The true crime genre has been a cornerstone of the podcast market for many years now, and we may well see an increase in newsletters about cold cases, wife murders, or gang rackets. Unfortunately, this form can easily be imitated by ChatGPT, which can pull information from Wikipedia and other websites and stitch together stories that seem intense.
4. An artificial intelligence scammer sneaks into print.
ChatGPT brings me to the next item on my list. In September, Nicholas Huynh-Brown, a Toronto-based journalist and editor Locallaunched an open call for stories about healthcare privatization in Canada. One of the best offers he received came from Victoria Goldie, a freelancer who boasted a resume of publications that would intrigue any editor at a small but prestigious publication such as Local. Through some simple due diligence, Huynh-Brown discovered that Goldie had been making up quotes in previous articles—sometimes from people who didn't seem to exist—and concluded that she likely used AI to write not only her articles, but also her presentation. Apparently she did not live in Toronto as she claimed when she told her story to Huynh-Brown. In her other work she cheated.
Goldie appears to have been duped by a long list of publications; That Guardian, LiveAnd Journal of the Law Society of Scotland all the retracted articles she wrote for them. I don't think the editors in these places were naive, and I don't think they made obvious mistakes that reflect widespread incompetence in the industry. And that doesn't necessarily herald a flood of AI freelancers scamming editors around the world, mostly because journalism pays terribly and there are better things to do. But we are approaching a time when it will be difficult to distinguish the daily news feed generated by people from the news generated by a large language model. What happens if this line is crossed?
Or perhaps the troubled and financially strapped media industry will simply deliberately cross that Rubicon. Last week Washington Mail launched an audio product called Your personal podcastwhich will allow users to create a daily news summary. According to internal emailusers will be able to select their own hosts, select areas of interest, and even “ask questions using our Ask the Post AI technology.” Presumably, these answers will come from the newspaper's own reporters and stories, but when you replace the news-gathering names and faces with a soothing robotic voice, how will readers and listeners think about the news?
3. Streamers have an incentive to talk about politics
I've already written a lot about this this year, so I'll keep it short: streaming, like all disaggregated social media phenomena, is much less democratic and independent than it might seem. The algorithm is the great determinant of success and failure, and people who are always trying to unravel its secrets end up doing the same thing. Last year we saw what I will call, using a term coined on the Internet, “political maximization.” Content creators such as Adin Ross and the Nelk Boys, who have only recently shown an interest in politics, started talking about the news— first of all, about the Gaza Strip. I believe many of these people will stop talking about Palestine and politics once the algorithms change; anyway, considering the impact that these new media forms have on young people in particular, it would not be surprising if this switch were turned on during every major election cycle.
2. News traffic continues to decline
Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism released its report in October. annual report about the state of local news. According to the report, monthly page views of the country's 100 largest newspapers have fallen by forty-five percent over the past four years. The rest of the statistics in the report are no better. Quantity “desert news“, defined as areas that lack consistent local reporting, continued to grow as more than one hundred and thirty newspapers closed in 2025, about the same number as closed the year before.
No one seems to have a clear plan for what to do with all this. Of course, no one seems to know how to meet the need for local news, despite numerous efforts that have had varying degrees of success. One possibility is that there is less demand for local news than journalists would like to believe, and that we now live in a world in which people care most about news about Donald Trump. But I think the public is a little tired of the endless coverage of Trump at this point, and that people will support the efforts of local news outlets who try to meet them somewhere on their regular tours, via the Internet.
