Journalism

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? Half of web articles written by AI

Reproduced from Graphite.io; Chart: Axios Visuals AI is writing about half of the articles on the internet, Axios' Megan Morrone writes from a new report by Graphite, an SEO firm. The number of AI-written articles has exploded since ChatGPT's debut, and it's now roughly the same as the number of articles written by humans. Some paywalled sites — where content is more likely to be written by people — weren't captured in the analysis, but it covers over 300 billion web pages. ?Yes, but: There's almost no AI content on the most prominent news sites. Low-quality content farms are able to use AI to churn out an enormous quantity of words — but even robots still prefer human-written content. ?️ By the numbers: 86% of articles ranking in Google Search were written by humans, and 14% were generated by AI, according to a separate report from Graphite. And 82% of articles cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity were written by humans. Go deeper.

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A journalist's view of AI

Illustration: Lindsey Bailey/Axios

AI is making my life more convenient and my job more efficient. But it's also tempting me to think less — and sparking new frustrations, Axios' Amy Harder writes. Why it matters: AI is infiltrating daily life faster and more aggressively than any modern technology. We're all living experiments in its effects: the good, the bad and the unknown. Early research, and plenty of anecdotes, suggest AI is already reshaping our brains. A recent MIT Media Lab study found students who used ChatGPT to write essays showed significantly lower cognitive engagement. One of the researchers, Nataliya Kosmyna, put it bluntly: Evolution pushes us to adopt tools that make life easier, "but your brain needs friction to learn." ⚡ Catch up quick: When I rejoined Axios in September and jumped into the AI-and-energy beat, it felt like AI immersion therapy. Axios itself is integrating AI tools into our newsroom workflow. Our journalists can use them to take a first stab at alt text for photos and charts (descriptive text to aid accessibility), to research new topics, to sort through huge datasets for trends, and to get suggestions for smoother language. The effect: I'm covering AI while also depending on it. Flashback: History shows a long list of technologies that've made our lives easier while compelling us to let go of certain skills. We ceded handwriting to computers. We ceded math to calculators. We ceded direction to GPS. We ceded our attention to social media. ? I worry we are ceding our thinking to AI. You know the saying, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." With AI, I worry the opposite might be true — that the sum of what we're offloading is starting to add up to something ... that's the opposite of great. I don't need good handwriting, I never liked math, and I don't mind following Google's blue dot around the world. But AI goes after our thinking itself, the foundation beneath all the other skills we've offloaded over time. ?️ How it works: Early on in this job, I could feel AI making a difference to my mind, so I started taking notes: It's tempting me toward intellectual laziness. I could ask ChatGPT to do big pieces of my job. I resist it, but the temptation exists — and humans are efficiency-maximizing creatures, as Kosmyna said. Learning feels heavier. Diving into a new topic — traditionally the joy and oxygen of journalism — now sometimes makes my brain groan like it's heading to the gym. I'm retaining less. Reading, listening, interviewing, prepping for talks — it all feels less "sticky." AI's "magic" leaks into real life. When my jacket zipper jammed the other day, I caught myself frustratingly thinking: Why can't this just work? AI always just works. The feeling of AI's magic in the digital world is setting impossible expectations for the physical one. The intrigue: Late October was my peak use of AI, when I ceded my thinking to it more — driven by both temptation and experimentation. Since then, I've intentionally pulled back, putting guardrails around when and how I use it. Between the lines: I never let ChatGPT write drafts. And I use it sparingly for public speaking, since the success of a live interview or talk depends so much on the written prep process itself. ? To be sure, I do use AI for a lot of things (still). Professionally, I ask it to help refine interview questions (originally created by me), and use it for initial research (specifying that it should mine only legitimate sources). Personally, it's been a lifesaver simplifying complex finance and tax guidance (which I then run by human professionals). And I enjoy asking it to write satirical versions of songs and speeches. Reality check: This is just one person's snapshot of a few months inside a fast-evolving technology. Mark Manson, a bestselling self-help author, wrote recently: "The more I use it, the more I think, 'I should be finding more ways to use this.' And that is something I've never experienced in my life." He just launched an app that offers AI coaching. ? Zoom out: AI could help cure cancer or commercialize fusion. It could also trigger mass layoffs. It'll likely do things we can't imagine today. Its impact on the human brain is just one thread in a sprawling tapestry — but considering we each only get one brain, it's a pretty important one. The bottom line: Despite my unease, I don't think AI is inherently bad — or that we shouldn't use it. After all, I ran this story through ChatGPT to make it better. It did. Of course.

