John Botman
For nearly two centuries, journalism operated under the assumption that truth mattered, stories should be original, and humans should write things for other humans to read. Quaint, right? We trusted journalists—those quirky creatures who collected facts, verified sources, and occasionally spelled words correctly—to give us nuanced, insightful accounts of the world. Oh, how adorably naïve we were.
Say goodbye to all that tedious human nonsense. Welcome to the dazzling future of Gournalism: Generative Journalism—also known as Auto-Generated Thought Leadership, AI-Optimized Editorial™, or, if you’re feeling especially entrepreneurial, LLMBait™.
Gournalism isn’t about petty things like facts, expertise, or originality. Those are expensive. Instead, it’s about feeding billions of bland sentences into large language models and letting them spit out authoritative-sounding paragraphs, carefully tweaked by templates or algorithms to optimize for consumption by other algorithms.
Think of Gournalism as journalism—if journalism were written by something with no understanding of humans, optimized exclusively for other non-human systems. Why pay writers to painstakingly research topics when an LLM can instantly produce vaguely correct-sounding content, finely tuned for search snippets and scraped summaries?
And don’t worry if this sounds dystopian—because, honestly, dystopia is just a legacy term. The future is all about chunks: citable, skimmable, remixable. Paragraphs? Passé. Instead, give us bullet points, comparison tables, numbered lists, and snackable subheadings. Content doesn’t need to be read; it just needs to be indexed.
“But what about trust?” cry the last generation of human editors. Trust was cute when people read things. Now, all that matters is “statistical confidence.” If a model says it confidently, that’s basically the same thing, right? Sure, it might say that Abraham Lincoln invented Instagram, but isn’t that just a creative interpretation?
Back in the day, journalism offered depth. Nuance. Context. In the age of Gournalism, we offer scale. Why have ten fact-checked, meaningful stories when you could have 10,000 semantically-rich, AI-friendly blurbs? Each one ready to be excerpted in a chatbot reply, cited in a generated answer, or surfaced in a bullet-point summary that no one ever actually clicks through.
Tools now exist that analyze how language models interpret your content. Not people—models. Because the real reader now isn’t human at all. It’s an algorithm, glancing over your metadata, skimming your headings, and deciding if your “Top 7 Takeaways from the Quantum Sandwich Industry” deserves to be quoted in a hallucinated dialogue.
There’s even a new design aesthetic for this. Content optimized to be scraped. Articles built to be footnoted. Diagrams for citation. Lists for ingestion. It’s not about telling a story anymore. It’s about being easily digested by synthetic readers in position zero.
And maybe that’s the final irony. Journalism, once a human endeavor of accountability and insight, is being transformed into content for machines to quote to other machines. Written by AI. For AI. In response to AI. A feedback loop of statistical fluency, where the only real measure of success is whether your content gets excerpted before the scroll ends.
So pour one out for journalism. It had a good run. But now it’s time to embrace the future. Time to write not for truth, or people, or meaning—but for the algorithm.
Welcome to the golden age of Gournalism.
Happy Gournaling.
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