A Note to Our Readers

Consumernews.ai started as an experiment with worthy goals that we perhaps didn't clearly spell out, an oversight I'll try to remedy here.

After spending most of the last 60 or so years in the news business, I've become something of an expert at squeezing more productivity out of a steadily declining number of reporters, editors and other functionaries.

It's no secret that as audiences and advertisers abandon the established news outlets, the continued production of informative, accurate and reasonably balanced news reports has become something of a Perils of Pauline adventure whose outcome is increasingly in doubt.

Newspeople today talk endlessly about the situation and tend to blame management, which in turn mostly blames the newspeople. Neither is to blame, of course; it's the audiences and advertisers that fled to Google and other digital wonders, leaving old media behind. Google happily slurps up the news produced by the starving masses of journalists and uses it to sells ads, occasionally throwing a crumb at one high-toned journalism foundation or another.

The newspeople are currently focused on Artificial Intelligence as the villain, fearing it will replace them. I wanted to see if this was true and decided to try running a one-person news site – not a flaming opinion outlet or literarily inclined specimen but just a plain old news site producing a few stories a day, with emphasis on news of importance to consumers.

Newspeople swear that AI is evil and rely on "detectors" to weed it out, sort of like the Pilgrims used dunking stools to detect witches. This is because journalists almost universally focus on staff size as an indication of the relative health of any news outlet.

In reality, most of the news that appears in local newspapers and on local broadcast outlets is national in scope and comes, either directly or indirectly, from the networks or wire services. This is supposed to free up humans to pursue investigative projects and undertake complex local issues they would not otherwise have time to cover.

Could AI do that? I wondered. Could it go it one better and assemble all kinds of other information of importance to audiences – not news necessarily, just information: scores, other statistics, recall reports, health studies, etc.?

Shocking truth revealed

So a year or so ago, seeking to answer those questions to my satisfaction if no one else's, I started ConsumerNews.ai. We have produced roughly 800 stories, most of them "assigned" by me to either ChatGPT or Perplexity, drafted by them and then edited and often extensively rewritten by me. The AIs were a lot easier to work with, though not as much fun, as most neophyte newspeople.

The result is not particularly thrilling. There's no personality, no puns, literary allusions or ironic inserts – just plain old news, with a bit more detail and less conflict than is usually found in daily reports. Also fewer quotes. A good quote can do wonders but too often, they just fill space and take too much time to get. They also tend to involve expense-account lunches, inflicting bouts of angina on editors and their bosses.

I'm confident the stories we assembled are as accurate as they can be. I check the sources, compare our stories to other outlets and do all the other things a responsible editor might do. Amazingly, we've had no reader complaints. Of course, we don't have many readers either.

One reason for that is that Google turned its AI detector on us and is, I suppose, planning to burn us at the stake when it gets around to it. Keep in mind that, if no one can find us, no one is likely to read us. This doesn't much matter to me since this is basically a retirement project but it would matter a great deal to some struggling start-up trying to make a name for itself.

As far as I can tell, Google is happy to read and catalog our stuff and use it in Gemini and its other outlets but no longer bothers to list us in its public index, a disservice that far outranks the other harms it routinely inflicts on a somnolent public already beaten insensate by an insanely corrupt gang of thugs who somehow took over the wheelhouse.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is: I'm not going to be doing this on a daily basis anymore. We'll keep the site up, do an occasional story and crank out some more detailed analysis of our findings when we get around to it. We may also resurrect The Outraged Consumer, something I've been doing off and on every now and then.

If you have any thoughts on the matter, please address them to my longtime associate, Truman Lewis – trumanlewis@proton.me.

Thanks for listening,

Jim Hood