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20 years of media revolution

Illustration: Allie Carl/Axios

Axios CEO Jim VandeHei and co-founder Mike Allen write this "Behind the Curtain" column on their 20 years as entrepreneurs together: Twenty years ago this year, Jim quit The Washington Post and Mike bolted TIME magazine to fix a problem that seems baffling today: Consumers needed more political news, delivered with more speed and more voice. Politico — which launched Jan. 23, 2007 — was the solution. Why it matters: Little did we know. We soon helped end the daily news cycle, seed and feed a consumer addiction to political news, topple legacy news models, and fragment media consumption in then-unimaginable ways. We alone didn't start this fire. But, along with co-founders John Harris, Robert Allbritton, Fred Ryan and Kim Kingsley, we surely lit or fanned it — then had front-row seats to witness the blaze. We're proud of helping create Politico and prouder still of what we're building here at Axios. These are big, durable companies committed to strong journalistic principles. As we enter our 20th year as media entrepreneurs, we wanted to take stock of the good, bad and ugly that's unfolded before our eyes ever since a few people created a small D.C. publication two decades ago. Politico took off like a rocket in a way none of us expected. Politico alumni Jonathan Martin, Mike Allen, Maggie Haberman and Jim VandeHei during an election-night webcast in the publication's early years. Photo courtesy Kim Kingsley The media and political landscape of today looks nothing like it did in 2007. The transformation we helped pilot — from broad to niche, from slow to instant, from institutional to individual — upended media, politics and information consumption: The death of the "day": In 2007, a big story or "scoop" lasted 24 hours or more. Editors hoarded big stories for the Sunday paper. Politicians and readers spent days reacting to powerful new revelations. We ended this decisively — and by design. We calculated that most people did most of their reading in the early hours — but most reporters didn't start their workdays until 10 a.m. So, we obsessed about "winning the morning" — "The Scoop Factory," The New Republic dubbed us back in 2009 — by creating Politico Playbook, then churning out sunrise scoops while others snoozed. Our mentality was to beat the competition before they even got in the game. Within years, everyone was doing this. Now, you're lucky to hold someone's attention for an hour or two. This is a big reason we started Axios nine years ago. The newsletter is the new front page: Before Mike launched Politico Playbook in June 2007, newsletters were mostly dusty recaps sent by marketing departments. We turned Playbook into Washington's town square — a mix of high-stakes news, birthdays, and gossip that the entire power structure read before breakfast. Playbook proved that personal voice now matters more than institutional voice. And that in the internet era, the most powerful people want their news faster and more efficiently. Today, there are tens of thousands of newsletters on Substack alone. The most influential voices and readers are addicted to the format: Axios AM now reaches about the same number of leaders in politics, media, tech and business as there were daily subscribers to the fabled Washington Post when we left 20 years ago. Individuals trump institutions. The arrogance of the Post and other legacy institutions at our initial launch was breathtaking. They believed (and, at the time, it seemed right) that it was the media brand, not the star journalists, that mattered. They assumed their historic brands were impenetrable. But we bet that the most talented journalists were bigger than the brands — so we paid and treated them that way. Soon, Maggie Haberman, Ben Smith and many others were household names. But everyone knew they worked for us. So both sides profited. This is the dominant model of today, where star journalists leave the dinosaurs to bet on themselves — and make more money. Niche, not national. Politico didn't invent niche coverage, but it pioneered one of the most lucrative news spaces ever — and inspired a massive acceleration of media brands catering to very specific, often micro, audiences. Politico profited from the intense readership of political professionals, not the large national online audience. Look around at the most successful brands since — Axios, The Information, Punchbowl and more — and you see the same model. ⬇️ Column continues below.

