In 2023, Business Insider shifted its organizational model, adding multiple artificial intelligence (AI) products in 2024, and reducing its staff by nearly 40% between April 2023 and May 2025.[7]
I suspect that the author is more likely to be impacted than most of the people involved.
Journalism’s been having a rough time for some decades from technological change, though that predates AI as we know it today.
First — in the US, not sure about everywhere else — there was a shift away from local news towards focusing on national news. You don’t need as many journalists to cover a limited number of national stories. IIRC, that started before widespread Internet adoption, but the Internet accelerated it a lot:
The appearance of news deserts across counties and communities in the U.S. has been a widespread phenomenon in recent years. But why? In an interview with the HPR, Jeremy Meserve, the Staff Producer and Archivist for the Belmont Media Center, pointed to the over-corporatization of media consumption as a cause of the decline in quantity and quality of local journalism.
The rise of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram has fundamentally changed how people consume media. Social media platforms like these have spelled the end for many local newspapers as people have shifted their media consumption priorities to more convenient options. Meserve believes that part of the downfall of local newspapers had to do with the old business model, where many local papers were free. So when social media emerged, people stopped reading, as social media platforms provided faster and equally free media. As a result of this, newspapers lost their audience and their benefactors which led to that old business model being unsustainable.
Second, Google basically took over the ad market that a substantial amount of journalism relied on for revenue. Sure, some money came from subscriptions, but a lot of magazines and newspapers relied on their ability to put ads in front of a broad demographic’s eyeballs. You don’t want to pay a newspaper for relatively untargeted ads when you can pay Google, which can hit exactly the demographic that you want to advertise to.
Third, my understanding is that some stuff — like “business news” articles, where one just wants a summary of earnings reports or someone talking about the general movement of stocks and a vaguely-plausible explanation attached — became largely automatically generated some time back. This predates the LLM boom as well:
The Associated Press, working with Automated Insights and Zacks Investment Research, is now automatically generating more than 3,000 stories about U.S. corporate earnings each quarter, a tenfold increase over what AP reporters and editors created previously. Here, Assistant Business Editor Philana Patterson, who has been overseeing the rollout of this process in the newsroom, gives an update on AP’s automation efforts that began last summer.
That might sound like something happening today, but…that’s a story from June 2015, over a decade ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Insider
I suspect that the author is more likely to be impacted than most of the people involved.
Journalism’s been having a rough time for some decades from technological change, though that predates AI as we know it today.
First — in the US, not sure about everywhere else — there was a shift away from local news towards focusing on national news. You don’t need as many journalists to cover a limited number of national stories. IIRC, that started before widespread Internet adoption, but the Internet accelerated it a lot:
https://theharvardpoliticalreview.com/local-news-democracy-risk/
Second, Google basically took over the ad market that a substantial amount of journalism relied on for revenue. Sure, some money came from subscriptions, but a lot of magazines and newspapers relied on their ability to put ads in front of a broad demographic’s eyeballs. You don’t want to pay a newspaper for relatively untargeted ads when you can pay Google, which can hit exactly the demographic that you want to advertise to.
Third, my understanding is that some stuff — like “business news” articles, where one just wants a summary of earnings reports or someone talking about the general movement of stocks and a vaguely-plausible explanation attached — became largely automatically generated some time back. This predates the LLM boom as well:
searches for an example
https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/announcements/automated-earnings-stories-multiply/
That might sound like something happening today, but…that’s a story from June 2015, over a decade ago.