You Want What We've Got: Big Tech V. Big Journalism

A sharp history of journalism's digital unraveling in the age of algorithms.

In the past three decades, the battle between big tech and big journalism has reshaped how we consume the news. Jason Whittaker delves into how tech giants outmaneuvered traditional media companies, siphoning off advertising revenue and audience attention. As journalism struggled to adapt, social media platforms evolved from utopian public spaces into breeding grounds for misinformation and fake news, eroding public trust. The influence of billionaires further complicated the digital ecosystem, swaying public opinion and exercising direct political power, of which previous media moguls could only dream. More recently, AI has begun to revolutionize content creation, distribution, and consumption. Overall, this thirty-year period has witnessed a tangled mix of progress, contention, and disinformation. Incorporating stories about The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, and many other media outlets from around the world, and discussing key figures and companies in big tech and AI like Facebook/Meta, Cambridge Analytica, Google, Microsoft, Twitter/X and Elon Musk, Edward Snowden, Jakob Uszkoreit, OpenAI, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and more, Whittaker provides an incisive examination of the frequently combative relations of these two industries and the uncertain future of the news in the digital age.