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⚡ Part 2: Post-news era

John Harris, Politico global editor-in-chief, and former Politico CEO Jim VandeHei discuss the forthcoming Politico Europe in Berlin in 2015. Photo: Wolfgang Kumm/picture alliance via Getty Images Jim and Mike continue: 5. Journalists as entrepreneurs. This might be the legacy we're most proud of. Journalists 20 years ago saw themselves as salaried cogs of big brands, unless you were a TV star. But we helped encourage an entire generation of journalists to see themselves differently, as entrepreneurs. Jessica Lessin left The Wall Street Journal to start The Information; Ben Smith left Politico to help start BuzzFeed News and later Semafor; Jon Kelly left Vanity Fair, after stints at The New York Times and Bloomberg, to start Puck; Jake Sherman, John Bresnahan and Anna Palmer left Politico to start Punchbowl. We've proudly helped advise all of them at different points. 6. The gutting of legacy media. We were laughed at for even suggesting that Politico would one day be bigger and more important than the Post. It was an audacious thought two decades ago. We didn't cause the Post's decline, but Politico rose as legacy media fell. Social media and slow, tired newsroom cultures were bigger culprits. Axios shows it's easier to build a new brand from scratch than rescue fading ones. Twenty years later, we think there's more good content from a more diverse set of voices than ever. But there's an underbelly ... 7. Rise of political porn. Once upon a time, political coverage was mostly boring, and rarely an hourly obsession. Politico amplified not just the policies, but the personalities and in-the-weeds politics animating elections and government. We helped create a monster: politics as entertainment — and the dominant weapon in a never-ending cultural war. This wasn't the intent. But we can't deny the outcome. 8. The fragmentation of truth. This is another darker legacy of the era. By speeding up the news and proving that "niche" pays, the entire industry fractured. Consumers drifted into their own bubbles and realities. Politicians exploited this fracturing, and news morphed into information warfare. The public lost trust in legacy media and a shared common purpose. Reality shattered. Politico isn't to blame, but its rise coincided with the fall of media as we knew it. ? What's next: We're hurtling into a post-news era, and we're trying to steer Axios readers through it. And as we tell any young person who'll listen: If you ever have the chance to start something from scratch, do it! You'll learn more about humanity and yourself than you would in a lifetime of classes. A few people often get credit for creating a brand or company. In truth, hundreds leave little parts of themselves in new creations. So thank you to all Axions and Politicos past and present, especially Roy Schwartz, Kayla Cook Brown and Danielle Jones.

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🗞️ Elegies for The Washington Post

Via X

The great Peggy Noonan, who started her career at CBS News before joining the Reagan White House, writes in today's column, "A Lament for the Washington Post," after the paper chopped a third of its staff: "The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it. That isn't the occasion of jokes, it's a disaster." "It takes years to make good reporters — people who are trained, who love getting the story so much, who love the news so much, that they will wade into the fire, run to the sound of the guns," Noonan continues: "They are grown only in newsrooms, not at home with laptops. They are taught by older craftsmen and professionals, through stories and lore. The Post's greatness and expertise can't easily be replaced and perhaps can't be replaced at all, or at least not for decades of committed building." Keep reading (gift link). Read the email Executive Editor Matt Murray sent the newsroom.

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Washington Post publisher Will Lewis says he’s stepping down, days after big layoffs at the paper

Washington Post publisher Will Lewis said Saturday that he’s stepping down, ending a troubled tenure three days after the newspaper said that it was laying off one-third of its staff.

https://apnews.com/article/washington-post-will-lewis-stepping-down-layoffs-c8559f5e1d9f4d73f37163e4a708f9da?

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• 📰 Andy Lack — former chair and CEO of NBC News and MSNBC, and co-founder and executive chair of Deep South Today (a network of local nonprofit newsrooms in Louisiana and Mississippi) — is committing $7 million to support nonprofit journalism, he told Axios' Sara Fischer. It's one of the biggest contributions ever to nonprofit local journalism by a single individual. Go deeper.

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Is Independent Journalism in Jeopardy?

When have people in powerful positions liked being held to account? 

https://atoday.org/is-independent-journalism-in-jeopardy/