Azeem Azhar

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.

Is it a competitor?

Is it a collaborator?

You were early to do a deal with OpenAI, but many laggards could be left behind.

Which of these four are the biggest, most interesting challenges for the CEO of a media business today?

In the face of that decline, of course, people don't care about the quality of the journalism in some sense.

you into your nightmares first.