Mountains beyond Mountains: AI and Media Disruption in 2023

Transcript: Opening keynote at Outdoor Media Summit, 09/25/23, in Boise, Idaho, by Stephen Regenold.

HELLO! Thank you for having me. Welcome to Boise. I see a lot of familiar faces. Thanks to Yoon, who is a longtime friend, and the OMS staff. This venue is great and I am excited for the conference ahead. 

I am Stephen Regenold, the founder of GearJunkie and I have been involved in media for 20+ years, including as a journalist, reporter, editor, founder, publisher, and now for the last couple of years on the executive level with AllGear Digital.

Ok, so 2023… this has been a heck of a year. What a strange time and place, maybe even more so if you’re in media. AI, deepfakes, LLMs, machine learning, text programs that hallucinate and lie, and neural networks that can write a book. Are we at the Outdoor Media Conference? This all sounds so sci-fi.

A year ago I thought a “generative pretrained transformer” was a toy car that folded up and changed into a robot. Maybe it held a little plastic laser gun. It did not, however, generate text on “how to fix a flat tire” or “write me 10 jokes about Boise.” (We’ll get to that.) 

So much has changed this year, and the landscape just looks different for publishers than ever before. Now, as we look ahead to 2024, it’s good to step back and try and get some scope.

I recently heard the climate in media this year described as “A combination of economic headwinds, looming regulation, and the advent of AI.”

That’s a lot. And if that wasn’t enough, Google killed GA3, a blow for digital publishers. Google also launched its generative search tool, which feels like short code for plagiarism sometimes, or at least close to it. 

The future of search, SEO, and organic traffic – the backbone of many media businesses – is uncertain as usual, but now even more so that Google decided to bring in AI. The task of getting people to a webpage continues to be a whack-a-mole adventure that never ends. 

Also, let’s talk about advertising. This is where many publishers get their revenue, and it’s what keeps us alive. Starting a decade+ ago, digital publishers from GearJunkie to the New York Times have been in battle with Meta, Alphabet (Google), and other tech giants for advertising dollars.

The FAANG, as it’s called – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google – ate up the media landscape over the past few years. Magazines died. Publishing giants and formerly glossy titles have been reduced and merged and conglomerated.

Craigslist years ago famously destroyed a pillar of revenue (classified ads) for thousands of newspapers. The landscape is riddled and unrecognizable from when I graduated from journalism school in 1999.  

But back to advertising. Not only now are we in media competing with the known tech giants and the hyper-customizable campaigns, we are now competing with… Instacart.

Yes, the food marketplace where you can order spaghetti at 11pm. A trend now is advertisers turning to marketplaces like Instacart and Uber to reach the eyeballs that media used to sell and guarantee. 

How impactful is this? The industry publication WorkWeek wrote this month about the trend, citing an S-1 document from the food delivery giant that revealed advertising is now 30% of its business, with more than $750M in annual revenue. $750M in advertising spent on Instacart. Basically, they are now a CNN in revenue scale for ad dollars. They are beating the media companies at their own game.

Uber will do more than $500M in advertising in 2023, the article claims. Why is this? “These marketplace businesses make perfect homes for advertising.” Each has a high-intent demand side with large amounts of data on users. Where better for McDonalds to advertise a new triple bacon cheeseburger with ghost pepper sauce than on an app where people are already hungry and ordering food?

Yes, 2023 is weird for media. I haven’t even got to AI too much yet.

And print media? Well, that is a whole other chapter that we probably don’t have time to unpack right now. There are still innovators in the paper and ink game, and we are seeing some renewed energy for tangible media in the hand.

Compared to even a few years ago, however, paper as a medium is aging out, losing share and influence, quieting down, and becoming boutique, especially for a younger generation of readers who grew up with screens.

There is a graveyard of print titles in the outdoor space, from Powder Magazine and Bike, to Surfer, Rock & Ice, Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, and so many more. Those last two were “bibles” of the outdoor media and had existed in print since the 1800s. That was until Recurrent bought them in 2020 and quietly digitized the playbook and rebooted the staff.

Go to the “support” page on the Field & Stream site and click on the FAQs. There is an entry that shows, “My Field & Stream magazine has not been delivered. Where is it?” The answer is “There is currently no print edition. Subscribers can use their Field & Stream+ login email to access current stories on the website, or read them in magazine format through our iOS, Android, and desktop apps.”

