Abare-bones recap of the past couple of decades in the American daily newspaper orbit makes it impossible to feel sympathy for the journalists now losing their jobs in the era of AI. Intensely biased leftist reporters and editors so completely alienated the vast majority of the public that once-thriving publications became financially unsustainable. They then turned to big-pocketed billionaires and well-heeled corporate conglomerates to shield them from this uncomfortable economic reality. And now they are discovering that these would-be sugar daddies won’t happily sustain endless losses in the name of a “social conscience” that placates their personal political orientations.
In early September, “dozens of reporters with at least 17 McClatchy newspapers from coast to coast – including the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star and the Sacramento Bee – were laid off as the company pivots toward lifestyle content written by artificial intelligence chatbots,” Straight Arrow News (SAN) reported Sept. 17.
The article implies that this represents a major loss for the American people. Multiple references to Pulitzer Prizes follow in the next two paragraphs, further compounding the assumption. Journalists just can’t understand that the same tens of millions of people who have tuned them out have long since stopped regarding a Pulitzer as a prestigious honor.
AI News as Corporate Hellscape
The article does acknowledge the dire state of the industry. “Newspapers nationwide have struggled for decades, and some 40% of all local US newspapers have closed shop in the past decade, including more than 130 outlets in the last year alone,” SAN wrote. Medill’s latest State of Local News report, however, states that the nearly 40% decline occurred over two decades, starting in 2005.
SAN also does a fine job of correctly identifying the mediocre (at best) nature of AI news.