Credible journalism takes time, effort, human intelligence

There’s an idiom in journalism: the goat must be fed.

The proverbial goat has changed over the years. It used to be the next day’s paper. Then it was the 24-hour news cycle. Then the 12-hour news cycle. Then it was websites.

Those pages, those hours, those constantly refreshing sites — they all must be fed. The goat can never go hungry because a fed goat is a fed public. But then suddenly there were so many goats, with ever-bigger appetites, and keeping them fed became impossible.

So it’s not entirely surprising to me, as someone whose two decades in journalism has overlapped with the advent of blogs, the boom and bust of digital media, multiple “pivots to video” and the credo “do more with less,” that AI has become an appealing tool to “feed the goat.”

It’s alarming to read stories, such as this weekend’s 49.8 cover story by my colleague Eva Wasney, about websites such as Boring News, whose AI-generated articles — jammed with factual errors, fabricated quotes and dubious imagery — are filling news gaps in rural communities.

It’s alarming to read a Wall Street Journal profile of a Fortune reporter who has cranked out 600 stories in six months using generative AI and how he thinks that’s a good thing.

But I also think it’s instructive to think about how we got here.

In the 2010s, we saw a boom in digital media. These were agile outlets that weren’t beholden to a print cycle. But there was, at first, still an emphasis on quality.

Pioneering sites such as BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox and Gawker were all still turning out longform reporting, despite some legacy media sniffing that all they published were “listicles.”

But eventually, quality was supplanted by quantity. More new websites, more upstarts and more blogs promising to “disrupt” media.

People were always checking their phones now; you had to give them more. You had to leap onto The Discourse lest you be left behind. This was the era of hot takes and dishy personal essays and clickbait with a singular goal: to go viral.

Staffers (if writers were lucky enough to be hired on as staff, that is) were expected to churn out multiple posts a day chasing clicks and views — quick-hitters that were often just aggregate stories that strip-mined other media outlets for quotes and information, usually, at least, with attribution: “Per Variety.” “According to the New York Times.”

They might proffer a whiff of analysis or some snark, and then they’d hit post. Proto-slop, if you will.

Or, websites would pay a whopping $50 to young women, especially, to reveal their most intimate secrets as part of what was dubbed the Personal Essay Industrial Complex. It’s cheaper and faster to mine an aspiring writer’s trauma than it is to commission a reported story on the same subject, and those pieces had the tendency to go mega-viral — often to the detriment of the writer.

Many digital media sites of the 2010s have folded now, or have become pale imitations of what they once were. Personalities have splintered off into newsletters and podcasts, and both markets have become oversaturated.

But for the news organizations still trying to do journalism in 2026, well, you are up against bots and misinformation produced by GenAI and, in Canada, social media giants that don’t allow you to post news.

And if you’re a burned-out, overworked reporter, I see how a tool that could help you write hundreds of stories in a few months might be exciting.

Why anyone feels the need to write hundreds of stories in a few months in the first place, however, is a telling indictment of the media ecosystem many of us came up in. Yes, the goat must be fed, but it doesn’t need to be stuffed until it explodes with low-quality slop.

Journalism is a competitive, deadline-driven business — we want to get it right but we also want to get it first. But reporting can often be slow work, especially the kind that results in scoops and investigations and colourful features and revealing profiles and other work readers value. It takes time.

Because the goal was never to churn out as much content as possible. The goal is to inform the public.

Journalism doesn’t always happen at a desk. It happens out in the world. It is, at its very base, real people talking to other real people. As Brent Jolly, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, told the Free Press: “Journalism is at its core a human craft.”

And humans, at some point, can’t keep doing more with less. So maybe we need to do less with more, and hope that readers see — and value — the difference. The goat will still get fed.

winnipegfreepress.com/jenzoratti