Francesco Marconi

Hello everyone,
After 20 months of researching and writing, I’m excited to present to you my book: “Newsmakers: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism” by @ColumbiaUP. Coming to book stores this Fall. Available now for pre-order!🤖+📰=🚀

buff.ly/2Jw2m6F

For 200 years, news+information companies got paid to find what's true and to deliver it. AI makes delivery free. That's half the business, gone. What's left is the valuable half: being first to know something. Original Intelligence. Everyone's racing to build the pipes. The water is what gets scarce.
appliedxl.com/research/origi…

This hit #1 in three Amazon bookstore categories in the first week. Didn’t expect that. I’m giving away 10 signed copies. Tag someone in comments who always needs to know things first. If I pick your name, you both win a signed copy. I’ll choose 10 this Sunday. What if you could see the early signals before they become news? That’s not a hypothetical. That’s what this book is about.

It costs $211,900 to produce a news investigation. It costs $0.02 for an AI to extract its value. 10 million to one. That is the First-to-Know Tax.

People debating whether AI can "do journalism" are missing the point: It doesn't need to. It just needs to wait 3 minutes for a journalist to do it first.

Within minutes of publication, AI has crawled, indexed, summarized, and served the essential value, often before the reader even considers clicking through. News aggregation extracted attention. AI extracts comprehension. The user can now understand the story without ever visiting the source.

The parasite needs the host. The host is losing money. But the host hasn't realized it still has the ultimate leverage.

A handful of AI companies have started paying publishers. It won't matter. A licensing fee is a toll on a road that's being rerouted. The moment an article is published, its value can be extracted by anyone. No deal changes that.

For 200 years, the business model of journalism was temporal advantage: knowing first. AI collapsed that advantage to a window of minutes. The monetization window after publication is 3 minutes. The monetization window before publication, the detection phase, is days to weeks.

One window is collapsing. The other is where the entire value of the information economy is migrating.

The only information AI can't extract is information that doesn't exist yet.

The ratio for a daily news story is 158,000 : 1. What is it for a research report? A legal brief? An equity analysis?

vibe coding took over software: trust the AI, ship the output, don't look too closely. It either works or it doesn't. And it almost always works. The same thing is coming for newsrooms and nobody wants to say it. Call it vibe reporting. Point AI at thousands of documents, let it surface what matters, let it draft the first version. The journalist becomes the editor of a machine. The only question is whether the person editing the machine knows enough to catch what it gets wrong. This isn't a prediction. It's an inevitability. But there's a difference. Code has a compiler.. if it runs, it runs. Journalism doesn't have that. There's no compiler for truth.. yet.