What will AI do to the scrum?
When news breaks, everyone drops their version of the same story. Will AI change that?
Because we couldn't go one week without maximum drama in the AI world, Elon Musk is leading a consortium of investors in a $97.4 billion bid to buy the nonprofit part of OpenAI. It's a wild development, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, and it's also a great example of a news scrum, where every publication that covers AI cranks out its own take on the story. AI, with its instant summarization, appears to change the incentives behind phenomenon, and may end up discouraging the traditional reporter pile-on. But you can't always trust appearances.
More on Musk, scrums and AI summaries in a minute. Before I get to that, though, here's your reminder that the comprehensive six-week AI training course for PR and media professionals now has a second cohort, beginning March 18. Register now to save big 👇
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The end of the scrum?
When news broke about Elon Musk's hostile takeover attempt to seize control of OpenAI, the tech media responded as they usually do — with a flurry of hastily written takes re-reporting the story The Wall Street Journal had broken.
Nothing against that model — I participated in it for years when I was Tech Editor of Mashable. Today, however, I'm not interested in joining the fray. The story, and the wave of takes and reblogs that followed, got me thinking about the phenomenon of the scrum — when journalists all pile on a single event because, well, it's big news.
The scrum is a definitive feature of news reporting, if not a particularly well-regarded one. Being in one means it's very difficult to stand out, and sometimes the competition for any scrap of information can get so intense that it becomes destructive to the story it's supposed to be illuminating. And from a news-consumer perspective, it’s difficult to know which publications have fresh information or good insights. If you’re not paying close attention, you might not even know who broke the story in the first place.
I don't know if the scrum is a net positive or negative to a well-informed public, but I do wonder whether the presence of AI in the media ecosystem meaningfully changes its dynamics. Looking at the many rehashes of the Musk story, the answer seems to be no. News broke, everybody jumped on it, same as always, even though AI is a present and growing force in media today. That suggests AI had no direct effect on publications choosing to cover the story.
How AI search changes incentives
However, you can bet that some nonzero number of audience members typed "elon musk openai" into an AI search engine like ChatGPT Search and Perplexity and got a capable summary of the news, probably after hearing about it on a text thread or social feed. It's a tiny portion of the broader search audience, but it's getting bigger — ChatGPT, after all, is now one of the top 10 URLs on the planet.
That means that a small but growing portion of the audience for the Musk story read an AI summary and did not click through to the story. When Google starts applying its AI Overviews to news, that portion of the audience will get considerably larger. This, of course, is the heart of the tension between AI companies and the media, and the source of so many lawsuits and business deals.
Putting aside the question of compensation and copyright, will AI alter incentives enough that the scrum begins to crumble?
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