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Can the New York Times Save Journalism From Our AI Overlords?

26 min read

Summary

For most companies, spending upwards of 20 million on this legal battle against several big AI companies for copyright infringement. How is that suit going, if I may ask? And I’m curious, what is your ideal outcome from that lawsuit, not just for The New York Times but for the news industry more broadly. What do you hope to accomplish there? Let me first just linger on the number you just said. We are two and a half years into this lawsuit. Two and a half years. And we have spent well over 40 million on a lawsuit? Or do you accept the pennies on every dollar you spent to create your work just to recoup something? We think it’s really important to enforce our rights and say “absolutely not.” Like, you want to use our stuff, that requires permission, and that requires fair compensation. Someone needs to fight that fight. Thankfully, we’re not the only ones filing a lawsuit like this. A number of other publishers in the industry have filed similar lawsuits. Our parent company has a few. Silicon Valley has tried to portray our lawsuit as anti-tech. They have. It is not anti-tech. It is anti-theft, and anytime you hear the anti-tech line, I just want you to picture Jensen Huang coming down onto the floor of his Nvidia factory, discovering that Sam Altman has snuck in and has arms full of chips and he’s running out of the building. What a visual. And Jensen says, “Hey, you’re not allowed to take that.” And Sam Altman says, “If you tell me that I can’t take this, you’re anti-tech, Jensen. You’re gonna make China win.” We are not anti-tech. We are anti-theft. This is not about money. This is about the ability to sustain essential work. You’ve talked a few times about our profession, journalists and news executives, linking hands on this issue of AI. Teaming up to get ahead of it, to win. What does it look like to you to compete and team up at the same time? Because we all compete fiercely. Well, who would you say was the closest, fiercest competitor of The New York Times if you look at the last half century? The Washington Post. I was thinking it in my head, trying to be emotionally generous. But that is the answer. The Washington Post was our fiercest competitor. And boy are they fierce. And to their credit, they still are. To this day, there are so many good journalists at The Washington Post, and not a week goes by without them publishing something that I’m just salivating with envy over them having gotten first. So they were our fiercest competitors. They were also our closest ally when our industry came under pressure. Just think about the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times starts publishing the Pentagon Papers. The Nixon White House goes to war with The Times. It is so dark. The threats are intensifying so much that my grandfather, who was publisher at the time, has his entire legal team quit over his decision to publish the stories, and they tell him he may spend the rest of his life in jail. And he starts carrying a toothbrush in his pocket, in case he’s hauled off at any moment. The fresh breath was really important? Fresh breath was really important to him in prison. So we publish the stories, we defy the Nixon White House, and eventually we will win the legal case that establishes the right that the government cannot establish what’s called prior restraint, keep you from publishing something in advance. We will end up winning that legal right. But there’s a period in which we are locked down. When the court has ordered us to halt publication. And what happens the next day? The Washington Post picks up where we left off. And I could give you a dozen of those stories. Our journalists were all kicked out of China in retaliation for some of the actions of the first Trump administration. Who was my first call? It was Fred Ryan at The Washington Post. And my second call was Will Lewis at The Wall Street Journal, and we decided that we would raise concerns about these actions collectively. Let’s compete on the stories all day long. Let’s compete for the best journalists all day long. And then when our rights are attacked—the same rights that protect me are the rights that protect you and vice versa—we all come together. I think that’s the posture we need in the face of these AI abuses. There are things we can do collectively. We can tell the story of these abuses and help the public understand them. We can tell the story of journalism, what journalism is and why it matters, and the danger it faces if these abuses are allowed to continue. We can enforce our rights. How do you win? How does our industry win? Our industry is not gonna win compared to the tech giants. We are a tiny little minnow. Well, let’s say winning is synonymous with surviving. And that’s it. What I am worried about, and what you’re worried about, and all our peers across the industry, is not about getting giant and bigger. That’s what the folks in Silicon Valley are worried about. They want to take over the world. We want an essential profession, an essential