Unspun

I can’t find the link, but it was of a comedian on Instagram Reels ranting about Gen Z and the lack of critical thinking.

Her take was that there was once a time when people practiced critical thinking, which amounts to listening to both sides of an argument before coming to a conclusion. After that, the critical thinker could agree or disagree, but they would lay out their arguments instead of trying to cancel the one they disagree with.

I bring this up because when I’ve written about the media before, it encountered this cancel culture instead of a full-spirited discussion that could lead to some fruitful outcomes for the media.

My Position on Mainstream Media

So let me be clear on where I stand: A strong mainstream media is most beneficial for society, business, and my profession—public relations. This is even more so today, when AI or LLM Search is dominating how consumers and other stakeholders are getting their information on brands and corporations.

The Jakarta Post Editorial: A Cautionary Tale

That said, here’s an argument that The Jakarta Post’s editorial on music—why it should not be (virtually) free—embraces an outlook that contributes to the situation the mainstream media finds itself in today.

Inherent in the editorial argument is that music is valuable intellectual property, artists are to be respected for their creativity and labor, and musicians need to be paid much more than what streaming services such as Spotify pay them today.

The Napster Precedent

This argument dates back to 1999 when Napster burst onto the scene. The music industry was aghast; it took legal action against the platform for infringing their copyright and “stealing” their music.

They won the legal battle. Napster was found guilty of copyright infringement and had to close down in 2001.

The music industry lost the war, though. Napster changed how people accessed music and paved the way for music streaming services.

More importantly, Napster forced the music industry to adapt, exposing the demand for online music and pushing the industry toward online distribution.

In the end, the music industry could not fight technology, and the result is iTunes, Apple Music, and Spotify. Musicians give their music away virtually free (although they benefit from the long tail of sales on digital platforms) so that they can build a brand.

Musicians like Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, or Coldplay, all cited in the Jakarta Post article, thrive because they were able to leverage their brands to create events and attract sponsorship—where the money is.

The Media Industry Faces the Same Challenge

What’s that got to do with today’s media industry? Technology, this time in the form of AI or LLMs, is again on the march and disrupting whole industries.

Kompas, for example, reported at the CTRL+J APAC conference last month, organized by AMSI, that its website traffic dropped by about 30 percent for news stories and up to about 60 percent for non-news stories because of AI.

Instead of embracing technology, however, the news industry seems determined to fight it. Most of the journalists there talked about how news was a public good, is valuable, and should be protected and funded, although they did not really know by whom.

The same sentiments were echoed by many participants at the Jakarta AI Forum organized by the World Association of News Publishers on August 4, although they focused more on how to get AI to improve their workflows and productivity.

What also emerged from the two forums was that most of the news publications in Indonesia and elsewhere block AI crawlers from accessing their sites and scraping their news information, which they felt was valuable.

A preliminary research by Maverick Indonesia, for instance, found that many of the major news news outlets in Indonesia such as Kompas.com, Kompas.id, Kontan, Liputan6, Tempo.co, Okezone and Jawapos.com actively block their sites from web crawlers.

The Opportunity in Giving Content Away

Is the news industry fighting the same war that the music industry fought in the 2000s and lost because of technology? This line of thinking gives rise to interesting opportunities for the news industry.

Instead of holding on to the belief that their news is valuable, why not give it away for free or very little money, like musicians do today on Spotify and other platforms?

They may not have a choice because LLMs change how consumers and other stakeholders get their information. Unlike what we have been used to when searching for information, LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok do not give us a list of links. They give us a recommendation instead.

The New Game: AI Visibility

This changes the game for traditional SEO as well as marketing, brand building, and reputation management. Whereas being listed on the first or second page of Google was enough, we now talk about AI visibility.

In AI search results, you are either recommended as a result of certain prompts, or you are invisible. The recommended brands have a huge advantage because of anchor bias and authority bias.

High-Authority Sources Win in AI

What makes this situation an opportunity for news publishers is how the LLMs are informed to make their recommendations.

From countless studies, including those by public relations firms like Hard Numbers and PR software providers Muck Rack, as well as authoritative sites such as Search Engine Land and Generative Engine Optimized, LLMs are most influenced by high-authority sources. This was verified by Maverick Indonesia’s own research into LLM behavior in the Indonesian context and ongoing work in Generative Engine Optimization work.

High-authority sources are those that are widely recognized for their reliability, credibility, and accuracy—particularly from journalistic sources, the traditional news organizations. In the PR business, we classify those as Earned Media that have greater credibility because they are secured by their newsworthiness rather than being bought.

A New Business Model for the AI Age?

This being the case, perhaps news publishers should think of a new business model. Instead of generating revenue from dwindling subscriptions and eyeballs, they might want to consider how they can parlay the influence they have on the new search engines in the area of brand building and reputation management.

If they do so, they might come up with a business model that is suited for the times, rather than trying to fight the march of technology like the music industry in the early 2000s.