Like many of us in the news business of this century, after a short-lived halcyon era of digital “innovation” where we gained new audiences that we didn’t own, I’ve been turning over in my mind what I see as the “future of news.”

For the last quarter-century, our job in one way or another has been to produce news in new ways for new audiences. This has been as exciting as it has been devastating. We’ve been living in a decades-long transition in which AI killing the news editor, just one of the many ways in which our business has been forced to terms with our existential reality. We (the people) now live large parts of our life inside technology-enabled networks of niches, a Creator Universe custom-fit to every possible specialization, hobby, ideology, and identity.

Most reading this know that TikTok now not only dominates phones, it’s also — in terms of format — now the standard-bearer for capital-J journalism. Even the once-staid New York Times has launched a vertical video tab in their app, featuring its reporters on camera. Still, it may come as a shock to some that I — an accidental poster child for the pivot to video — don’t see this as the macro future of news.

AI is advancing our production abilities in wildly efficient ways. The most resourced among us will be able to channel these tools to do more journalism, more quickly. At the same time, this technology will supercharge the slop productions that already eat into all of our attention.

News has always been someone’s attempt to gather a version of reality and present it to the rest of us. The future of news is still that, but the delivery mechanism continues to morph beyond anything we’ve ever imagined. I see a future in which trusted avatars continue to deliver information. Sometimes that avatar will be a real person. Sometimes it will be an AI version of a person, a digital twin, a stylized character, or some other embodied intelligence or entity. It could be an AI newscaster friend we’ve personalized. It could be a creator whose worldview we’ve bought into. The common denominator is emotional trust, not institutional authority.

Creation is still going to matter. I believe with great conviction that there’s a future world where influencers, creators, experts, niche guides and the people we look to as our stewards of information (journalists) continue, for at least portions of the population, to shape what we see. But I can’t say with any faith that in that future, news assembled and delivered by humans and human institutions is going to matter more.

The idea that news organizations “of record” will serve as primary gatekeepers of information is already a nostalgic fantasy. It’s not that all of our traditional news organizations will go away. But economic reality will further force them into tedious, painful reinvention as their audiences continue to dissipate and even the most loyal subscribers are pulled toward more convenient, frictionless ways of getting information.

This is why the future of news requires we zero-base our organizations against these new opportunities. AI is now fully collapsing production cost, with distribution cost close to zero in the current platform era. The fact that creators can produce high quality content for a fraction of the time and money it once required has opened the door for independent operations at a scale they never could have dreamed of. This means our media institutions will no longer be able to simply steward legacy brands with outdated business models and expect success. We will not be able to thread AI through an existing brittle stack of legacy tech and journalism workflows. You actually have to start from scratch.

If you do not, the creators, the indies, the startups (and, of course, big tech) will continue to beat you. They will outrun you by building devoted bespoke communities founded on earned trust. They will out-innovate you, more quickly with ever-advancing tools. My prediction is that the big guys will ultimately shed all their production costs and either buy up the indies or strike deals with them — because that’s where the audience (and hence, the revenue) will be.

For the first time in years, we’re not stuck in the stagnation of wondering what comes next. The “future of news” must see a willingness by media companies to run their businesses in the present.