Fax machines to AI: Can real journalism survive the algorithm?

Thirty years ago, a customs officer stopped me at Cairo Airport because I was carrying a fax machine. “Sir, you can’t bring this in. You need a security permit.” The fax machine flew back with me to Washington, where I was working, and only reached its intended destination several months later, when a friend more skilled at dealing with the authorities carried it back to Egypt.

At that era, where I come from, the challenges for us journalists in accessing information quickly and accurately were political, then technical, then ethical. Assuming we were lucky enough to have jobs that paid a decent salary, and that we possessed a level of courage and commitment.

With the spread and powerful impact of the internet in the late 1990s, our ability to access and trace information improved dramatically. The world changed quickly, amid hope that the digital age would open new avenues for media freedom.

We dreamed that technological progress would weaken the grip of political repression and the dictates of capital. There was no longer a need for expensive infrastructure for printing or broadcasting, good journalism and investigative reporting became accessible from almost anywhere in the world.

This was a real leap, and far more significant than the arrival of satellite TV channels like Al Jazeera and others.

Although those channels challenged governments in Riyadh and Cairo, and beamed in from Washington and Doha all the way to homes in the working-class Cairo district of Shubra, they still required enormous investments backed by states with political agendas of their own.

Hope reached its peak in the years of the Arab Spring, from 2010 to 2012, when popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter became arenas for mobilizing, organizing, exchanging open information, and publishing media content.

Governments were no longer able to shut down internet publication and broadcasting without significant cost and disruption to the banking and service sectors, and even to many government activities themselves. At moments of major political crisis, however, the state may choose to bear those costs temporarily.

From mobilizing to blocking

Repressive governments in our ill-fated region quickly regained their coercive power by going after those who publish online.

They blocked journalists’ and independent media websites or arrested and punished people for sharing their views in writing, images, or audio on social media, using vague laws that lack basic legal safeguards whenever security officers decided they posed a political or “moral” threat.

Even so, the internet remained a huge outlet for journalists and independent media.

In the past few years, however, the giant tech companies have indirectly joined forces with these governments in imposing restrictions and regulations on independent journalism that have taken away some of their early shine and reduced their free space.

This happened after media outlets became so deeply tied to these platforms that the relationship took on the shape of a trap that is very hard to escape.

The first constraint is content policies that ban or restrict the publication of material that violates rules set by giant companies like Meta, Google, and Twitter/X. These policies still lack clarity, legitimacy, and are often discriminatory against more vulnerable communities, whether politically, culturally, socially, or in class terms, or those that use languages outside English and a handful of other Western languages.

Second, direct visits to websites have fallen in favor of reaching content through social media pages and search engines, mainly Google.

This led to excessive dependence on the goodwill of the giant platforms, and on their policies in highlighting or marginalizing content. It also means sharing digital advertising income with the platforms, a split that many complain is unfair to journalism and lacks transparency, since the big companies control the numbers and the data.

When the medium owns the message

Digital revenues have become one of the most important sources of income for news publishers, making up roughly one-third of their total revenue around the world. Income from partnerships and advertising deals with platforms accounts for about 12% of total revenue, according to the World Association of News Publishers.

A study at Columbia University in USA claims that if social media platforms distributed the economic return from publishing news content more fairly, they would have paid publishers in the US alone about $13 billion in 2022, for example.

A growing share of people are content to just read Google and AI summaries, or scroll through the snippets carried on social media.

This affects the direct income of independent media websites from advertising, since their value is set according to the number of visitors, and how they behave on the pages. It can also influence decisions by donors and institutions that support small and medium-sized independent outlets.

The platforms now retain users on their own feeds, and the rate at which they click through to original news pages has dropped by 30% since 2022.

Even on the media organizations’ own social media pages, the big companies, through their many algorithms, largely control the number of viewers. They determine the order of the content each user sees on their feed, whether it comes from friends, from accounts they follow, or from paid posts.

Media organizations and journalists now find they have to pay to “boost” content and push it out more widely, hoping that the material and moral return from reach and engagement will outweigh the costs incurred.

But not all constraints are financial. Many reports and studies, point to the restriction of Palestinian content on social media under legal labels such as counterterrorism, banning incitement to violence, or removing violent content.

These policies often lack transparency, credibility, and effective avenues for challenge and review.

AI is coming

The latest, looming challenge is generative AI, which is flooding the internet with synthetic content that is ultimately just the recycling and reformulation of genuine and original work that has already been published online.

The summaries that appear at the top of Google’s search results are one expression of this shift.

Gemini, Google’s large language model, produces these summaries, and this has contributed to a 9% drop in visitors coming from the world’s most popular search engine to media sites in the first quarter of this year.

Publishers also fear the “zero click” phenomenon, where users are satisfied with Google’s summaries and do not go any further.

There are no easy solutions.

Social media platforms now wield a kind of power that is sometimes more slippery and harder to confront than that of governments, because most of the big firms are concentrated in the US, are not fully or clearly subject to international legal arrangements or domestic laws, and operate with non-transparent policies and algorithms.

In the end, they are driven more by revenue and profit than by preserving credibility and continuity that requires media institutions and journalists to be able to work and publish, earn enough income to keep going, and not to be overwhelmed by a torrent of misleading and false information that these platforms themselves powerfully help to spread.

One of the main solutions pursued by major media companies such as the New York Times, and by powerful states such as Canada and Australia, has been to negotiate with social media platforms and search engines for a fairer share of advertising income.

Efforts are focused on setting rules for AI crawlers; which are programs that regularly visit a website and copy their content for free, so that models like Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude can use it faster.

The aim is to charge web crawlers based on how much material they take. Crawlers account for about 30% of visits to news sites, and this will only be increasing in the future.

Alternative models

Some still point to the BBC model, where public, independent media is funded by the government and license fees paid by listeners and viewers. They argue that it is impossible to rely on market mechanisms alone, such as advertising and selling content, to guarantee financial sustainability.

But this model does not work in our region and in most of the Global South because rulers tend to seek control.

There are, of course, ideas that may seem idealistic, but that we still need to work on. One is to turn more and more to open-source and cooperative platforms and applications for storing and sharing data, as a way to escape the monopolies of tech giants.

This is a long road, but it can be taken in parallel with other paths for reform and to limit the power and dominance of the major corporations.

There is no doubt that new technologies offer wider and deeper possibilities for freeing serious independent journalism from governments and market monopolies, especially compared to the situation in the 1990s when I failed to bring the fax machine to my fellow journalists in Egypt.

Yet we must all confront the corporations that dominate these technologies, and challenge their monopolies in every possible way. This includes developing and adopting new tools and alternative platforms.

Most importantly, it requires that we continue to write, film, and publish through every available channel, ensuring that the voices shaping the world’s narratives in the decades to come are not limited to a handful of tech giants, their products, or their algorithms, nor to the small circle of billionaire men who own them, such as Elon Musk and Jensen Huang.