Economist Peter St. Onge, Ph.D., said the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence is reshaping the news industry and could cut the audience for traditional media outlets in half over the next several years, arguing that readers are increasingly turning to AI-powered tools and independent creators instead of legacy news organizations.

In a recent commentary, St. Onge said artificial intelligence is changing how people consume information by providing direct summaries of news topics without requiring users to visit the original articles.

“Legacy media could lose half its audience as people go to AI instead. Can journalists learn how to walk a dog?” St. Onge said.

He continued by criticizing traditional news organizations and their role in public discourse.

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“For a century, the media has told us they are democracy's immune system when it turned out they are democracy's cancer, and AI is the chemo,” he said.

St. Onge cited a recent Pew Research study examining Google's AI-generated search summaries.

“According to a new Pew study, when Google puts an AI summary at the top of search, it gobbles up 92% of the audience, leaving just 8% to visit CNN,” he said.

He argued that Google's AI summaries are only one part of a broader shift in how consumers access information.

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“Now, keep in mind that's just Google's AI toss in people who just go direct to ChatGPT or Grok instead of wading through a 1,200-word New Yorker hit piece on Trump's helipad,” St. Onge said.

According to St. Onge, some major news organizations have begun removing themselves from Google search in an effort to limit the use of their content for AI-generated summaries.

“So bad, major sites are now delisting from Google, throwing away their main audience source to stop Google scraping their content,” he said.

St. Onge contrasted the previous business model for online journalism with what he believes is emerging in the AI era.

“So the background is: before AI media was simple, write the story, optimize for Google clicks, sell ads. Google would scrape your content, sure, but they paid you in eyeballs,” he said.

“With AI, you get the summary and punchline for free. The actual articles got to sing for its supper, and turns out not many articles can sing for their supper,” St. Onge added.

He also referenced projections that search traffic to news organizations will continue declining.

“With Reuters projecting search traffic to news sites will fall nearly half in three years with no end in sight,” he said.

St. Onge argued that declining trust in traditional news organizations has contributed to the migration toward alternative news sources.

“Of course, it's not just the AI media shot itself in the foot, throwing away credibility and authority for nakedly partisan reporting, trust in traditional media is down to just one in four Americans and one in seven Republicans,” he said.

According to St. Onge, consumers are increasingly obtaining news through social media platforms and AI chatbots rather than television networks or newspapers.

“That's hit media consumption to the point most Americans get their news from social media and AI chatbots already, not traditional media,” he said.

He pointed to independent creators as evidence of that trend.

“That's where it gets interesting because the eyeballs are not going away, they are migrating. Joe Rogan famously is the most popular podcast in the world. Substack has grown fivefold since 2021. Hundreds of YouTubers you have never heard of get more views than the entire CNN universe,” St. Onge said.

He also cited the audience for Tucker Carlson's interview with President Donald Trump.

“Tucker's interview with Donald Trump got nearly a quarter billion views, which is roughly 80 times his Fox audience,” he said.

St. Onge argued that artificial intelligence is accelerating the transition toward independent media.

“AI accelerates all of this because it replaces left-wing media slop with multiple points of view, and often by people who know the topic much better than journalism majors who are experts in literally nothing,” he said.

He said the internet had already reduced the dominance of traditional news organizations before the emergence of AI.

“That was already driving mass layoffs and consolidation with the number of journalists in America, newspapers down nearly three-quarters, and even TV laying off in the face of YouTubers and independents,” St. Onge said.

He also cited estimates of ongoing job losses within the news industry.

“Layoff analyst Challenger Gray estimates media layoffs are now running 20,000 a year, which is about one in 10 remaining journalists every year, while independent creators, of course, explode,” he said.

Looking ahead, St. Onge predicted continued contraction among legacy news organizations as AI adoption expands.

“So as next brought to you by the Bitcoin way, aside from their corruption, our supposed intellectual elite is characterized by a kind of ideological DEI, where the people on top are surprisingly second rate for the authority they command. You probably noticed this during COVID. Now that AI can replace second rate in about three sentences, that elite is running on fumes. Give it another 10 years, and we will not have a legacy media,” St. Onge said.

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