- Losing My Perspicacity
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- Losing My Perspicacity, February 12, 2026
Good morning and Happy Thursday! I’m happy to see you today.
So, a lot happened yesterday, which is an evergreen sentiment these days. Pam Bondi crashed out on Capitol Hill, Pete Hegseth inadvertently shut down air traffic over El Paso, and a sad Norwegian Olympian failed to win back his lady love after celebrating his bronze medal by publicly airing their dirty laundry to the entire world. Oh, and the DOJ is surveilling Democratic members of Congress.
But today I’d like to talk to you about something else. For weeks, I’ve been saving piece after piece about how awful Google is. This is something journalists have known for a while, but I think the general public is largely unaware of it. So let me walk you through how Google killed the news media. And, let me say that this is a brief overview based on my personal experience.
In addition to my own time working in newsrooms, I’m relying on this piece by Matt Stoller at American Affairs, which I think does a pretty good job of breaking it all down. I’ll let Stoller set the scene for us.
Let’s start with why news collapsed, which has to do with advertising markets. From the early 1900s until the early 2000s, 60–80 percent of the budgets of newspapers came from advertising. And in the 1990s and early 2000s, this model ported reasonably well to the web, with a host of ad intermediaries fostering open markets for internet advertising. But a host of mergers, culminating in 2007 with Google’s purchase of DoubleClick, changed the situation.
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When Google sought to buy DoubleClick, it was a major pivot point in the industry, and highly controversial… When these firms combined, it “tipped” online advertising into a monopoly. Google could now track every individual everywhere online, and show them ads with more granularity than anyone else. Because of DoubleClick’s market position and its own search data, Google now had a God’s eye view into what every publishing company, every advertiser, and every user did.
We’d also be remiss if we didn’t talk about the effect the digitalization of classified ads had on the news industry, which relied heavily on that revenue for decades:
Craigslist, Facebook, and other similar sites that allow for digital facsimiles of classified ads have also had a massive negative impact on local news…
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From the turn of the millenium too 2022, over 2,000 local print newspapers closed their doors in America, andthe number of American newspaper journalists was cut more than in half.
Ad revenue wasn’t something I thought much about when I first left law for journalism around 2010, but what I quickly learned from running my own blog, and later at the Chicago Tribune, is that pageviews were the name of the game. Most online publications have an equivalent of what we called “The Big Board,” a real-time listing of which pieces are pulling in eyeballs and which aren’t. At two different outlets, the Big Board loomed over the newsroom all day, ranking pieces (and by extension, the journalists who wrote them) not by their newsworthiness or the quality of the reporting, but simply by eyeballs. How many people were looking at a story at once?
The decline of ad revenue in news media coincided with something else - the rise of private equity. As ad revenue began to dwindle and outlets sought a financial savior, venture capitalists descended on the industry, convinced they could make newsrooms profitable. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post. Great Hill Partners (including Jim Spanfeller) bought Gawker Media. Billionaire Sam Zell bought the Chicago Tribune, Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the LA Times … and so on, across the country. All of these buyers were certain they could “turn things around.”
The problem is that private equity makes things “profitable” by buying them up, stripping them for parts, and then selling whatever is left for a profit. As Megan Greenwell, author of Bad Company, told the Columbia Journalism Review:
Private equity did not cause the fundamental problems in the news industry. They came in and capitalized on existing problems to benefit themselves, at the particular expense of local publications. What became clear to me over the course of my reporting is that the reasons private equity came into media had nothing to do with wanting to strengthen the business models, despite promising they were going to try to solve those problems. There was no attempt at innovation, at creative solutions. They came in because there was still some juice to be wrung from the orange. They lined their pockets and then just discarded these media companies.
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I don’t think private equity firms care about journalism in the slightest. Publications are a widget, just like a hospital or a retail chain, etc. What motivates them is the chance to make money, which remains, for the moment, totally doable from downsizing newsrooms, selling off their real estate and the like.
The private equity guys had zero knowledge of what makes news profitable (and I believe news should not be profitable; it should prioritize the public interest over anything besides breaking even) or how a newsroom works, but they did understand that pageviews = advertising dollars. The more clicks a site gets per week, the more it can charge advertisers for banner and pop-up ads. If you can strip away “excess” from the newsroom — you know, things like free soda, transcription software, subscriptions to online investigative tools, and copy editors — you can wring even more money out of a dying site.
Soon, newsrooms across the country were cutting back on editors and reporters. After all, why do you need five journalists covering City Hall when you can have one? (Answer: Because there are likely too many stories for one reporter to cover well.) But suddenly, the people in charge of newsrooms didn’t care all that much about investigative reporting or even quality reporting. What they cared about was the number of stories reporters could crank out per day, ideally, without ever leaving the newsroom. That means finding a story someone else reported on, and rewriting it for your outlet, coupled with a clickbait headline that would make people choose to click on your story over others. This pursuit of clicks above all else created “a vicious cycle where, in particular, local newsrooms have less money to employ journalists to research stories, resulting in lower quality reporting, which results in further circulation declines, which results in lower ad revenue.”
