AI is eating media. It won't stop there.

Business Insider just cut 21% of its staff and more turmoil looms.

Business Insider, my former employer, announced today that it’s laying off 21% of its staff.

This is the most drastic cut in media I have seen. When I worked at there from 2021 to 2024, the company did two layoffs on a much smaller scale.

Executives at the time cited economic uncertainty, but the message was different this time. In an internal memo that leaked to social media, CEO Barbara Peng attributed the restructuring to declining readership and a doubling-down on artificial intelligence.

Over 70% of Business Insider employees are already using its internal ChatGPT product regularly, according to the memo. The resulting productivity gains have pushed the company to reevaluate its labor needs.

It’s a brutal, if unsurprising, moment. I still have friends who work at Business Insider, and some who were impacted this week.

Unfortunately, economists and technologists have been warning for years that AI would trigger a white-collar apocalypse. Knowledge workers — those in writing, research, accounting, law, coding — are in the early innings of a structural change.

As a newsletter author, I fall into this camp, too. I’m hoping that a personal brand, distribution and business chops insulate me, but no one will be immune from the fallout.

I struggle to envision a world where AI won’t eat everything, to borrow the words Marc Andreessen first used to describe software in 2011. Corporate media roles will suffer from severe collateral damage.

AI models do not get sick or request time off, nor do they unionize, require health insurance, or talk back to managers. The tools we have now from OpenAI, Google and other firms are already extremely effective.

And remember, today’s models are the worst they’ll ever be.

As I’ve written before, these tools commoditize expertise, which radically shrinks the separation “experts” think they have from everyone else.

That means journalists, who benefit from an above-average ability to write, research and synthesize information, no longer have the moat they once did.

The expert class of doctors, lawyers and academics are confronting the same existential question.

Since forever, knowledge has been hard-earned and highly esteemed. Schooling, jobs and social media have always rewarded those who can wield their knowledge best.

What happens to our psyches, jobs and the economy when knowledge is no longer scarce?

That’s a conversation for another day (though that day is coming fast).

For now, I anticipate that other media outlets will use Business Insider’s layoff to justify similar moves of their own.

While AI-driven productivity boosts could be a reason for newsrooms to slash jobs, I’m not yet convinced that shaky balance sheets and plummeting web traffic are not the real catalysts.

It’s tempting to blame innovation for bloodletting in media, but what we’re seeing now is less about technological disruption and more so a series of delayed consequences.

Over the last decade, advertising and on-page clicks have propped up the economic engine fueling digital newsrooms. Meanwhile, cheap capital and lofty valuations made it easier to do business.

The bill is finally coming due, and AI is only a piece of the story.

When media executives invoke new technology to justify layoffs, they are obscuring the more painful reality that they have been losing eyeballs — and so, revenue — since the pandemic.

Online audiences have fractured as media sources proliferated, which has pushed advertisers to seek out industry-specific, niche platforms.

Mainstream news companies — masters of producing algorithm-friendly content at scale — are simply not holding up under the new economics.

What we’re seeing now is not so much a clean technological disruption as it is an overdue correction.

Media companies built with scale-at-any-cost strategies are colliding into a reality that favors the niche and nimble.

The coming months will provide no shortage of winners and losers.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

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If you have been impacted by media layoffs, please reach out phil@openingbellmedia.com.