I am doubting the old guard, people who got that magazine for decades, are logging in.

But we do still have Bikepacking, Overland Journal, Freeskier, Mountain Gazette, Adventure Journal, Gripped, Paddling magazine, a new publication, Trails mag, and the OG (since 1977) Outside. Who did I miss? There are still a few. I love a good magazine, don’t get me wrong, and I am a holdout who still subscribes to a few titles and gets them in the mail.

But, ironically, you know what was among the more interesting of new magazines of the past year? It’s something made by AI. Pages and pages of AI art and the prompts a human used to conjure the pixels up to align from the code. Welcome to Midjourney magazine.  

So, back to AI it is … the buzz of all buzz right now … we could dive in for the rest of the talk on this. But what if we focus on just the visual side for a moment?

Is anyone here a photographer or illustrator? What do you think of Dall-e and Midjourney? These image generation tools are yet another arrow in the side for anyone who makes a living with graphics, pictures, camera bodies, and lenses.

MidJourney and its ilk offer free and instant – and often stunningly beautiful – imagery at the push of a prompt. It’s among the most wild, tangible tech advances I have seen in my career. Here’s “potato over apocalypse, sun streaks and mountains burning,” some digital art I created last night before brushing my teeth.

Did anyone think we’d be here a year ago? With generative transformers and burning potatoes? Advertising trending on a food app. It can cause my head to spin.

Is this doom and gloom, or the steady march ahead? I try to be an optimist, and I try and look at the bright side of life, or at least seek out the humor and irony.

Speaking of … as promised a few minutes ago, now, onto the jokes. You can thank our AI overlords for these gems. To start, I asked ChatGPT to write me a few jokes about journalists attending a conference in Idaho. Oh course, that means potatoes.

1) Why did the journalist bring a backpack of potatoes to the conference? – Because they needed some "extra sources" for their stories.

2) Why did the journalist get in trouble at the Boise conference? - Because they kept "spuddering" their words. 

3) Why did the journalist bring a camera crew to Boise? – Because they heard there were some "a-peeling" stories to cover. 

4) Why did the bloggers organize their own conference? - Because they couldn't find a more convenient way to "post" up and network.

Ok, I am sorry. Those were so bad. It’s probably accurate to say standup comedy is safe for now.

I actually told the AI as much. That the jokes sucked. He/it/they responded with careful consideration to my dislike, talking about how it “understands that humor can be subjective” and “I'm sorry if the previous jokes didn't quite hit the mark. . . . Let's try one more.” 

That’s a thing about AI. . . AI is always willing to do one more. It’s amazing in that way, a way that is not human but can indeed be useful to humans.

We at GearJunkie and AllGear like to frame our use of AI tools with the premise of “what would we do if we had unlimited interns.” Those repetitive tasks you don’t want to do, or the big data you don’t want to parse … put that through the ChatGPT filter and see what comes out the other side.

There was a lawyer in 2020, this isn’t media necessarily but it’s close, who brute-forced an AI to create musically all of the known 12-note melodies that can mathematically ever be created.

Damien Riehl, a lawyer and hobbyist musician, came to the idea with programmer Noah Rubin. There were billions, la-la-la—de-da, and so on and so forth, into near infinity, until the bots had put it all in one place, documented, and (here was the kicker) made it all possibly copyright-able so that the creator could “own” all the melodies mathematically existing in the universe and ostensibly take legal action toward anyone who hummed a tune.

To their credit, the actual stated goal was to release all the melodies into a creative commons and make them free and available for all. A happy ending, I think?

I am not overly musically inclined, but that anecdote struck me as illustrative of the crazy tasks people will put machines to in the present and near future. Imagine every combination of an article about climbing Mount Rainier. Or, “how to fix a flat bike tire” published 1,000 times in 1,000 iterations so that the search algorithms crawl and rank these rote articles, serving them up to readers intent on just simply fixing their flat, all whilst now being served programmatic advertising targeted to their demographic and IP at all hours and anywhere on the globe. I mean, maybe it could work? But I really hope not.

