When the axe came into the forest, the trees said: the handle is one of us
A reckoning with journalism’s internal compromises, and a path to resilience
It’s a line with deep roots and various origin stories, often regarded as a Turkish proverb. Whatever the source, the proverb speaks to a reality journalism must confront: the forces that weaken it are not always external. Sometimes, consequential decisions come from within.
In the long unwinding of journalism’s fortunes over the past two decades, it is reasonable and necessary to look outward. Around the world, legal findings have confirmed what many in the industry have long suspected: that dominant digital platforms have engaged in anti-competitive and monopolistic behaviour, exacerbating journalism’s market failure. But the imbalance runs deeper. Producing credible, accountable journalism is costly. It requires time, expertise, and rigorous fact-checking. Platforms, by contrast, profit from viral, low-cost content and claim immunity even while they enable, normalise and monetise widespread online harm and industrial-scale mis/disinformation actors. Beneath it all lies the deeper logic of surveillance capitalism, which favours profiling and prediction over the public interest.
These forces were not neutral. They were shaped and driven by powerful actors who do bear significant responsibility. But the proverb lingers because it resists easy villains. It reveals a deeper discomfort: complicity — a series of strategic missteps that led first to adaptation, then to accommodation, and eventually to surrender.
Chasing scale, ceding power
Many news organisations embraced scale at any cost, often on the platforms’ terms. They courted reach, even as revenue models collapsed. Editorial priorities shifted toward optimisation and engagement. Distribution drifted into the hands of a few tech firms, and strategic decisions were shaped around those dependencies.
Journalists had little real choice. The direction came from owners and executives, many of whom struck deals with platforms that promised short-term exposure. In return, they accepted long-term vulnerability by chasing virality over credibility, outsourcing distribution, and neglecting investment in independent infrastructure. Yes, media owners and executives faced immense structural pressure — from collapsing ad markets, rising platform power, and years of political and regulatory indifference. But their decisions were not without consequence. A few organisations resisted, reinvented, or built alternative models. Most did not. And that history matters now because the current wave of disruption, driven by generative AI, calls for decisions that will stand the test of time.
AI enabling new practice and accelerating economic harm
AI systems are not only transforming journalism — in many respects, they are enhancing it. They power transcription, translation, tagging, summarisation, data analysis, and even story discovery at speeds and scale previously unimaginable. Many newsrooms (and this Substacker!) now use generative AI to assist with image creation, templated copy, or explainer content. When deployed transparently and strategically, these tools can help journalists focus on deeper reporting and analysis.
But the same technologies are also driving the blade in deeper. Built on years of journalistic output — from tone to structure to editorial judgment — generative AI models now mimic the very content they were trained on. They’re being used to rewrite copy, mirror journalistic tone, and produce content en masse, often without consent or compensation. The threat isn’t hypothetical. It is already in beta.
If media leaders helped shape the “handle,” then part of their responsibility now is to reshape the conditions for journalism’s survival. This is not about returning to a golden age. The goal now is reinvention, not restoration.
There’s also a deeper irony at play. Generative AI systems, if they are to produce credible information, need trusted journalism to survive. Not just as historical training data, but as a living, ongoing source of verified knowledge, public accountability, and editorial judgment. If public interest journalism is allowed to collapse, the systems trained on it will begin regurgitating degraded versions of their own outputs — eroding their own credibility in the process. The relationship therefore is not extractive alone; it is symbiotic. And that makes the case for compensation and protection even stronger.
What regulation must deliver — and what platforms must change
Regulatory frameworks are urgently needed, and not just reactive but anticipatory. The first and most immediate challenge is AI governance. To reiterate: generative AI systems are being trained on journalism — not just articles, but editorial judgment, style, structure, and verification. This material is not free raw data. It represents labour and investment.
Any credible regulatory framework must:
Require transparency about what datasets are used in training and how outputs are derived
Enforce opt-in consent mechanisms for the use of original journalism in training sets
Support collective bargaining mechanisms for publishers and journalists whose work fuels generative systems
Alongside AI-specific safeguards, stronger platform regulation is needed to address deeper structural asymmetries in digital markets. That should include:
Mandating fair compensation for the use of journalistic content on dominant platforms, not through opaque commercial deals, but via independent, rights-based frameworks
Imposing transparency obligations on how content is ranked, recommended, or downranked
This isn’t only about protecting revenue. It’s about protecting visibility — ensuring journalism remains accessible and prominent in the digital public sphere.
Democracy needs credible journalism
Finally, credible journalism needs to be recognised as both a public good and part of the ‘democratic infrastructure’ of society. As the journalism-led civil society alliance argued in submissions to the Competition Commission, the public interest and control of news media should be the point of departure — which entails recognising journalism as a public good and a vital component of democratic life.
This recognition must be matched by support. That includes independent public interest media funds, insulated from both political and corporate capture. Remedies proposed also include targeted fiscal interventions such as zero-rating VAT on digital news subscriptions, financial incentives for small publishers, and reforming public procurement to prioritise local media. These measures would be designed to address market failure — and align closely with broader competition law-based efforts to support pluralism and sustainability in the news ecosystem.
The axe has fallen — but not everything is lost
Journalists did not create the forces now turning against them, but many were drawn into systems that made those forces harder to resist. This is not about assigning blame within the media. What matters now is building the conditions for journalism to serve the public effectively — and endure.