In 1962, I tripped and fell face first into journalism and have never gotten out.
I dropped out of Brigham Young University to get married (before student loans). My first job was with The Intermountain Contractor, which covered the construction business, then on to the Rawlins Daily Times, a small newspaper in Wyoming.
Now, 62 years later, and 20 years after retiring from the Washington State University faculty, I still have a finger in newspaper journalism as an occasional columnist for this paper.
In my 87th year, I’m likely in my end game.
Unfortunately, so are newspapers as we have known them.
Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism reported in 2024 that the United States has lost 3,300 newspapers since 2005.
Struggling with the loss of advertising, the remainder have had to amputate staffs and are on their deathbeds gasping for the breath of life.
Some are surviving as mere ghosts of their former selves and economics is forcing them to reduce the amount of news that they publish and how often. Crippled staffs can’t cover as many stories as they did in the good ol’ days, or dig as deeply as they used to.
Unfortunately, they are looking and feeling more and more like television or web products, a format that is foreign to the flow of intellectual ideas.
Hedge companies buy struggling newspapers, raid their resources and fold them.
Some 360 survivors have become “not for profit” organizations that have to beg for bucks to survive.
The death knell rings loudly for newspapers such as The Eatonville Dispatch in western Washington. The weekly is owned and operated (such as it is) by The Pacific Publishing Company, out of their Seattle office.
As I write, I’ve been trying for three weeks to place my daughter Eva Wulff’s obituary in the Dispatch, with no luck. They are very reluctant to take my money for a very long obituary, or even communicate with me except to tell me someone will call.
Perhaps the publisher hasn’t discovered that he could “hire” an AI robot to edit my daughter’s obit and get it into print, but other papers have, some going even further to use AI robots to write and edit their own “news,” under conjured names or even the names of real journalists who have no idea that they have written the story.
I hope you are shuddering with a fridged chill. I am.
Seattle Times Columnist Danny Westneat has reported on AI-written “news.” Three years ago a publication entitled Daily Tidings began publishing six days a week in Ashland, Ore. “The entire site now is reported and written by artificial intelligence bots, under stolen or assumed identities,” Westneat wrote.
One “reporter” tracked down by Oregon Public Broadcasting lives in the United Kingdom and denied that he was practicing journalism in southern Oregon.
The site reports about five stories a day by cribbing from real news publications, even from press releases, and has it rewritten by AI bots, to avoid being sued for copyright violations.
“What’s happening in Ashland is not an isolated phenomenon,” Westneat wrote. "Sites are popping up everywhere using AI bots to create the vague appearance of journalism, usually by rewriting or repurposing articles culled from the real local media."
A single AI tool can digest an article, converting it into 1,000 “human-quality” facsimile articles, to be spewed across the internet.
Westneat observed that, “You can’t get that kind of productivity out of a carping real reporter.” The columnist also wrote that a Hoodline AI bot converted a routine press release into a false story alleging that the prosecutor committed the murder for which he was charging another person!
I avow that I -- a very human journalist -- wrote this column.
Terence L. Day and wife, Ruth, have lived in Pullman since 1972. In 2004, he retired after 32 years as a science communicator on the Washington State University faculty. His interests and reading are catholic (small c) and peripatetic. He welcomes email (pro and con) at terence@moscow.com. Give him a piece of your mind.
