While it is not yet possible to say that the group of technologies currently called “AI” is harmful to literally everyone, that tech is already harming large numbers of people in many different ways: jeopardizing their jobs, health, privacy, and lived environment. And I can say with certainty that the way these technologies are being built, deployed, and used has been extremely harmful to the journalism industry in general and to small news outlets in particular.
It is for that reason that my organization, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, recently joined with 59 other publishers to file a mass-action lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. Together, this group of plaintiffs, represented by the mission-driven law firm Platkin LLP, controls more than 500 news outlets large and small across the United States.
Our main complaint is that OpenAI and Microsoft took our articles without asking our permission and definitely without providing us payment of any kind, in violation of well-established copyright law, in order to build the large-language models that are the core of their AI businesses.
This is only one type of damage
This is only one type of damage that the AI giants in question have inflicted on news outlets all over the U.S. and the world. And the exposure for these companies due to that damage is absolutely huge when one combines the potential amount that our lawsuit could cost OpenAI and Microsoft with the potential amount similar lawsuits could cost those defendants — as well as the truly massiveNew York Timessuit against the same companies on the same grounds that has been wending its way through the legal system for three years. Which, clearly, is why we are suing on those grounds.
But there are other ways the vast corporations that make up the nascent AI industry have harmed news organizations. Perhaps the worst of those is that the volume of traffic to news outlets from web search has been dropping since the AI boom began a few years ago (a dilemma that Truthout leaders have ably elucidated in two recentcommentaries). We all rely upon that traffic for maintaining and, more importantly, growing our audiences over time. Audiences translate to revenue for news publications as with every other business on the web, be that revenue donations for nonprofit news groups or advertising for both nonprofit and commercial ones.
According to a January 2026 report by the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism that used a survey “drawn from a strategic sample of 280 digital leaders from 51 countries and territories” to look at major threats faced this year by the news industry, “Aggregate data, sourced from the analytics company Chartbeat for this report, show that Google traffic from organic search to over 2,500 sites was down by a third (33%) globally between Nov 2024 and Nov 2025 and by 38% in the United States, but it is not clear how much of this is down to AI overviews.”
The news editors, CEOs, and digital executives surveyed
The news “editors, CEOs, and digital executives” surveyed for the Reuters Institute report forecast another 43 percent drop in organic search traffic to news sites this year, but we’ll have to wait until the next report to see how accurate that prediction was.
And the fact that the study did not determine how much of that drop was due to AI search summaries does not mean that effect was insignificant. The Pew Research Center tracked 68,879 real Google searches by 900 U.S. adults in March 2025 and compared what happened when an AI search summary box (called “AI Overview” on Google) appeared on top of a search results page versus when it didn’t. The percentage that clicked through to a non-Google website link when there was no AI Overview box on top of the search results page was 15 percent. The percentage when there was an AI Overview box on top of the search results page was 8 percent. Meaning that almost half the people who would normally click through to a non-Google website link from Google search did not do so when an AI Overview box was present on top of a Google search results page.
The Pew study also found that only about 1 percent of users clicked ach summary were more likely to end their session entirely (26 percent with a summary and just 16 percent without one). So lots of people are simply reading the AI Overview on Google and then stopping their search without going to any other site, including news sites, as the Reuters Institute study showed
Thus, a significant portion of news outlets’ audiences
Thus, a significant portion of news outlets’ audiences are being effectively blocked from finding us even as the chatbots scrape the professionally produced articles published by the news industry to answer people’s questions. This in turn strangles the reach of most news outlets and results in our audiences shrinking.
Guess what that does to our revenue streams? It’s not pretty.
All of this is happening, mind you, in an era when the news industry is already dying the death of a thousand cuts. Private equity firms and hedge funds have been buying up news outlets, mining them for profit, and selling off whatever assets were left for decades. We had already lost most of our advertising dollars to Google, our classifieds income first to Craigslist and then to other corporations, and our audiences to all the social media giants like Meta’s Facebook — which we had gamely helped bring our audiences to starting in the 2000s (“join us on Facebook!”), only to have them start to charge us to reach those same audiences not long after we helped deliver them on silver platters.
For most of the last two decades, I have been saying that the news industry is in rolling collapse, with small local and regional publications shutting down with increasing regularity.
Now I say that American journalism is in terminal collapse.
According to the 2026 State of Local News
According to the 2026 State of Local News report released this month by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, 7,500 newspaper jobs were lost nationwide between 2024 and 2025. This, in an industry where many reporters already don’t have full-time jobs but are forced to be freelancers and find other gigs outside journalism to make ends meet. Also, the report states, “In the past year, 170 newspapers have closed or merged, at a rate of nearly three a week, and many of these were the last remaining source of original news in their communities.”
The Medill report authors try to put a happy face on the situation by pointing out that their research shows that “8,400 news outlets make up the American local news ecosystem.” But they also demonstrate that we’ve had a net loss of 3,400 local newspapers since 2005, and that “total newspaper employment has decreased by 75% over the past two decades” (2005 to 2025).
From long experience and constant communication with dozens of fellow news publishers, I will add that I believe too many of the surviving news outlets in the U.S. are as close to shutting down as my organization — continuing to survive only by the underpaid labor of an ever-shrinking number of wildly overworked staffers shored up by a legion of “stringers” (freelancers), usually uncounted by research centers like Medill, who have little hope of ever getting a “job job” in a dying profession.
AI giants walking off with the content
AI giants walking off with the content of news outlets like mine and blocking us from our audience with AI search summaries look to be the final nails in the coffin of the news industry as major news organizations join smaller ones in suffering significant staff cuts or going under outright.
As flawed as American journalism has always been, news publishers are beset by these manifold crises while the tech lords are amassing wealth at historic levels and using that wealth to dominate politics in ways that threaten democracy in the United States and beyond.
I believe that this crushing of remaining U.S. news outlets by oligarchs is not a bug but a feature of the tech-driven American economy. Billionaires in the tech industry (and other major industries besides) are singularly uninterested in anybody shining the light of day on their political and economic activities and those of their conglomerates.
That is why the Boston Institute for Nonprofit
That is why the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism is committing to fighting tooth and nail to continue producing news in the service of democracy. And part of that fight is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for ripping us off — small and perennially on the brink of financial ruin though we have been throughout our entire 11+ year run to date.
We are extraordinarily pleased to be joined in this fight by many other news publishers like us, including close friends The Shoestring of western Massachusetts, ecoRI News,East Greenwich News of Rhode Island, InDepth NH, the Pelham Examiner of New York, and the Austin Chronicle of Texas.
We hope that more folks who are aware that their lives and livelihoods have been harmed by the AI giants and other tech giants will be inspired by our action and follow in our footsteps. If enough people demand redress through the legal and political system, perhaps the oligarchs will see their industries collapse before they succeed in wiping ours out — brought down by an army of regular people defending our democratic rights. On top of the deleterious effects of the growing speculative bubble forming in an AI industry unable to create products that most people are willing to pay for.
A bubble that is looking more ready to burst by the day.
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Truthout is one of only a few platforms
Truthout is one of only a few platforms for justice-oriented, grassroots journalism. Today, we face an existential threat.
Due to Google’s launch of AI search, we’ve seen a drastic plunge in our site traffic and, as a result, our revenue. We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight.This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.
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