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Launched last month, Arc Search is an app that’s poised to revolutionize the way you browse the web. It’s just the first of many artificial intelligence tools that will change the way content is consumed, potentially spurring commercial news outlets to change their business models when advertising revenue disappears overnight.
When that happens, public and nonprofit media will remain important sources of factual, original reporting amid the growth of unreliable automatically generated content. But we will only succeed if our audience has a strong awareness of our brand across platforms and our financing model is not closely tied to online underwriting.
Over the past year, artificial intelligence tools have become increasingly common. Every major web company has released its own style of large language model, the technology behind these tools. All are trained on massive amounts of data and are designed to answer any type of question within the scope of the model, whether the answer is based in reality or not. Tools such as ChatGPT, Bing, and Gemini use algorithms that don’t always cite their sources, making them unreliable in finding verifiable information. Because it takes time to integrate new data, many models lag in responding to current news. Until recently, artificial intelligence was not used for news consumption.
With the introduction of Arc Search, this situation changes. For the first time, artificial intelligence models are available as applications for consuming specific content rather than producing content from large data sets. The idea behind this new web browser is that the Web is not a collection of web pages to be visited, but a source of information to be exchanged.
The starting point is familiar to the average web user: the search box. However, the results of the search were something else entirely. Arc returns not a set of links, but an AI-generated summary of those links organized into sections with meaningful titles. To prevent artifacts inherent in the output of any large language model, it checks to ensure that details in the summary (such as numbers and quotes) are actually present on one of the source pages. The end result for users is a clean, readable, quoted summary of search results without having to click on every link.
It’s easy to see the appeal of such an app. Commercial news outlets place distracting ads on their websites to maximize revenue. Frankly, it has become a nightmare trying to read news articles in pop-ups to encourage newsletter subscriptions, with mid-scroll auto-playing videos, and animations inserted between each paragraph. On a desktop, this is annoying but manageable. On mobile devices, this is nearly impossible. From the perspective of many readers, it is objectively better to consume web content without dealing with any annoying ads or filler content.
Whether Arc Search succeeds or not, its model will be widely copied. I believe this will mark the beginning of the end for ad-supported commercial journalism online, as the online advertising market will effectively disappear as more and more consumption of publisher content becomes input to models rather than human eyes. This will only lead to one result in business terms, which is that the only sustainable news model will rely on subscription or other non-display advertising revenue.
Moving to a subscription model poses two problems. First, due to cost, most consumers will subscribe to only a few independent sources, resulting in siled regional reporting. Second, only larger population centers can maintain a subscription base to support the work of news organizations. Ultimately, the free “news” market will increasingly be served by media outlets that provide opinion and advocacy without making a profit. Reliable fact-based reporting will only be available to those who can afford to pay.
For public media, the impact of this shift is unclear. As AI tools become more widespread, public media will play an increasingly important role as a source of free, high-quality, unbiased content, both for human users and for client-side crawlers that generate ephemeral summaries. Like Arc is doing today.
This requires us to start thinking about future funding models that are diverse enough to withstand the complete loss of display advertising. We also need to think about how to market our purpose and mission in multiple places to increase touchpoints where AI is less likely to be mediated.
This includes things many of us are already doing, such as buying paid physical media and engaging with audiences on as many social platforms as we can handle. It should also include changes to the digital presence we have, especially apps. The public media app ecosystem can get better. It’s so bad, in fact, that many stations are writing their own content or joining alliances to do the same thing.
In fact, there should be an app using the new single sign-on technology to provide video and audio as well as written content from PBS, NPR, member stations and our partners. The user experience will be better, and the benefit marketing and membership value of the communities we serve will be more clearly communicated.
I also hope we can elevate, collaborate and promote other nonprofit newsrooms in our community to ensure everyone has access to high-quality journalism, regardless of their ability to pay. We can’t control the development of technology, but we can try to meet people’s needs with whatever tools they want to use.
Jason Katterhenry is AZPM’s Director of Information Technology.
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