This is where Google comes back into the mix, because every outlet uses Google Analytics to learn what stories are getting the most clicks and which ones aren’t. In addition, it became obvious pretty quickly that the higher a story ranks on Google, the more likely it is to get clicks. That, in turn, led to the hiring of teams of SEO specialists, whose sole job is to help newsrooms get their stories ranked on Google and Google News. A lot of journalists have adversarial relationships with their SEO teams, who are constantly pushing for things like changing headlines, changing ledes, and writing about the Dallas Cowboys (no, I’m not kidding).
You see, people love the Dallas Cowboys. When it comes to sports, writing about the Cowboys will garner more clicks than just about anything else. Don’t know what to write about? Write about the Cowboys. Or Lebron. Or anything to do with the NFL. That’s what brings in the clicks, which is how SEO specialists are judged on their job performance.
Better yet, forget chasing tips that come in or deep dives into interesting stories. Head on over to Google Trends, see what people are talking about, and write about that. It doesn’t matter if 50 other outlets have already written slightly-modified versions of the same story. Write what brings in clicks. Write it in a way that ranks on Google. Oh, and by the way, instead of writing one story per day, you now have to write four. Four stories means four times the clicks, right? And while we’re at it, get rid of all those pesky editors. All they do is cost money, and they don’t bring in any pageviews.
Enter AI. You know what really saves money on overhead, thus allowing bigger profit margins? Having generative AI write stories instead of people. People get salaries, benefits, and time off, and they always want to unionize. AI bots don’t need any of that. And they can churn out as many stories a day as they’re asked to. And, of course, Google has a generative AI platform it’d like you to use, in addition to providing AI summaries of user queries.
Google has built an AI model partly trained on news content (which it initially took for free, without asking) that's able to answer many user queries and therefore avoid having to direct them to the sites themselves.
As a result, search traffic to news sites appears to be tanking.
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Some publishers are discussing "Google Zero" — the hypothetical moment when Google Search stops sending any traffic to third-party websites, instead providing AI overviews directly on the search results page.
For example, during the 2018 Winter Olympics, a sports journalist might be asked to write a piece explaining the rules of curling. When a user Googles, “What are the rules of curling?”, hopefully that piece pops up.
But here’s what happens when I Google “What are the rules of curling?” in 2026:
That’s Google’s AI summary of the rules of curling, which it cobbled together from various sites, written by actual people. In other words, Gemini stole it.
A decade ago, newsrooms learned that readers don’t scroll much past the first page of Google; that if your story doesn’t appear in the top half of the page, the chances of people seeing it decline exponentially. Now, we have to worry that no one will read past the AI summary. Is the AI summer accurate? Maybe. Maybe not. Google itself (in an AI summary) claimed that its AI summaries are wrong 60 percent of the time.
These days, unless a reporter is lucky enough to work for an outlet that values in-depth reporting, like ProPublica or Mother Jones, or has the budget for investigative reporters, like the NYT, chances are pretty good that what a journalist writes about, and how well they write about it, is controlled, largely, by Google.
If killing news media isn’t bad enough, Google, whose mission statement used to be “Don’t be Evil,” has become exactly that. Like every other generative AI platform, Google (allegedly) violated countless copyrights to train Gemini. As someone whose work was stolen by Anthropic, and who is not being compensated for the violation of my copyright, I can attest that it sucks.
In addition, many Google products are being used to build the surveillance state, working with government agencies like ICE and CBP:
The letter lists a number of Google products and systems being used to power what it calls a “campaign of surveillance, violence, and repression.” Among them are Cloud, which forms the backbone of CBP’s national surveillance network, the Google Play Store, which is blocking ICE tracking apps, and YouTube, which runs ICE ads encouraging immigrants to “self-deport.”.
Lest you think it can’t get worse, Google has also been turning over our data to government agencies like ICE based on nothing more than a subpoena, which has no more legal power than a politely worded letter from the government, and which are often successfully challenged in court. More disheartening, Google is turning over data without giving the subject of the subpoena a chance to object or consult a lawyer.
Amandla Thomas-Johnson had attended a protest targeting companies that supplied weapons to Israel at a Cornell University job fair in 2024 for all of five minutes, but the action got him banned from campus. When President Donald Trump assumed office and issued a series of executive orders targeting students who protested in support of Palestinians, Thomas-Johnson and his friend Momodou Taal went into hiding.
Google informed Thomas-Johnson via a brief email in April that it had already shared his metadata with the Department of Homeland Security, as The Intercept previously reported. But the full extent of the information the agency sought — including usernames, addresses, itemized list of services, including any IP masking services, telephone or instrument numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit card and bank account numbers — was not previously known.
The list of other reasons Google is problematic is long, and I won’t bore you with them all. But I think all the time about an email we got at my last job, which went something like this: “What happened to all the investigations into secret racists? Or the exposés on wife beaters? Why do you guys just write the same shit as everyone else?”
The answer? Because the only thing our bosses cared about was chasing clicks. Chasing clicks meant ranking highly on Google. Ranking highly on Google meant writing about what was already popular and using some SEO tricks to get them into the “top four” box on Google search. Having to do three to four of those a day left no time for anything else. Sure, we still tried to chase down leads and scoops, but we never got to devote as much time to the reporting part of “reporting” as we should have. And none of us were in a position to quit our jobs on principle.
In conclusion, fire Google into the sun.
The High Note
Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.
Please enjoy Jon Stewart sticking it to the pearl-clutching crowd.
Hey, survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.
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