Roadkill on the Information Highway. 

That’s the title of an internal memo written thirty years ago by Microsoft executive Nathan Myrvold. The piece anticipated the looming economic carnage from the Internet.

The memo made a series of generally accurate predictions, though perhaps none more prescient than how the online world would ravage the media industry.

Myrvold said the loss of advertising combined with printing costs would be catastrophic to newspapers. Books (because they don’t rely on advertising) and magazines (because they are niche focused) would fare slightly better. 

He predicted it would happen slowly and then all at once. 

“The actual process by which the information highway will displace current businesses will be far more like the start of an ice age rather than instant calamity,” he wrote.

His observations come to mind at the end of a week of record media layoffs that included reporters at the Wall Street Journal and the collapse of The Messenger.

There were more than 500 journalists fired during the month of January, and that doesn’t count an additional several hundred let go when The Messenger folded last week. There have been layoffs at Business Insider and the Los Angeles Times and Forbes. 

The importance of such reporting and the threat of its disappearance was driven home in a piece just published by Sebastian Junger called When Journalism Dies.  

Myrvold’s memo is worth pairing with the recently issued Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report for 2023. One is a chronicle of a death foretold; the other an account of years of terminal illness.

The Reuters’ report suggests the situation is far worse even than it seems. According to the report, the media is on a fast trajectory to losing direct contact with its audience. 

The analysis said that just 22 percent of readers consume major media directly through a news website or app, down 10 percentage points since 2018. The majority arrive via social media. 

The Reuters data looks even worse broken down by age. In the UK, for example, 52 percent of readers 35 and older access news via direct websites or news apps, little changed since 2015. But among readers 18 to 24, only 24 percent access news directly, down from 53 percent. 

Legacy media companies have been cut off from their customers and the Reuters data suggests that won’t change. It is this disintermediation – not AI – that is life threatening. 

The paradox is that as the media struggles we are in the midst of a content Renaissance.

It’s hard to keep up with the volume of information appearing on industry websites or newsletter platforms such as Substack and Beehiiv or from users on LinkedIn, Twitter and TikTok.

One of the major conclusions of the Reuters report is that young readers trust celebrities, influencers and other social media personalities more than journalists.

That’s probably because that is where they are getting their news.