“I think being a small outlet, in three years, is going to be really, really hard from a discovery standpoint.”

That’s what Kyle Villemain, the founder and editor-in-chief of North Carolina’s The Assembly (yes, the stingray investigative reporting outlet) told Sophie this week.

For Villemain, Sophie wrote, “the clock is ticking on getting The Assembly to sustainability in the sense of building and owning its audience. With ambiguous, but potentially enormous, changes to the infrastructure of the internet looming because of generative AI (and social media companies’ shifting priorities), Villemain is very worried about search and social disappearing, for the purposes of publishers.”

This reminds me of what another local news publisher — Jeff Elgie, of Canada’s Village Media — said last year, in the context of Canada’s Online News Act. “You need Google to stay in this. Otherwise, it devastates the entire industry. You cannot lose Google and Facebook and have some reasonable publishing industry left online. It doesn’t work.”

The problem of attention is certainly not limited to local news. When Axios laid off 50 people this week, CEO Jim VandeHei cited “shifting reader attention and behavior, scattering across social, podcasts, individual creators and influencers, partisan websites, and more” as one of the forces working against news publishers. Another one of those forces? AI, wrote VandeHei, “pushing us to a technological inflection point where models can summarize news, at the same time Facebook, X, and search are faltering as reliable traffic standbys.”