How the Media Are Changing in the Age of Information Overload

By Georgios Zeritis, Chairman of Celyphos. Originally published (in Greek) by the Athens-Macedonian News Agency (AMNA) on 11 August 2026.

For two years now, almost every conversation about artificial intelligence ends up at the same question: how many journalists, creators, or knowledge and communication professionals can it replace? It is a reasonable question — but perhaps not the most critical one.

The more essential question is where economic value will be produced when access to knowledge and to the tools of communication becomes easier, faster, and far cheaper.

Major technological shifts do not usually destroy value. They move it. Consider: the internet took power away from those who controlled distribution and opened the road to direct access. Social networks handed the advantage to the platforms that control attention and the relationship with the audience. Now artificial intelligence is shifting the weight from producing content to selecting, interpreting, and understanding it.

This, in my view, is the point worth watching: value is not lost. It changes position within the communication chain.

The first upheaval is already being felt in production. Until recently, a quality piece of text or video required time, specialized people, and considerable money. Today many of those constraints are receding at a speed we could hardly have imagined a few years ago. A video is produced faster, a translation or transcription happens almost instantly, and a large journalistic archive can be searched and put to use at a fraction of the cost.

That is progress, of course. But it carries an inevitable consequence: the easier production becomes, the more content circulates. And when everyone can produce a great deal, quickly, production by itself ceases to be a distinct advantage.

The Great Challenge for the Media

In the news media we are already seeing it. Publishing more articles, posts, or videos is not enough — often it merely adds more noise. The hard part is creating something worth the reader's time: accurate, useful, well-crafted, and with real substance.

At the same time, the route by which the reader reaches the news is changing too. For more than twenty years, search engines were the main gateway to the publisher. The user asked a question, saw the results, and visited the source. Increasingly, they now get the answer inside the environment of an AI system itself. The original source may have supplied the information — yet never receive the visit.

This is not a minor change in the distribution of web traffic. It touches the publisher's relationship with its audience and, ultimately, the very business model of news. The critical question of the coming years will be who holds the direct relationship with the reader — and who collects the value that relationship generates.

It would be convenient, of course, to blame artificial intelligence for all of the media's problems. It would not be accurate. The decline of traditional advertising revenue, the migration of attention to digital platforms and video, and the shrinking of many newsrooms had all begun long before the large language models appeared.

Artificial intelligence did not create this transition. But it is accelerating it — and dangerously narrowing the window for adaptation.

That is why neither doom-mongering nor technological euphoria helps. Human judgment and the ability to deliver credible, quality information remain fundamental. Indeed, as the volume of content grows, the things that cannot easily be copied become more valuable: credibility, editorial judgment, original reporting, exclusive information and, above all, the public's trust.

From Information to Understanding

Economic history reminds us of something simple: when a good becomes abundant, scarcity moves elsewhere. In the age of artificial intelligence, information will be everywhere. What will not be everywhere is credible information — and, rarer still, understanding.

This is where a different model of content production begins to take shape. Repetitive, time-consuming tasks can pass to the technological infrastructure: a quality article turned into a short, comprehensible video, an hours-long broadcast into selected highlights, a vast archive into material that can actually be used. Not to push the human aside, but to stop wasting human time on tasks a system can execute faster.

The time gained only has meaning if it returns to where it is needed most: to judgment, interpretation, storytelling, and quality control. Technology can speed up the process. It cannot, by itself, guarantee that the result is accurate, clear, and worthy of trust.

This balance — automation where it adds speed, human responsibility where quality is at stake — does not concern the media alone. It concerns every organization that relies on knowledge and seeks to communicate: banks, insurance companies, universities, consulting and law firms.

For many years, the advantage belonged to whoever held more information. Gradually, the advantage will belong to whoever knows how to select, interpret, and synthesize better what is available to everyone.

That, in the end, is the deeper change artificial intelligence brings. It does not merely change the tools of our work. It changes the point at which value is produced.

Amid the flood of content, the organizations that will stand out are those able to do something seemingly simple, yet ever more difficult: to turn complexity into understanding, and information into trust.