 At my company, we are leaning into AI. I’ll get to a few examples later. But safe to say AI is used daily now by a few people on staff, and it is useful, though we are not yet writing articles en masse or looking to game any systems.

Pre-AI, I had seen that rodeo before, and I’ve seen some giants rise and fall. Content mills and keyword stuffing, to name two. Google seems to eventually catch up and bite sites in the butt that get too clever. I’ve been bitten a few times, let me tell you.

Ok, a bit of a reset now a few minutes in. I was given a big task with this talk, a lot of bullet points and so much terrain. I thought maybe I would share some other possible names we brainstormed for this talk to give a bit more context for the second part ahead. There was:

• Impending Tsunamis: AI and other Disruptors

• Mountain beyond Mountains: Highs & Lows in a career of media

• Message + Code: 20 Years of Digital Disruption in media

• Catching the AI Wave

• Something with “Inflection Point, Storms, Code, and Swells”...

When we finally decided on a title – AI and Beyond: Leveraging Disruption to Your Advantage – I put the title into Midjourney for a cover slide graphic. This is what it came up with:

AI seems to really like robot people. The blending of circuits and brains. Very transhumanist with the prompts I was providing. 

Speaking of, I once met a transhumanist. It was on a bus ride from Whistler after a ski trip back to Vancouver. Zoltan Istvan is an author and was also the presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party in 2016. Yes, that is a thing. He was snowboarding with our group in Whistler. Super nice guy with some crazy ideas for sure.

I have met a lot of wild people in my life and career in media. I would not pick another way to make a living. 

I am not a transhumanist. I am happiest like many of you outdoors away from screens and silicon. I once trekked for 9 days in Patagonia to the tip of the continent, sleeping under bushes and drinking out of streams. I grew up in Minnesota and feel a spiritual connection to the North Woods and Lake Superior.  

My career started when I was 19. That is when Sean McCoy, sitting in this room and still a close friend and employee at AllGear, worked with me to launch a ‘zine. 

We built Vertical Jones during our college years at the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism. It was a 40-page B&W booklet, printed quarterly, and later we added a proto-style website designed on a Mac with Adobe PageMill and a 48k modem, all scrapped together in a crappy house just off of campus.

We rode Vertical Jones into a career of journalism and media in the outdoors. Sean went to the Virgin Islands and pursued the tropical path at a newspaper plowed by Hunter Thompson in "Rum Diaries." He covered local crime and corruption, and he bought a sailboat. Fixed it up and chartered it. He came back a decade later with wind-burned cheeks and so many wild tales.

I took a more traditional route, working first as an editor at a business/tech magazine before turning to freelance writing. I started GearJunkie as an evolution of what Vertical Jones had been, and I later convinced an editor at the daily newspaper in Minneapolis, the Star Tribune, to run my weekly column on gear.

For years, I tested equipment, traveled, climbed, and adventured. The lifestyle was full-on and the reason for being. Money came second or third at this phase, behind the experiences, the people I met, and the gear that enabled it all.    

I got known for the beat. The New York Times hired me to do a story on ice climbing in 2006. It was my big shot, and I got in a car and drove from my home in Minneapolis for hours through a blizzard to get to northern Ontario. I was to interview Shaun Parent, a legendary and wild guide who was auctioning off first ascent ice climbs. I followed Parent and his client deep into the Ontario wilds, seeking virgin ice on vertical cliffs.

The story had some drama and intrigue and adventure – but it also had an angle. Was there a moral compromise in selling first ascents? That was the nut, the news hook of sorts. For $350 you could sign up and get introduced to some ice that ostensibly had never been climbed. You could rate the route, name it, and then get your name in the guidebook as the first ascensionist, which in climbing ethos had never before been pay-to-play.

I came home after a few days with a pile of notes. The story was in this swirl of handwriting and scratches, and I needed to pull it together. My editor gave me a shot, and I was darn well going to deliver. What happened next ended up being a few of the most formative days in my career, including locking myself in a closet to write, 100% distraction free, for hours at a stretch, and re-typing published stories from the Times to get the style and the rhythm in my head.

A couple weeks later my story hit the printing press in New York.

Millions of copies of the paper were delivered around the planet, and my story was printed almost word for word as I had tapped it out in the closet.

