Azeem Azhar

That's all for now and I'll catch you next time.

I see four horsemen challenging the business of journalism right now.

Hello, everyone.

I'm Azim Azhar, founder of Exponential View.

And today, we're going to look at the future of media, the future of journalism with my friend, the CEO of Atlantic Media, Nick Thompson.

Now, the last time Nick and I did anything on video, he put me in a weird exoskeleton and had me walk up some stairs in Geneva.

I've been much kinder to you this time, Nick.

Welcome to the show.

That was a year ago, and a lot has happened in the year.

I see four horsemen challenging the business of journalism right now.

I've put them into four buckets for historical reasons.

There's the challenge of the sovereign creator.

Substack just raised $100 million at a billion-dollar valuation.

They have 5 million paid subscriptions, and many journalists are leaving the traditional world to go out on their own.

The second horseman is the collapse of search traffic and the rise of AI and chat GPT as a source of traffic.

It's now our third largest source of traffic.

The third is a big secular shift, the weakening of trust and authority that media houses have had, chronicled very well by Martin Goury a decade ago.

Trust is becoming personal, not institutional.

And the question is, what do people want from those commentators?

And the fourth horseman is AI.