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I am a forty-five-year-old journalist who, for many years, had little interest in the news. In high school, I knew about events like the O. J. Simpson trial and the Oklahoma City bombing, but that was about it. In college, I hung out with nerdy economists who read The Economist, but I never remember turning on CNN or buying a newspaper from the newsstand. I was a sucker for novels and magazines like Wired and Spin. When I went online, it was not to check the front page of the Times but to read album reviews in the College Music Journal. Somehow, at the time, I considered myself reasonably well-informed. I had a wide range of views on the world. I wondered what they were based on? Chuck Klosterman, in his cultural chronicle The Nineties, describes that decade as the last in which it was possible to ignore the goings-on around you entirely. Perhaps the standard was rather low.
The September 11 attacks, which occurred during my senior year, were a significant turning point. Later, in my early twenties, I subscribed to the Times and the Economist, then The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. My increasingly deep engagement with the news felt like a step toward adulthood. Yet it’s striking to recall how superficial and, in fact, unnecessary my engagement with the news was back then. Today, I’m surrounded by news almost every minute; checking in on current events has become as routine as snacking or daydreaming. I have to make an effort to distance myself from the news feed. It feels wrong—shouldn’t I strive to be informed?—but it’s necessary if I want to be present in my life.
It is also absurd to complain about bad news. There are many crises in the world; many people are suffering in many ways. Yet studies of news reports over time have shown that they have become progressively more negative. Clearly, the situation has been getting worse over the last eighty years. Something is happening not in reality itself, but in the news industry. And because our understanding of the world beyond our immediate experience is so heavily shaped by the news, its increasing negativity has consequences. It makes us angry, despairing, panicky, and irritable.
The closer you look at the profession of journalism, the stranger it seems. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer than 50,000 people were employed as journalists in 2023, fewer than the number of DoorDash delivery workers in New York City, and this small group faces the impossible task of producing authoritative and engaging accounts of a confusing world every day. Journalists serve the public good by uncovering disturbing truths, and that work makes society better, but the more of those disturbing truths that become known, the worse things get. Readers complain about negative news stories, but they also increasingly click on headlines that are scary or upsetting, and so news organizations, even those that strive for accuracy and objectivity, have an incentive to alarm their audiences. (Readers also complain about the politicization of the news, but they click on headlines that they think align with their political views.) It’s no wonder that trust in journalists is declining. Gone are the days when cable TV was a novelty, and you could feel informed by reading the front page and watching the half-hour news before “The Tonight Show.” But that's also a bright spot in the world of news: It can change.
Of course, change is coming. Artificial intelligence is already changing the way we create, distribute, and consume news, both in terms of demand and supply. AI summarizes news, allowing you to spend less time reading; it’s also being used to create news content. Google, for example, now decides when to show you an “AI digest,” which extracts information from news stories, along with links to the original stories. The science and technology podcast Discovery Daily, a separate news product from AI-search company Perplexity, features AI voices reading computer-generated text.
It’s not easy to parse the implications of these changes, in part because so much news is already summarized. Most shows and columns essentially catch you up on known facts and provide analysis. Will AI-generated news summaries be better? Ideally, such stories would be more surprising, more specific, and more interesting than anything AI can produce. Then there are interviews, scoops, and other specific reporting; a reporter might labor for months to uncover new information, only to have it compiled by AI and served up in a dull summary. But if you care about detail, you probably won’t be satisfied with a simple overview. From this perspective, the most basic human-generated content—sports highlights, weather reports, push notifications, listicles, clickbait, and the like—is most at risk of being replaced by AI. (Condé Nast, the owner of The New Yorker, has licensed its content to OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT; it has also joined a lawsuit against Cohere, an AI company accused of using copyrighted material in its products. Cohere denies any wrongdoing.)
However, there is a broader sense in which “new
Sourse: newyorker.com
