Here's a headline that made me sit up: USA Today Co. says AI is hurting its business. Then in the same breath, it says AI is going to save it.
Wait, which is it?
Turns out, it's both. And honestly, that's probably more honest than most companies are willing to be right now.
The "AI hurt us" part isn't hard to understand if you've noticed how you search for anything these days. You type a question into Google, and instead of a list of links, you get an AI-written summary sitting right at the top. You read it. You get your answer. You never click through to the actual article.
That's a problem if your business depends on people clicking through to the actual article.
USA Today Co. runs more than 200 local papers across the country, on top of the flagship paper itself. All of them depend on traffic. Traffic brings eyeballs. Eyeballs bring ad dollars. When AI tools answer the question before anyone visits the site, that whole chain breaks down.
I've watched a version of this play out in my own small corner of the internet. I've been writing about travel since 2017, and for years, search traffic was the game. Write something useful, get it ranked, get visitors. Simple. Now search results are getting eaten by AI summaries, and a lot of independent writers and small publishers are watching their numbers shrink without doing anything differently. The rules changed under everyone's feet. Nobody voted on it. It just happened.
So what do you do when the thing that built your business starts quietly taking it apart?
USA Today Co.'s answer is the interesting part: lean into the same technology. According to the reporting, the company is looking at AI for advertising and video production, using it to make content faster and cheaper, and presumably to stay competitive in a world where attention is harder to earn than ever.
Is that contradictory? Maybe a little. But is it wrong?
I don't think so. I think it's just realistic.
I've learned something similar on the road. You can resist a shift, dig in, complain about how things used to be, and genuinely, I get the appeal of that. Or you can ask: what happens if I just try the new tool and see what it actually does? When I started experimenting with AI for editing video clips and speeding up tedious parts of my own work, I wasn't trying to replace myself. I was trying to free up time for the parts only I can do, the actual storytelling, the actual judgment calls about what matters.
That's probably the real question for USA Today Co., and for any publisher watching this unfold. Can AI handle the repetitive, expensive parts of making content, so humans can focus on the parts that require a human? Can a tool that's stealing your traffic also become the tool that helps you produce more, faster, with a smaller team?
Those aren't easy answers. A lot of journalism jobs have already disappeared because the math stopped working. More AI in the production process could mean fewer people doing the work, which is its own serious problem, especially in local news, where USA Today Co.'s network lives.
But pretending AI isn't already reshaping the business isn't a strategy. It's just denial with better PR.
What strikes me most is that this isn't really a story about one media company. It's a preview. Every business built around attention, content, or information is going to face some version of this question. The tool that disrupts you might also be the tool that saves you. Sometimes both things are true at the same time, and you just have to pick your way through the mess.
I don't know exactly how this plays out for USA Today Co., or for local newspapers generally. Nobody does yet. But I know enough from changing my own approach over and over on the road to say this: the people who survive these shifts aren't the ones who had the right answer early. They're the ones who kept experimenting after the ground moved.
So what happens next? That's the part worth watching.
Source: Poynter
Read our previous article: Google Just Made Search and AI Inseparable - And Schools Are the First to Feel It