I took this trajectory and ran with it, pitching my editor another set of stories and then getting back on the road. What came was two years of adventure and nearly 60 stories published in the NYT and on the paper’s growing website, some of the top-read pieces as ranked on the homepage. It was a thrilling period, and also validating for me as a young writer looking to make a dent.

All good things come to an end. After a couple years on the road I was ready for a new lane. I wanted to grow GearJunkie, start my own media business and try and reach some scale.  

It was 2010, and from my Times writing a communications director reached out to me. She asked if I’d be open to going to Mount Everest. HanesBrands, the underwear company, was organizing an expedition. They needed a media crew, and they were offering to pay me $15,000 to get involved.

In a brazen moment, I asked for $30,000. This was HanesBrands, I thought. Huge company. The comms people got the approval, and after a week or so I was booked and then prepping to soon head to Nepal.

The mountains and the trek through the Khumbu were life changing. The culture over there, I felt, was spiritual in a nonchalant kind of way, just recognizing the awe in it all day to day. I liked the vibe and also I liked unplugging from the Western world for a few weeks to live up in the Himalayas.

Through this expedition I also got a peek behind the scenes at a media operation with big budgets. I was getting paid maybe $800, at most $1,000, for a Times story. This Nepal gig got me $30k, which was a drop in the bucket of what HanesBrands was spending on the year-long initiative and campaign.

They didn’t call it “custom content” back then. But that is what we were producing. HanesBrands hired a crew of media people, guides, porters, Sherpas, and two Western climbers to ascend the world’s highest peak in a prototype outerwear suit made in a lab in North Carolina. We wrote about it all. We covered it on GearJunkie in a custom channel and we distributed it on Facebook and Twitter, the burgeoning new platforms of the day.

I got home and compiled some of the practices into GearJunkie. We had a small staff by then and were building a blog, as it was called then, but we’d also offer custom content and direct-sold ads. We’d charge for social media posts. Sell it all as an “integrated campaign.” And none of this would compromise the integrity of the site, we hoped, maintaining transparency with readers and focusing most of the work day by day on editorial content written by journalists objectively covering gear.

Looking back, there were a few phases like this – inflection points where we leaned into new technologies, new platforms, or new ways to reach readers or make revenue.

Around 2012, Facebook video started to be all the rage. I remember one review video we produced went viral and gained hundreds of thousands of views in a few hours. It was a heady time.

During this period, I knew some people at Wirecutter. These were its early days. GearJunkie was one of the sites that the editors there looked to for product recommendations, and Wirecutter staff would call me to talk for long periods about the nuances of winter boots or mountaineering mittens. I thought it was strange, and the style of content produced was different – essentially research projects about gear. At this time, Wirecutter wasn’t testing much gear but instead leaning on experts and quoting them, which included GearJunkie.

When everyone was focused on social media video views in the infamous and ill-fated “pivot to video” era, Wirecutter was putting out 4,000-word reviews on wool socks. Sites like DC Rainmaker and others followed suit, and soon enough GearJunkie decided to build a plan, too.

We had always written about and reviewed products; that was the core of the site. But never before (this was 10 years ago) had we monetized the links, the lead-gen to retailers. So taking on the playbook of Wirecutter, we built a launch plan to learn affiliate and build a workflow to both produce great content and also monetize it in a then-new way via affiliate links.

Today, GearJunkie does seven-figures in revenue via its affiliate links. Our articles send hundreds of thousands of clicks to REI, Backcountry, Evo, Amazon, and other retailers each month, and we get a % cut of the sales.

We hire experts, guides, writers, and journalists to pull together massive gear reviews. Our readers get the information they need to buy the warmest winter mitts, or the best rooftop tent. If done right, the incentives align on all sides in affiliate commerce.

It took a couple of years to figure out affiliate. It’s an ongoing job, and now AllGear employs a couple-dozen folks to work across its 7 sites on commerce articles and the promotion and SEO required to keep the car racing ahead on the track. 

More initiatives would come. Between 2015 – 2020, we opened a second office in Denver, built a video studio, scaled our staff, and sold bigger integrated deals, to name a few. We built playbooks around SEO. We launched a podcast, which Adam Ruggiero hosts with aplomb still today.

