Originally published: March 15, 2011 · Updated: June 16, 2026

The 2011 Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media report landed on March 14, 2011. The headline finding: for the first time, more Americans got their national and international news from the internet than from print. Tom Rosenstiel, then Pew's project director, said 41 percent of Americans cited the internet as their main news source in December 2010 — more than double the 17 percent who had said the same a year earlier. Tablet ownership hit seven percent of U.S. adults in January 2011, double the rate three months earlier. The iPad had been on the market for ten months.

I wrote at the time that the news cycle was about to collapse from daily to hourly, and that a 24/7 PR agency was inevitable. Both happened. Neither was the real shift.

What 2011 was actually measuring

The 2011 Pew report was measuring the death of paper. That part was clean and obvious. By 2015 print newspaper revenue had fallen below digital advertising for the first time in U.S. history. By 2020 more than 2,200 U.S. newspapers had closed since 2005. The Pew 2024 State of the News Media report counted roughly 1,200 daily newspapers in the U.S., down from over 1,700 in the early 2000s. Local news became a desert.

The 24/7 deadline became the rule, not the exception. The PR industry built around it. The tools changed — embargoes shortened, social monitoring became real-time, crisis playbooks compressed from days to hours. The communications stack that existed in 2011 was unrecognizable by 2020.

What 2011 missed

The 2011 frame assumed the consumer would always go to a news outlet — just on a phone instead of paper. That assumption broke. The 2020 generation does not go to a news outlet. The 2026 generation does not go to a search engine. They ask a model.

Pew Research reported in 2025 that 27 percent of U.S. adults under 30 use a generative AI tool weekly for product, brand, or company research. Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 found that for users aged 18 to 24, social video platforms — TikTok, YouTube, Instagram — now lead direct news websites and apps as the primary news source. ChatGPT alone reported over 800 million weekly active users by late 2025. Google rolled out AI Overviews to U.S. search in 2024, and by 2025 those overviews were appearing on a majority of informational queries.

This is the second structural shift. The first, in 2011, moved the audience from paper to screen. The second, between 2022 and 2026, moved the audience from screen to answer. The publisher is no longer the destination. The model is.

What it means for communications

In 2011 the PR firm's job was to get a story into a publication that the audience would visit. The job has changed. In 2026 the PR firm's job is to get a story into the source layer that the AI engine will cite when the audience asks the question. The publication is now an intermediary — sometimes useful, often bypassed.

This is what AI Communications is. It combines public relations, digital marketing, Generative Engine Optimization, and AI-visibility research to grow Citation Share — the share of the answers buyers now see inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The firm that still thinks of its work as winning a print clip is the firm that lost the audience in 2011 and is losing it again in 2026.

The framework

  • Measure outcomes in citation share inside the AI engines, not in placements. A New York Times mention that ChatGPT does not retrieve is a vanity metric.
  • Build entity-rich, primary-source content that survives indexing — named spokespeople, structured data, primary URLs, real numbers. Engines reward source clarity.
  • Stop assuming the consumer journey ends at a publication. The journey now ends at an answer. The publication is one input among many. Plan for that.

The 2011 Pew report called the first transition. The 2025 Pew and Reuters data is calling the second. The firms that read both correctly will own the next decade. The firms that read 2011 correctly and stopped reading will lose share to the ones that did not stop.

Ronn Torossian
Founder and Chairman, 5W AI Communications