The problem

In ten years, Brazil lost 13,147 news outlets.

That figure is not an estimate. It comes out of the daily upkeep of the largest journalist database in the country. The United States, which has been counting the same thing for twenty years, shows where the curve ends up. And there is a third fact that moves the whole subject: artificial intelligence is already building the reputation of brands and people by reading, above all, the content nobody pays to produce.

Brazil · our own data · 2014–2024 United States · 2005–2025 series Reputation and AI · 2026

I'Max Press Thermometer

Ten years of media that went away

News outlets that appeared and that closed in Brazil between 2014 and 2024, measured through the continuous upkeep of the I'Max database — the largest media database on the market.

10.795

Outlets created in the period

13.147

Outlets removed in the period

−2.352

Ten-year balance

I'Max Press Thermometer: news outlets created and removed in Brazil, with the annual and cumulative difference, from 2014 to 2024.
Year	Created	Removed	Difference	Cumulative
2014	602	1.177	−575	−575
2015	558	1.986	−1.428	−2.003
2016	658	806	−148	−2.151
2017	1.177	675	+502	−1.649
2018	800	416	+384	−1.265
2019	1.027	488	+539	−726
2020	919	1.622	−703	−1.429
2021	689	2.405	−1.716	−3.145
2022	1.337	2.911	−1.574	−4.719
2023	1.451	490	+961	−3.758
2024	1.577	171	+1.406	−2.352
Total	10.795	13.147	−2.352	−2.352

The series comes out year by year. Each step opens an address of its own, which you can save or send to somebody.

Click a column of figures to sort the table.

The last two years of the series are positive: +961 in 2023 and +1,406 in 2024. But the period still adds up to −2,352 outlets, and the low point, in 2022, reached −4,719. What closes does not come back: a hundred-year-old outlet that shuts takes with it the archive, the sources, the trust built with readers and, very often, the only person who showed up at city council meetings.

How we measure it: this is an operational count of the Brazilian press inside our own database. The SpamCortex AI helps catalog the movements of the press year by year. It is not a statistical projection or somebody else's sample: it is what actually comes into and goes out of the largest media database on the market. The picture from 2014 to 2024 is what set us off on Mais Pelo Jornalismo (MPJ).

The figure does not tell the whole story. The 10,000-plus outlets created in the period do not fill the same space as the ones that closed: winning an audience over takes time and money, and some outlets were born and died between two counts without ever making it into the statistics. On top of that come the automatic republishers, with no editorial judgment at all, which fatten the "created" column without putting a single reporter on the street.

Where the curve is heading

The United States has been counting the same thing for twenty years

Northwestern University has tracked every outlet that opens and closes in the country since 2005. The 2025 report closed out the second decade of the series — and it is the portrait of a market that has traveled the whole of the curve Brazil is now halfway along.

3.500

newspapers disappeared in twenty years

One in four Americans was left with little or no access to a printed paper covering their area.

148

went under in the past year alone

Closures and mergers together: a little over two a week, by the report's count.

212

counties with no news source at all

There were 206 the year before, and a little over 150 in 2005. The curve has not stopped climbing.

1.525

counties down to a single source

Usually a weekly. If it folds, the place joins the count above.

50M

people with little or no access

That is how many live in those counties with no coverage or only one source.

−75%

of newspaper jobs since 2005

More than 270,000 positions gone. The whole newspaper industry was down to 91,550 people in 2024.

What is shrinking is not only companies: it is people doing the reporting. There are around 42,000 journalists in the United States today, and fewer than a third of them work at a newspaper — in 2005, newspapers employed 71% of all the reporters in the country. In half the American states, fewer than a thousand newspaper workers are left.

And the move to digital did not make up for it: over the past four years, monthly visits to the websites of the hundred largest newspapers fell by more than 40% on average.

Source: The State of Local News 2025, Medill Local News Initiative, Northwestern University (Oct. 2025). Employment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, base year 2024.

Why this is the business of anyone who communicates

Reputation became the priority — and the one writing yours now is a machine

Reputation is the most repeated word in corporate communications today. What changed is where it forms: no longer only in the mind of whoever reads the news, but in the answer artificial intelligence gives when somebody asks about your brand. And that answer is assembled, overwhelmingly, out of earned media.

26%

name reputation as the year's top priority

More than any other answer among corporate communications leaders surveyed by Deloitte for 2026.

84%

of AI citations come from earned media

Across more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. The share has held between 82% and 89% since 2025.

27%

come from journalism, specifically

More than a quarter of everything the AIs cite is reporting done by a newsroom.

0,3%

is all that is left for paid content

Ads and advertorials barely register. The answer is not for sale.

51,1%

of ChatGPT's sources are news or earned media

In an independent reading of 5.35 million citations across eight different models.

3.749

AI content farms cataloged so far

"News" sites generated by robots with no human oversight, in 16 languages — Portuguese among them.

The sums that do not add up

Reputation is now built by other people. What the machine cites is what was published by someone with no commercial relationship to the brand — and that is precisely what makes the citation worth something.
That content is the only kind nobody pays for. The company pays the agency, pays for the media, pays for the platform. The journalism holding up its reputation in the AI's answer was produced by a newsroom that got nothing for it — and that, by the numbers above, is closing.
Where the reporting goes, the space does not stay empty. It is taken by whoever can produce at scale for next to nothing. In the United States, fake local news sites have already overtaken real daily newspapers: 1,265 against 1,213 in June 2024.
And the machine reads both. An AI that needs earned media to answer a question about your brand will go and find it wherever it can — including on a content farm that has learned to look like a newspaper.

Earned media without paid journalism does not go away: it turns into room for the fake.

Sources: Generative Pulse — What is AI reading?, Muck Rack (May 2026; 25 million links, 17 sectors) · GenAI Lens, Meltwater (Apr. 2026; 5.35 million citations across eight models) · 2026 Corporate Affairs Report, Deloitte (42 interviews with corporate affairs leaders, mostly FTSE 100) · AI Tracking Center, NewsGuard (Jun. 2026) and Sad Milestone, NewsGuard (Jun. 2024).

What we do about it

Where the local news goes dark, we put a newsroom online.

Mais Pelo Jornalismo (MPJ) is I'Max's answer to these numbers: a redesigned news site, hosting, cybersecurity, company e-mail and technical support, with no money asked of the publisher — what the publisher gives back is journalism. The target is a thousand sites, around 25 per state, with 30% of them covering a sector rather than a town.

For anyone who hires I'Max, it is the same circuit closing: your message reaches the right newsroom, and part of what the company earns comes back as a newsroom online — the newsroom the machine will cite when somebody asks about you.

Journalists take care of the story. We take care of the technology.

See how the program works →