Is A.I. the future of journalism? I hope not.

I'm a day late this week, but today is a holiday here in the US, so it's a Monday that feels like a Sunday. So I'm calling it good. 

How many fingers am I holding up?
lipsky | Deposit Photos

This past week, the Chicago Sun-Times copped to running a bogus feature article recommending books to read this summer. The article was written by a freelancer for King Features, a company that regularly distributes material like features and comic strips to newspapers. It has been in business since 1915. 

The article was included in a supplement called "Heat Index" -- a 50-ish-page filler "magazine" meant to fatten a paper's page count while causing no extra work for the news staff. Wherein lies the problem with this particular article: the freelancer kind of ran out of time to do it properly, so he had A.I. generate it. And then he didn't fact check it. His editor at King Features didn't fact check it, either. Neither did anybody at the Sun-Times (nor presumably did anybody at any other papers that ran it, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, according to The Atlantic, which interviewed the freelancer in question). But while the authors cited in the piece were real, the books that are supposedly coming out this summer by them are not.

The articles I've seen about this mess mostly focus on the fact that staff attrition at newspapers around the country have left the business ripe for this kind of thing. Of course that's true. But there's another danger underlying this obvious conclusion, and it relates to the credibility of the news media as a whole.

Once upon a time, people in the news business prided themselves on being purveyors of Truth, their work consisting of factual reporting, as unbiased as it's possible for a human endeavor to be. It's bad enough that conservative media have made a career out of making stuff up and calling it "news the lamestream media doesn't want you to see!!!1!!1!!!" And it's worse that even liberals are berating papers like the New York Times and The Washington Post for publishing editorials that don't reflect reality as they see it. But now newspapers are letting A.I.-generated dreck past their gatekeepers.

It reminds me of back in the '80s when infotainment became a buzzword in broadcasting. Infotainment programming blurred the line between news and entertainment, to the point where TV news has become more about entertainment than informing its viewers. Owing to the tyranny of the clock, broadcast news has always been less substantive -- by which I mean less detailed -- than a newspaper article. But with papers now beginning to lean on A.I. to generate content, whether because of staff shortages or time crunches or cheapskates in the front office, it's going to be harder to trust what we read in the paper as true.

Journalism already faces a credibility problem. Using A.I.-generated crap without having a human vet it is just going to make it worse. 

I hope newspaper owners wake up and realize that relying on chatbot-generated nonsense is not going to improve their bottom lines, and that they're supposed to be providing a service to the community, not just padding the pockets of their owners.

It may be a vain hope. It may be too late to save the news industry. But I hope not.

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These moments of bloggy news criticism have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Fact check everything!

How to get rid of a boss: a case study.

So let's say that at your latest staff meeting at work, the Big Boss tells everybody on your team that you're getting a new supervisor. Oh, and by the way, your old supervisor was offered a brand-new position in the organization, but instead of taking it, she quit.

Now, you and your colleagues have heard some things about this new supervisor, none of them good. He has some sketchy behavior in his past -- unethical and possibly even illegal. You also know that he's a crony of the Big Boss, and that B.B. has been padding the C-suite with several of his cronies over the past few months -- in an effort, B.B. says, to make the company more profitable. But your company is no stranger to putting principles ahead of money; that's the way it has done business over many decades. And you and your colleagues sure as hell don't want to work for this sketchy new supervisor. So what do you do?

Welp, if you're the Washington Post newsroom, you assign an investigative team to run a bunch of stories about the shenanigans in your new supervisor's past so that he'll quit before he even starts the job. 

And it worked! On Friday, it was announced that Robert Winnett would not be joining the Post as its executive editor, after all. 

As a former journalist, I've been bemused by watching this unfold. Winnett was hired away from the London Daily Telegram by the Post's new chief executive officer and publisher, William Lewis. Both Lewis and Winnett are British. Both are White. They had worked together in the past, at the London Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times.

But British newspapers have been known to play fast-and-loose with certain practices that are considered highly unethical to American journalists. From the link above, here, in a nutshell, is the dirt on these two guys:

A Post investigation published Sunday revealed Winnett's connections to a confessed con artist turned whistleblower who has admitted to using illegal methods to gain information for stories in Britain's Sunday Times...

The New York Times also reported that Winnett and Lewis had based some stories on stolen records, and raised new questions about a payment made to obtain information that led to a 2009 investigation into government corruption, which shook the British political establishment and led to several officials' resignations.

The Post story goes on to note, "Paying sources for information is considered unethical in most American newsrooms. So is representing oneself as anything other than a journalist to gain confidential information as part of newsgathering..."  

The way Winnett's predecessor was shown the door also rankled among the newsroom staff. Sally Buzbee was the first woman hired as executive editor at the paper, which won three Pulitzer Prizes this year. But Lewis decided she had to go anyway. He offered her a position heading up a brand-new division at the Post covering service news and social media -- which, to be honest, sounds a lot like kicking the little lady out of a man's job and sending her back to editing the women's page. Instead, she quit. 

And now Winnett isn't coming. But it's okay -- Winnett wasn't supposed to transition into the job until after the election this fall, anyway. In the interim, Lewis had hired Matt Murray, a former Wall Street Journal editor, to run the newsroom, and then helm the new division when Winnett came on board. Now I guess Murray will be the executive editor for the forseeable future. 

But never mind that. Don't you wish you had the power at your job to publicly embarrass your incoming supervisor and his boss by publicizing their sketchy pasts?

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These moments of bloggy just deserts have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!