[focusedone]

I hadn't read that Paul Graham article before, but it was extremely accurate at the time.

My degree is in Public Relations and I worked in political PR for a bit before moving to newspapers. The PR office worked so hard to word things in a way where news editors could lift our copy directly into print. It was a delicate balance to sell a point of view without sounding like a sales pitch.

Later, at the newspapers, I was shocked to learn how desperately editors would snag any text to fill the space between paid-for ads on a page. A minimal amount of actual journalism occurred above the fold. Past that we would publish absolutely anything in the English language without filtering.

This was all 20+ years ago. Now we've cut out the middle man, automatically publishing AI generated slop directly as if it were human-produced news. It's all very discouraging.