Something strange happened to journalism somewhere between the printing press and the AI summary box that now reads the news, condenses it and serves up the answer for us. The industry has not yet worked out how to feel about it. That is itself rather on brand.
Traditionally, a journalist researched a story. They wrote it. An editor argued with them about the third paragraph, and they were probably right. The piece was published. People visited the place where it lived, read it there, and went about their day. Attention and geography were the same. The whole thing was simple, the process tidy. It might even be profitable. Today, the journalist does all of the same things. The editor is still right about the third paragraph. The piece is published. And then people start consuming the journalism everywhere except where it was published.
It gets summarised by an AI assistant responding to someone’s vaguely related question at half eleven on a Tuesday. Three newsletters quote it, two of which fail to link back to it. Someone screenshots it and posts it to a platform where the comments section immediately turns into a slanging match that has little to do with the original piece. A podcast mentions it in passing. A sub-Reddit thread dissects its findings in considerable depth without once naming the publication that produced them. Thousands of people encounter the idea, but rather fewer encounter the article. Almost none reach the publisher’s homepage, the subscription offer in the sidebar, or the editor’s letter that took forty-five minutes to write.
The Philosophical Problem Nobody Asked For
This raises a question that is either fascinating or maddening depending on your disposition and your advertising revenue: if a piece of journalism informs thousands of people, changes minds, sparks conversations and gets quoted extensively, but relatively few people actually visit the site where it was published, was it successful?
Journalism’s traditional answer to this question involved the word “reach,” which was comfortably vague enough to cover most situations. But AI has changed what reach can mean. It no longer means helping people find journalism; it can read it, summarise it and deliver its substance without requiring the reader to visit the original article. Suddenly, the return journey home is optional, and the original question has grown teeth.
Before anyone reaches for the emergency pessimism button, though, a note of balance is in order. Publisher websites are not becoming ghost towns. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report found that around 57% of people still access news directly through publishers’ websites or apps. It is not a dying model. The majority of news consumers are still making a deliberate, active choice to go somewhere specific for their journalism. Direct relationships, trusted brands and paid subscriptions remain not just viable but genuinely important.
Two Worlds, One Very Confused Business Model
So the old model has not disappeared. It has simply acquired a rather strange new bedfellow. Two different ways of consuming journalism now coexist, occasionally bumping into each other at parties and pretending not to be alarmed.
The first model is direct and intentional. Readers choose publications they trust, visit them regularly, pay for access, and form something resembling a relationship with the journalism they consume. This is the model that sustains newsrooms, funds investigations, and keeps editors employed to be right about third paragraphs.
The second model is distributed and borderless. The substance of the journalism moves through search, social platforms, AI, aggregators and newsletters, reaching people who never went looking for it at a specific address. The ideas travel. The byline may or may not make the journey.
For independent journalists and specialist creators, this distributed model contains an opportunity. For most of journalism’s history, distribution power belonged to whoever owned the printing press, the broadcast licence or the enormous digital audience. If you did not have a large publication or an established audience behind you, your reach was often limited to the people who already knew where to find you. AI discovery and new aggregation mechanisms do not care about size in quite the same way. A genuinely distinctive voice or a piece of rare expertise can now reach far beyond the audience that might once have found it.
The Bit Where the Money Goes Missing
There is, however, an economic problem sitting at the centre of all this like an uninvited guest who has finished the biscuits. Journalism can now travel further while increasingly detached from the people and organisations that paid to produce it. Attention, attribution and economic value have started going to separate destinations This was not how the journey was supposed to work.
This is where infrastructure starts to matter, not as a technical solution but as a way of keeping original work, authorship and source connected as content moves across an increasingly fragmented landscape. Platforms like LettsNews are built around exactly this problem: helping independent journalists and creators distribute original work across multiple destinations without losing the thread back to where it came from and who made it.
What Journalism Actually Needs to Protect
The answer to all of this is not simply “more traffic.” Traffic is a measurement, not a relationship. What journalism needs to preserve urgently, practically and without too much further philosophical hand-wringing, is the connection between original work, authorship, trust and value.
Ideas can travel. Attribution must travel with them. The article left the building. It would be rather nice if it remembered its home address.
This article began with its author’s original idea and was developed, edited, illustrated, published, distributed and promoted with the assistance of LettsNews, with every editorial decision remaining in the hands of its author. It is the LettsNews connected workflow, put into practice.