We guarantee the death of most remaining newsrooms

I’ll start by clutching onto one bit of hope: In every crisis, there is opportunity. That fact is why we launched a new newspaper at the height of the Covid pandemic. It’s why we expect to thrive this decade and beyond.

Retain that hope as we navigate the next few paragraphs. Because right now, things are bleak. And the choices so many newsrooms make in 2026 will guarantee their collapse. Not that there are many left.

In South Africa, where our newspaper The Continent started, half of all journalists have lost their jobs since Facebook switched from prompting us with “Sipho Kings is…” to profiting from disinformation and mass murder. That trend is universal. We’ve got less journalism about fewer things. Being a news consumer sucks. And so many of the newsrooms that are left bet on the wrong relationship with readers.

That bet, on chucking away the strengths of journalism to embrace the form and function of platforms, was meant to save us. We forgot that the medium is the message. And that platforms are corporations. They did what corporations do, and asset-stripped the world to profit the vanity and offshore bank accounts of a few. When we pushed back, they bought off the biggest newsrooms and then ran sophisticated PR and influence campaigns to water down legislative responses. It’s left us as an industry that people don’t trust, with few ethical business models, and a dominant format that fails the public.

This moment feels like rock bottom. And in this crisis, there ought to be so much opportunity.

But we’re not learning from the past. Instead, we’re approaching this new era of generative AI much like we did platforms. Big Western newsrooms are signing secret deals to make some money. Our luminaries talk of the opportunities that come with becoming a feedstock to genAI companies (no doubt prompted by media events being sponsored by AI companies). The rest, notable exceptions noted, are already on the verge of collapse, and are using AI to replace journalists, then hoping the algorithms can get gamed.

We seem to have missed the key point here: These are corporations. They do not have a public interest incentive. They expect to profit in a burning world. And they will do what corporations do. We will lose. The public will lose.

That’s the path we are on in 2026. And yes, there will be some spots of innovation that stop total collapse. They won’t be enough. Unless our industry decides that this hopeless future isn’t inevitable. Maybe that’ll be the 2027 thing.