We nearly launched a major NFT project in 2021 (thank god we cancelled it, just in time!). In media, there are always projects to chase and shiny objects asking to be grabbed. It’s hard to know which of the gems to pick up, and which to leave be.

AI might be the shiniest of all objects I have seen. The promise of code and bots doing the work – and the tangible examples you can test at will – is too good to be true, and also too fun, too strange and intriguing. I have never seen a rush like this to test and try, move fast and break things, and see what works to gain efficiencies or (for the nefarious or opportunistic) game the system.

We spent two months this summer at AllGear working with AI. All the major LLMs, Midjourney and other image tools, and we even partnered with a startup called Another Mind to help us build some custom implementations into Wordpress and Slack (we’re still waiting for those to come to life).

The take-aways? We did publish a camp stove review written by ChatGPT as an experiment. But overall, AI content is not ready for the limelight, at least on the kind of media operations we run.

Our editors have tried to make it happen, and most of the time they are let down. An AI cannot review hiking boots or interview an athlete fresh off an FKT. And “first drafts” produced by AI on evergreen topics – "how to sharpen a knife," "how to wax alpine skis" – are often not much more than a weak framework that requires a full edit to give it depth, accuracy, and some soul. Many of the editors are saying “I would rather just start from scratch and do it myself.”

Maybe my crew is different. We are hearing from other media that AI has changed the game more. News Corp Australia, for example, is producing a mind-bending 3,000 articles a week using generative AI. They do this with purportedly a team of just 4 staff. It publishes stories on weather, fuel prices, and traffic conditions for “hyperlocal” news sites around Australia. This kind of rote coverage – essentially distilling data into words – is probably a great use for AI in its current state.

Others are more nefarious. See this tweet, which I believe is real and not a parody.

This is a grey-hat content site SEO hacker who is looking to "spin up" 300 media sites with an AI called Drafthorse. He needs just 333 monthly pageviews on each of the 300 sites to hit his revenue goals of $10,000 per month.  

At AllGear, we sometimes generate headlines for stories with Bard. It offers some excellent ideas. We use ChatGPT to distill big PDFs on complex subjects. I am finding myself, somewhat begrudgingly, using Google Generative Search more and more when I need quick answers and don’t want to peck around on the open web.

On the image side, the tools have been more useful. We have used Midjourney to illustrate stories (see above) and also have incorporated the prompt-driven visuals into sales documents and RFPs. It’s a tool for any publisher’s kit, and we’re finding it entering our workflow more and more.

NOW, where are we? Where have we come from? What is media right now? It used to be more simple – there was dead trees and ink. Things got mailed and you paid a subscription, or you turned on the TV and watched something like Seinfeld or ABC News, maybe sports, pretty much what your friends were doing and watching and reading, and you could all talk about it the next day.

And as for us in the industry, me going back about 20 years, if you wanted to be a writer there were these people called Magazine Editors and they sometimes answered phone calls and emails from their high glass towers, usually in Manhattan. Some of them were pleasant and real human beings, but many were smarmy or worse. They were called “gatekeepers,” referring not only to the information being put out there into the world via their glossy magazines and newsprint circulated by the millions, but also the gatekeepers of the voices in the industry – people like me trying to break through.

This was the early 2000s. The playing field was not level, and you had to work hard and sometimes get lucky to even deliver a pitch that would be read.

Today, anyone can start a TikTok/YouTube/Newsletter/podcast, or pretty much anything else. Platforms like Substack and Twitter, now called X, are leaning in on UGC or self-made (independent) creators, letting them build-in subscribe tools and offering the basic infrastructure for monetization and an instant media business with a few clicks.

It doesn’t mean anyone will read or view these creator-driven sites and platform content, but it does mean anyone can enter the field. The field is very flat. It’s also very, very large. Take just one of the creator platforms. Let’s talk about YouTube.

This is a phenomenon among phenomenon, that everyone can be there and paying so much attention at this one place every day online. The stats on YouTube are like astronomy – you cannot comprehend the speed, distance, or endless nature of it all. For one easy example, every day something like 80 years’ worth of new video is uploaded to YouTube. 80 years, in one day.  

