[abdullahkhalids]

> Now you just have a thousand media companies

Those 1000 --media-- news companies have been created in part by Google. Google created a game, where the website with the best SEO would bubble up to the top of their news results - not the website with the best editorial standards. This was Google 'commoditifying its complement'. In the absence of Google (but even in the presence of social media like HN or Facebook), there would be far fewer news websites that would be rewriting/summarizing the work of the actual journalistic newspapers. And in such a scenario the fewer news companies would actually make enough to continue to do serious journalism.

This is a lot more apparent if you look at other languages, which are not indexed as much by Google. There the status of news companies is a lot better.