The Chicago Sun-Times summer reading fiasco made the rounds online, drawing quick-fire reactions from across the spectrum. Most people fell into one of two camps: either “AI is bad” or “What an idiot.” But almost no one said the quiet part out loud: we did this to ourselves.
In the early 2000s, I worked on the new web team at the New York Times. We had a ringside seat to an industry-wide implosion. Craigslist had just gutted a core revenue pillar—classifieds. What had once been a dependable profit stream vanished almost overnight. The subscription team wanted to kill the website entirely, fearing it would cannibalize the print edition, one of the few moneymakers left. Not long after, social media came along and kneecapped another leg: advertising. Readers didn’t need to visit a news site when headlines scrolled past in their feed, nestled between vacation photos and political rants.
This is the backdrop we keep forgetting. We’ve been bleeding journalism dry for decades, cutting off revenue with every “innovation” and every new convenience. Now AI is here, and it’s accelerating the damage. People type a question into a chatbot and get a tidy answer. No need to click. No ad views. No subscriptions. Just information, abstracted from its source. The death of the last fragile revenue stream.
And yet journalism matters. Journalism is how we find truth and share it. Like scientific research, it’s a collective act of inquiry. Also like research, it’s under siege. Truth is increasingly treated as optional, a lifestyle choice rather than a shared reality. In this post-truth era, journalism is not just important—it’s vital. It’s what helps us understand Gaza. It’s what reveals local corruption. It’s what tells you whether your drinking water is safe. But it can’t survive without funding.
Here’s something that got buried in the news cycle: Trump fired the head of the U.S. Copyright Office because she said what the law actually says—that training data isn’t just free for the taking. That matters. If AI companies had to pay for the data they train on—news articles included—that could create a new revenue stream for journalism. No, it won’t fix everything. But every dollar counts.
So, yes, subscribe to your local paper. Subscribe to your national one, too. And maybe more importantly, call your representatives. Demand that big tech pay for the data they use. They’ve got the money. They’ve got the engineers. They can figure it out. This isn’t just about paying illustrators and little indie writers. It’s about preserving our ability to know what’s happening in the world.
Because if we lose that, we’re not just uninformed—we’re unmoored.