d rather look at the example of someone like Motaz Azaiza, a photojournalist who I only started following after the manuscript was submitted. He had been recording daily life in Gaza on a regular basis prior to the attacks by Hamas on October 7, and although there are some images of bombed out buildings there are many more beautiful images of people and the territory. Unsurprisingly – although not all at once – his photographs become much grimmer over the years as he documented the ongoing destruction of the strip and which also saw the death of a number of his relatives when Israel bombed the the Deir al-Balah Camp in October 2023.
I mention Azaiza as one example among many. He is reliant on a major platform that is completely outside his control - literally so: Instagram briefly blocked him and he was apparently kicked off Facebook amidst accusations of spreading fake news. I don’t actually agree with all his commentary, but looking through his images and videos seems to show a very high level of reportage. His reach has also grown, from the low thousands on Instagram to nearly 15 million as I write, but more so in that his photos and videos are shared by news organisations unable to report from Gaza.
My reframing of your question, then, is that I would prefer to see journalists concentrate on reporting rather than influence. It is not that I’m naïve enough to presume that influence is not important, but that in the post-truth world in which we find ourselves it is more important than ever to have people individuals who care enough about what they see to record it. Truth will not automatically out, but if no one is trying to even discover what it is then we have no chance to find it at all. This often means using platforms that are extractive – even exploitative – but I’m also old enough to remember Robert Maxwell embezzling millions of pounds from the Mirror Group Newspapers pension fund…
TBM: Towards the end of the book you discuss AI and specifically call on news publishers to "develop ethical guidelines that prioritize human oversight, transparency, and accountability in their use of AI" as well as the industry needing "journalists to be educated and trained on the responsible use of AI, including understanding its potential biases and limitations."
AI has obviously besieged the writing industry. ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022 and by November 2023 you have Sports Illustrated publishing fake stories with fake writers. Obviously places that had long been taken out to the, as I recall one writer putting it a while ago, "the SEO glue factory" using AI en masse isn't a surprise.
However, at the time of writing this, Canadian nonprofit magazine The Walrus recently exposed the New York Times published a quote ostensibly from politician Pierre Poilievre that turned out to be an AI fabrication. The false quote was in the story for at least two weeks before The Walrus pointed it out and the times added a correction before letting the freelancer go. But as The Walrus article notes, this critical mistake and breach of trust could be just as much a function of the editorial operations as it is of an individual writer's shortcomings.
How do you think institutional media (and independent operators) should be establishing these guidelines you suggest? We are clearly in need of them but, personally, it doesn't seem like management cares. What do you think places like the times risk by not being more proactively transparent with their AI use until a major issue like this happens?
Whittaker: So the company that is suing ChatGPT is possibly using ChatGPT to generate its articles… Welcome to the world of Alice through the looking glass.
In my current role, I’m often called on as the AI guru because I work with AI a lot. In the 1990s as an editor of a tech magazine, I helped set up one of the first web sites in the UK and I’ve been a truly mediocre coder ever since. Bad vibe-coding has been a way of life for decades, with AI replacing copy and paste from Stack Overflow. More seriously, I found that with other pressures my own work on websites had fallen into a rut where I was over-reliant on WordPress and templates, and I have been surprised to see that using Codex or Claude Code encourages me to be genuinely more inventive and creative, in the same way that InDesign (and before that Quark Xpress) invited me to experiment with page layouts which I still sometimes work on for charities and other organisations.
For anyone looking to be creative in any field, however, there is one important point to remember. AI will – almost by definition – be the ultimate mid. If you want to produce a financial report or SEO-glued-together-slop, AI will effortlessly regress to the mean because that is what it is designed to do, and to be honest much of the AI-generated visual imagery filling the internet increasingly operates at the slick level of stock photography that companies such as Getty and Shutterstock have been pumping out for years. For anyone who aspires to write the opening paragraph to John Hersey’s Hiroshima, or see the world through the eyes of someone like Lynsey Addario, however, AI is not going to help you because these are not writers or photographers who aspire to the average. AI is a stochastic parrot and one of the reasons it is so good at writing code – or financial reports – is because these are media that require consistency and replicability, which is pretty much the opposite of what is needed to be truly creative.
With regard to your comment that management doesn’t care… yes, that’s true, because the business of journalism takes precedence over journalism. I think however, there is a way to make them care and it begins with one word: quality. Humans will never be able to compete with AI in terms of quantity, but AI will always struggle with quality for two reasons: first of all, it does not know what it does, it has no consciousness; secondly, it doesn’t actually care. For me, these are not algorithmic qualities and so I don’t think they will be replicable using LLMs. I often share a comment with my students from the AI researcher Andrej Karpathy: “You can outsource your thinking, but you cannot outsource your understanding.” Anyone working in the media who wants their work to be more than mid will need to understand what they do and to care about it. Editorial processes, checking facts to understand the world around us, pushing contributors to write better copy or photographers to take a better shot – crassly, giving a shit – is the only thing that is going to save us from the sea of mediocrity in which we are currently drowning. And publishers also need to take note that this will be necessary for their bottom line: the internet was the death-knell for print, just as a smart kid with a team of AI agents will be the death-knell for organisations that rely on lowest-common-denominator shovelware.
Matt Wolfbridge is the founder & editor of Typebar Magazine.