The information ecosystem has four new rules: production is cheap, machines are the audience, content is liquid, and intention beats attention. Shuwei Fang buries the current publishing model, and somehow ends up optimistic: journalism needs to stop protecting the article and start selling the process. (Reuters Institute)
- Four structural shifts are redrawing the economics of information: production costs near zero, AI systems replace platforms as intermediaries, content dissolves into raw material, and intention data flows to the AI, not the publisher.
- The middle of the market, where most publishers currently sit, hollows out.
- But Fang argues the addressable market for trustworthy information is larger than ever, if journalism is willing to deliver in forms that look nothing like a newspaper or a website.
