1. In an apartment near Wimbledon Park, The Buggles recorded their great musical hit. Video killed the radio star was much more than a prophecy. The song, from 1978, stated that video had already killed the radio star. Little did we know, nearly fifty years later, we know it was a flawed diagnosis. Generalist radio leaders continue to gain listeners while, on the other hand, it's been decades since we've sung our last rites for VHS tapes and for the devices that took up half our living room furniture. Radio, therefore, has not been killed by anyone. Books, either. Not small screens, not big screens, nor audiovisual platforms with infinite catalogs offering eye candy. Radio and books have resisted. But what about newspapers? Will someone kill them?
2. The decline of the paper newspaper, here and everywhere, is constant and irreversible. The death of newsstands, visible and cruel, is both a symptom and a consequence of this unstoppable phenomenon that each publication navigates as best it can. As regular readers move neighborhoods, and we can no longer inform ourselves about earthly miseries, the printing presses will gradually shut down their engines. The distribution of information is changing channels, but now online news reaches further and more people than ever before. In the last decade, and thanks to digital formats, a murder on Balmes street, the questions from the university entrance exam, or Barça's new need to go even further into debt to pay for the works, no longer have thousands of readers but hundreds of thousands. Newspaper audience figures, both paid and free content, are counted in millions of unique monthly users. But just when everything seemed to be falling into place along this path, artificial intelligence arrives and everything goes down the drain.
3. The newspapers, precisely in recent weeks, have explained the lament of old booksellers. Suddenly they find that companies linked to AI are buying them second-hand books, in large quantities. The objective is to suck all the information contained in these volumes – on interesting topics or absurd content – to provide more knowledge to the AI's databases. The serious part of the matter is that, once the information is aspirated, these books are damaged. To scan them, they are shredded and discarded regardless of their potential value. It goes without saying that this blender of cultural heritage has also reached new publications and first-rate books. While the press focuses on this, which is a major journalistic topic, it doesn't realize that the newspapers themselves are losing their shirts because of AI.
4. Until not long ago – I'm talking perhaps a year ago – when we searched for information online, about the Pujol case for example, the search engine gave us options. It linked us to ARA or El Periódico, El Confidencial or La Vanguardia. The usual Google ordered it for us, but it sent us to the media outlets and we clicked where we wanted. Now, by default, for any question we ask, we get an AI-generated answer. It's a summary made by itself, based on the compendium of all the information that different journalists from different media outlets have worked on and published. It does not cite sources and, even more serious, it does not refer you to them. AI makes itself wise because it has sucked up all the work of all the newspapers, from here and from around the world, and the media owners and press associations neither protest, nor complain, nor demonstrate. All their present and historical content has been stolen from them, their business could go down the drain in a few days, and they are not capable of organizing themselves to file a proper lawsuit against AI companies? If they don't do something about it, it's very clear who will kill the newspapers. Of course, the world is full of mistaken prophecies.