Every day. Ungodly amounts of video uploaded per minute. And people are consuming it almost as fast. There are billions of people on YouTube each week, watching billions and billions of videos about life, science, sports, trends, celebrities, news, birds, and people slipping off icy steps into piles of snow. 

How do you compete, how do you “break through the noise"? YouTube is just one example now today among a dozen or so dominant platforms.

The bulk of what today is media is no longer controlled by the old guard in those glass towers. Tech has conquered, there is no looking back.

“Internet culture is culture" Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit, recently reminded us all. The speed and scale are too much and we journalists and creators can only hope to hop on and join the ride.

Add to this AI. Times all the above by a thousand. That is seemingly the wave coming from just beyond.

A question to ponder is ... Are you going to catch the wave or let it crash on your head?

I don’t believe AI will destroy publishing and media any time soon. But like the trends and the waves before it, this one is worth scoping out, measuring, looking at the tides.  

I’ll end on a positive view. The title of this talk notes “leveraging disruption to your advantage.” I see most disruption in media not as inherently negative, but as the effect of an industry in evolution and change.

Media is shifting constantly, I’ve seen this for 20 years. It’s a never-ending collective effort by people to communicate and connect, to influence, educate, sometimes sell, and to make some money, make a living out of it all, too.

A survey this month of 105 media organizations from 46 countries found that 80% foresee a larger role for AI in newsrooms of the future. The media companies noted the following uses for AI:

• Fact checking and disinformation analysis

• Content automation, and content personalization

• Text summarization

• Chatbots conducting interviews to gauge public sentiment on issues

Despite the use cases, most of these organizations also were concerned about the ethical implications of AI regarding editorial quality and issues such as algorithmic bias.

Charlie Beckett, a professor at the London School of Economics, is a former journalist for the BBC and the director of the school’s Journalism AI Project. He is known to speculate on the future of media.

Recently, Beckett talked about a hypothetical future as AI makes its way into newsrooms around the world. The conversation started with a stake in the ground: “I welcome our robot overlords in the sense that it means we will do less boring crap.”

Beckett sees the current state of media as “Journalists increasingly having to be able to do everything – be a curator, a filter, a community activist, an engagement specialist, and to be revenue conscious.” We need to add affiliate links. Deal with clunky CMS software. Edit photos. Upload video and splice it up for a bunch of platforms. Oh, and don’t forget to build your “personal brand” along the way.

Beckett believes that “AI adds to that, but also facilitates all that,” too. He is bullish that AI will take weight off journalists’ shoulders. Get rid of the boring crap and make it possible for a journalist to be a multifunctional machine.

“When an editor assigns you to research and write a feature article, then produce a shorter version for social, a snippet for Twitter, and a piece for TikTok,” Beckett provided, what if you will soon be able to simply add prompts, “press an ‘F’ key,” and the AI will do all that for you?

That’s a lot of boring crap done by a bot.

What is your job then? What should you be doing as the person here in this scenario? The abstract answer is, add human value… talk to people, get out of the office, away from the screen. Add story and soul. Guide the AI or the tools with your experience from real life.  

Get primary source information, new facts, and add the first-person view. Be a journalist, get out the notebook, and get the original story, get a scoop; a bot cannot report from a live event or do an interview from the field.

As Charlotte Owen, editor in chief of Bustle, recently said, “AI has given all publishers a gift because it’s really given us a north star of where we shouldn’t be.”

Owen talked about her company doubling down on original reporting and personal essays to differentiate its articles from the “SEO-driven content that could be replicated by generative AI technology.” I.e., more boring crap.

For journalists, producing content might soon become more about adding that elusive thing called human touch. And maybe you don’t need to produce cut-downs and video clips for social media, or spend hours copyediting for type-o’s and errors. These functions – and many more – could be done by software or AI, much like spellcheck or other common tools we use today. They could become endemic to the job, with new workflows and processes springing from the gained efficiency and the freeing up of time.

Wherever it all goes, I encourage you to stay curious, be open, be nimble, and to lean in but with an objective eye. Try prompting up some bad jokes. Build some weird images and play around. Or, maybe, if you need to focus, lock yourself in a closet for a couple days to break a mold, get into a new headspace, and get the work done.

Thank you much for your time. I look forward to today’s sessions, and I will see you all around the conference this week!