"But the elegiac pallbearers of print may be too pessimistic. My prediction for 2026? In the era of disinformation and AI slop, we'll see hard-hitting, deeply reported investigative stories relevant to real people and real communities will once again be seen as valuable. Not just journalistically, but economically as well. This isn't a pollyannaish take. I'm not suggesting that people will suddenly stop turning to TikTok for news, or that AI won't displace commoditized types of reporting."
"But our increasing understanding of what AI can do well - summarize, synthesize, and automate - also throws into relief what it can't do, at least not yet: Actual truth-seeking. It can't break a story a corporation is trying to bury, find a fact that is intentionally being hidden, saddle up next to a source at a bar to hear something new - something nowhere on the internet or in a machine learning training corpus."
Local newsrooms are closing, creating information deserts and hollowed newsrooms under billionaire owners and inconsistent non-profit funding. Deep, local investigative journalism is expensive, time-consuming, and faces uncertain outcomes, making it endangered. By 2026, deeply reported investigative stories relevant to communities may regain both journalistic and economic value. AI excels at summarizing, synthesizing, and automating commoditized reporting but cannot perform original truth-seeking, break buried corporate stories, or uncover facts hidden from public records. AI's reliance on existing data risks a recursive loop as more LLM-generated content enters training corpora, making fresh, verified, boots-on-the-ground reporting an increasingly scarce and vital resource.
Read at Nieman Lab
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