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First published August 16, 2026
Something funny is happening in the media business today. The Internet spent 20 years teaching publishers to chase scale, and just as many of them got pretty good at it, the Internet decided that scale was no longer the prize. Google wants to answer the question instead of sending you to the article; AI wants to summarise the reporting instead of sending you to the homepage, and social platforms want your headline, your video and your journalist, but preferably not the bill for the newsroom that produced them.
This sounds like a disaster for media, and in part it is. But there is another way to look at it. The Internet may finally be forcing publishers to answer a question they have been able to avoid for years: what, exactly, are people paying you for? This question gets more interesting when you look at what some media companies are doing about it.
Originally published by TechCabal.