Welcome to new subs overnight from Spotify, AOL, Australian digital news leader news.com.au, Big Tech watchdog Foxglove in the UK, the content team at Britain’s largest publisher Reach, Britain’s ad industry measurement bureau abc.org.uk, and Aussie PR agency PRshed, among others.
And the BBC’s international development charity BBC Media Action which uses the broadcasters’ massive reach to improve health, human rights and emergency response outcomes in developing nations. Bravo!
And here’s a can’t miss.
Are you aware what’s really driving your Google traffic and how vulnerable it is to AI-driven disruption?
Join my mates Pete Pachal of The Media Copilot and David Buttle, former director at the Financial Times, for an essential webinar designed specifically for media leaders.
Learn how to see what’s on the AI horizon by decoding the insights behind your search traffic to understand exactly where your content stands in the AI landscape.
In this session, you’ll discover:
Which types of content are most at risk of AI replacement - and which offer defensible, lasting value.
A clear framework for assessing AI substitution risks to protect your traffic and revenue, and
Actionable strategies to serve audience needs in ways that AI cannot replicate, ensuring long-term resilience and growth.
Equip your organisation to navigate the realities of AI disruption with clarity and confidence.
Reserve your spot today and get on the path to lasting success in the Age of AI.
Today I am focusing on the difference between reporting and journalism. Reporting tells you something happened. Journalism is the how and the why.
News events are a natural byproduct of our species. Storms happen, technologies emerge, markets rise and fall.
Journalism is a human-created investigation that explains storms are due to climate change, tech can be bad as well as good, and politics can manipulate markets.
If reporting is a mirror on humanity, then journalism is the magnifying glass.
Today, Alan and I are focused on one law that has done more than most to create an anticompetitive playing field that’s left the world’s journalists with all the costs and none of the benefits of publishing the truth.
After 30 years as an undercover journalist, I know how hard it is to get to the facts, and how important. I have also learned how costly it can be if you get it wrong.
But working under threat and being sued is just part of the job. It’s part of being accountable.
After all, the really big stories are the ones that someone wealthy or powerful - and commonly both - doesn’t want revealed.
That’s a price all journalists worth their salt are willing to pay.
But the world has forgotten that difference between journalism and news, and now it is more important than ever to have a reminder.
If reporting is just telling the news, then algorithms can do that. Google can do that. Google is now doing that with AI Overviews. So does ChatGPT, and others.
This is disintermediating the revenue of the media industry, and that is having the effect of silencing the journalism that the income from news has traditionally funded.
And AI, and tech platforms, cannot automate journalism no matter how many trillions it has in the bank.
That means humanity’s ability to get to the facts about the most impactful events in their lives is being silenced, and a critical public service is waning.
Let me share some of my personal experiences to ground this for those who have not been there themselves.
A few years ago, I went to Cuba undercover to expose a dangerous international paedophile ring.
Fidel Castro was in his final, maddest years, and the abuser was using his fame as a fading pop star and his money to fund a protection racket that delivered him teen girls.
After a week carefully gathering evidence that would reveal his crimes, I was spotted by his security entourage and beaten up.
I was then arrested by the police and jailed for eight years after being convicted of being a spy.
Guards told me that I would be targeted in jail. That enforcers had been given my details would assault me and leave me scarred for life.
As the hours counted down to me starting my sentence, the government lost its nerve and deported me at gunpoint instead.
Soon after, my expose led to the paedophile being deported too. The girls and the poor families he had preyed on were protected. I paid a heavy price, but it was worth it.
A few years later, I spent an unsettling year being sued by an alien sex cult, which threw tens of millions at a spurious case to try to bankrupt me.
Again, my story ran, the court case was thrown out, and thousands of vulnerable people looking for love who were being coerced to hand over their life savings to the cult were protected.
Again, it was worth it.
But both stories made headlines, exposed crime and corruption, and made life better for thousands of vulnerable people. Both are wow Netflix documentaries.
This was not news that was breaking, this was journalism that revealed things powerful, wealthy, cruel people want hidden. Big Tech can’t do that. It won’t do that.
Today I am off the tools but doing my bit with this newsletter, but the frontline journalists still face all those same hazards and hurdles.
But in recent years they’ve been given a new one. A more insidious one. One that was specifically designed to take power from the truth and give it to the powerful.
It is one that is entirely counterproductive to creating a better world and which has handed Big Tech the keys to the kingdom,
But it may soon - finally - be overturned.
It’s called Section 230, and that’s what Alan and I are talking about on this edition of the Future Media pod.
Listen above, or on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts.
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