Promising AI News Venture Sinks

Silicon Valley dipped its toe in the churning waters of journalism and found out what any reporter could have told them: You’ll need a life jacket.

Equipped with machine learning, artificial intelligence, and all the whiz bang technology it could muster, Artifact, the news platform founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the two fellows who founded Instagram and sold it for $1 billion to Facebook, announced it was winding down after a year of operations. “We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way,” the two men said in a blog post.

“We are at an existential moment where many publications are shutting down or struggling, local news has all but vanished, and larger publishers have fraught relationships with leading technology companies. My hope is that technology can find ways to preserve, support and grow these institutions,” Systrom wrote.

Artifact burst on to the scene about a year ago. It promised to provide a large online platform where journalists could post their stories, broaden their audience, and enhance revenues, assuming Artifact’s AI-enabled tools found value in – and an audience – the content. I wasn’t too impressed by their initial efforts, but I decided to use Artifact and give it a chance. It was designed to capitalize on machine learning to customize the reader’s feed and fashion a news report. It didn’t take me too long to pull the plug. Most of the content tended to be superficial and shallow.

Artifact’s lack of journalistic quality raises a larger point, though. As Ben Thompson, the technology blogger and an early Artifact enthusiast recently said, “maybe there’s just not enough good content on the internet!”

Indeed, I think the fall of Artifact represents more than just a repeat performance of the newspaper industry’s trip to the gallows. America is on the cusp of a moment of reckoning. Journalism writ large no longer routinely covers the courthouse, or the departments of transportation, or labor unions, or the Federal Communications Commission, the parts of national, state, and local government that reach into everyone’s home or pocketbook.

photo by Elimende Inagella

The news is increasingly irrelevant. With a few notable exceptions, we’ve created an illusion of the news. Newspapers, once the backbone of the media, now seize the easy and cheap stuff to cover -- politics, police, ball games and celebrity. Largely under the thumb of people who are more interested in first quarter earnings than the First Amendment, all manner of media produces the same stuff that felled Artifact. They repeat; they don’t report, creating narratives that become impervious to change and challenge. The only thing that counts with the plethora of hedge fund newspaper owners today is how much cash they can wring out of the news media they are strangling.  

I’m disappointed that Artifact didn’t make it, and I admire Systrom and Kreiger for at least giving writers and the news a shot. Silicon Valley is much larger than the two of them, but at least they tried to repair something their counterparts played a huge role in destroying,

For all its virtues, Silicon Valley unfortunately tends to disregard the social values of the industries and institutions it so gleefully “disrupts.” It’s ironic that the Elon Musk’s of the world started whining about news coverage when one of their own -- Bob Lee, a Silicon Valley executive -- died in a stabbing incident in San Francisco. Excuse me? The technology elite helped destroy the news industry, and now they complain about news coverage? The San Francisco press didn’t echo Silicon Valley when it collectively and reflexively blamed a festering homeless population in San Francisco for Lee’s death. He died at the hands of someone he allegedly knew, not the homeless population that tarnishes the image of the silicon city. The San Francisco press largely played the story correctly.

To their credit, Systrom and Kreiger tried to repair an industry that had a social value. For all the faults that made the media a target of technology, the news it published played a huge role in the glue that held the nation together. Human editors -- and not AI robots -- pored over the news that flowed from every corner of the world, discerning fact from fiction, and providing order to the events of the day that gave them meaning. 

Large, regional papers often picked up on local stories, elevating them to a wider audience that often led to a national stage. Large, regional papers like the Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, where I once worked, are shells of their former selves, overseen by hedge fund or billionaire owners with bankrupt ideas.

There are many small nonprofit startups trying to cover authentic news, but they lack the scale of a media once dominated by newspapers. They have promise and dedication, but they are reliant on the fickle whims of charities and philanthropists. We don’t know how they will stand up under the tremendous pressure of getting an audience to pay for the news, or how they can be stitched together in a larger network like the publications that were eviscerated by the vultures of Silicon Valley.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a problem with technologists that disrupt inefficient industries, and many newspaper companies made the wrong bet on the power of the internet to enhance storytelling. As a newspaperman, I’ve always rejected the popular notion that the internet destroyed newspapers. What destroyed newspapers was how they reacted to the internet. They turned opportunity into the evolving disaster we see today.

I don’t think the general public realizes the crucial role newspapers once played in the media. In cities and counties across the nation, the major newspapers set the news agenda for the day. Radio and TV stations often followed their leads. In a way, they were the infrastructure of the news. They built and maintained the journalistic roads and bridges traveled by much of the media that lacked the newspapers’ revenues. Now they are gone, and little is taking their place.  

In many respects, Systrom and Kreiger tried to rebuild those roads. But they lacked a key ingredient: journalists. The technological tools that Systrom and Kreiger relied upon are magnificent. One day, they may help rebuild the journalism that America deserves. But Systrom and Kreiger learned the hard way that technology always needs a human touch.

“I am particularly proud of all the work our small team of eight has accomplished,” Systrom wrote. “Our app was recently named the everyday essential app of the year by the Google Play Store. I’ve gotten the pleasure of working with some of the most talented engineers and designers through this venture and they deserve an immense amount of respect and credit. While we will go our separate ways, we can look back fondly on what we’ve built.

Team of eight? Engineers? Designers? Notice, no mention of journalists or editors. Once again, the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs failed to learn a key lesson: You simply can’t do journalism without journalists. It takes more than a staff of eight to report and edit the news.

 —James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.