The true-crime genre has been a cornerstone of the podcast market for years, and we could very well see a proliferation of newsletters about cold cases, wife murders, or gangland rackets. Sadly, this is a form that could easily be mimicked by ChatGPT, which can pull information off Wikipedia and other websites and stitch together stories that feel suspenseful.
4. An A.I. scammer cons her way into print
ChatGPT brings me to the next item on my list. In September, Nicholas Hune-Brown, a Toronto-based journalist and editor at The Local, put out an open call for stories about the privatization of health care in Canada. One of the better pitches he received came from Victoria Goldiee, a freelancer who boasted a résumé of publications that would intrigue any editor at a small but prestigious outlet such as The Local. Through some straightforward due diligence, Hune-Brown figured out that Goldiee had fabricated quotes in previous stories—sometimes from people who did not seem to exist—and concluded that she had likely used A.I. to write not only her articles but also her pitch. She did not appear to live in Toronto, as she claimed when she pitched her story to Hune-Brown. She had been deceptive in her other work.
Goldiee seems to have duped a long list of publications; the Guardian, Dwell, and the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland all retracted articles she had written for them. I do not think the editors in these places were naïve, nor do I think they made obvious mistakes that reflect widespread incompetence in the industry. And this does not necessarily augur a flood of A.I.-slop freelancers duping editors around the world—mostly because journalism pays terribly and there are better grifts to pull. But we are approaching a time when it will be hard to tell the difference between a daily feed of news generated by humans and one generated by a large language model. What happens when that line gets crossed?
Or perhaps an anxious and financially strapped media industry will simply cross that Rubicon itself, deliberately. Last week, the Washington Post launched an audio product called Your Personal Podcast, which will allow users to custom-build a daily summary of the news. According to an internal e-mail, users will be able to pick their own hosts, select their areas of interest, and even “ask questions using our Ask the Post AI technology.” Presumably, these answers will be derived from the paper’s own reporters and stories, but when you replace the names and faces that gather the news with a soothing robot voice, how will readers and listeners begin to think about the news?
3. Streamers get incentivized to talk about politics
I’ve written about this plenty already 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 determiner of success and failure, and the people who are always trying to game its secrets tend, ultimately, to do the same things. This past year, we saw something that I’ll call, in a term coined by the internet, “politicsmaxxing.” Content creators such as Adin Ross and the Nelk Boys, who only recently have demonstrated an interest in politics, began talking about the news—most notably, about Gaza. I imagine that many of these people will stop talking about Palestine and politics the instant the algorithms change; still, given the influence that these new-media forms have on young men specifically, it would not be surprising to see this switch get turned on during every major election cycle.
2. News traffic continues to decline
In October, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism released its annual report on the state of local news. During the past four years, according to the report, monthly page views for the hundred largest newspapers in the country dropped by forty-five per cent. The other stats in the report are no better. The number of “news deserts,” defined as areas that don’t have consistent local reporting, continued to grow, as more than a hundred and thirty newspapers shut down in 2025, about the same number that shut down the year before.
Nobody seems to have much of a plan for what to do about any of this. Certainly, no one seems to know how to fill the need for local news—despite many efforts, which 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 what people care most about are updates regarding Donald Trump. But I believe that the public is a bit sick, at this point, of endless Trump coverage, and that people will support local news efforts that try to meet them somewhere in their regular rounds, through the internet.