service. The act of seeking the truth, helping people understand the world, holding power to account. We want that to survive, and I really believe that democracy needs it to survive. Who else does these things if journalists don’t? Is AI going to go to the front lines of the Ukraine conflict and show what’s happening there? Is AI going to spend years building the sources that we need to finally get Trump’s taxes and provide the fullest picture of Trump’s wealth and the conflicts inherent in that. AI can’t do any of those things. And so we need journalists for it, and AI needs journalists for it. So we need to come up with a sustainable framework for all of this. And I would argue one that ensures that The New York Times is not the only game in town. You guys need competitors. Look, we are the first to say that. I mean, you are a behemoth. It’s interesting that you say that we’re a behemoth, and you cover behemoths here at WIRED. You are a behemoth in the context of the news industry. I really want to slow it down. The newsroom at The New York Times, we’re really proud of it, has basically doubled the number of journalists that we have to 2,400. That is a drop in the bucket of the number of journalists that this country needs. I could not agree more. We’ve reached this amazing milestone. We hit 13 million subscribers. We’re aiming for 15, and that sounds like a big number until you remember that Netflix is over 300 million, and you have another, you know, half dozen with a hundred, 200 million subscribers. Actually it’s all the way down the list to Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll has more subscribers than The New York Times. We are the largest player in our beleaguered industry. But what we need is the entire industry to be much bigger. If you’re going to say that The New York Times is the country’s leading news organization, do we really think that the country’s leading news organization should have fewer subscribers than an anime streaming service? Well, when you put it like that, A.G., I agree. What I want is for a 23-year-old journalist to look at this industry and think, “I could work there, I could work there, I could work there. Or maybe I could work there.” There are not enough places to point to. I mean, there are other success stories. I think The Journal has been doing extraordinarily well and doing great work. The Post had an amazing decade and before a couple of really tough years. The Atlantic, The New Yorker. Bloomberg may still be the largest newsroom in America. But there aren’t enough. And particularly at the local level. We’ve seen an 80 percent loss in the number of working journalists at the local level in this country over the last two decades. It is completely untenable, and it is not good for anyone. One of the things that makes me appreciate Meredith [Kopit Levien] so much, she’s our CEO, she’s the top commercial leader of the organization, and any time she is asked, she says, “I would much rather build a market for journalism than to build a business for journalism,” like a private business. She wants to build up that market, because the more we build up that market, the stronger we will all be. You’ll have more talent in the market. You will have more competition for stories, which makes us all stronger. It’s also just really important for America. Studies show that when you lose local journalism in your community, basically every unhealthy civic metric goes up. Loneliness goes up, distrust goes up, voting goes down. Corruption goes up. When you’ve got a strong local news organization, I think about Minneapolis, the Star Tribune, or The Seattle Times, the Baltimore Banner is doing amazing work. You see better civic outcomes. So I think it’s important for the industry; it’s important for the country. Let me end on this, because we’ve talked about a bunch of really tough stuff. Crunchyroll will stay with me. What makes you optimistic? When you wake up in the morning or you’re going to bed at night and you have a million things to worry about, you have a two-and-a-half-year, $20-million-plus lawsuit among them, you have the Justice Department knocking on the door of your journalists, what gives you hope and optimism for this industry? It’s a good question. This feels like a moment of great challenge, of existential challenge for our profession. I try not to force myself to avert my eyes from that. Because you want to avert your eyes from that. But I think the AI challenge, I think the press freedom challenge, I think also the challenge of serving this incredibly polarized, tribalized public—I think of those as sort of the three great challenges of my tenure, and those are first and foremost. At the end of the hardest days, what makes me feel like it’s all worth it—and this isn’t to sound corny, it’s true, and you can ask my kids, because they’re always complaining about it—is reading the paper. Just to remind myself, “Oh, this is what I’m fighting for.” How to Listen You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how: If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too. Comments Back to top

By Katie Drummond

Original Article