> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.consumernews.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The End of the World News as We Know It - URL: https://www.consumernews.ai/the-end-of-the-world-news-as-we-know-it/ - Published: 2026-08-28T14:55:22.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-28T14:55:22.000Z - Description: An end-of-summer bleat about things in general and journalism in particular - Author: James R. Hood - Tags: Consumer Protection Everybody's stirred up about something lately and The Outraged Consumer is no exception. For the last several months, we've put aside our outrage at the way things are to make room for a little experiment – one aimed at learning and testing instead of just bloviating about Artificial Intelligence and You Know Who. I think it's turned out pretty well. We've produced [news every weekday](https://www.consumernews.ai/), built a small but loyal audience and not been accused of anything awful. We have done it with a single person, me. Newspeople – now known as journalists, if you please – are outraged at the very idea that anyone would dare use AI to organize, edit or generate news. Their primary reason seems to be that doing so would result in further job loss. That's true and very unfortunate. However, as one who has weaved his way through the news business (losing or leaving several jobs along the way) for the last 50 years or so, I would suggest that our first priority should be preserving the people's right to know, as we usually put it. Our job is to find, organize and disseminate information that people need to do their job as citizens, right? Job protection comes second. The harsh economic reality is that news can't be produced as it used to be for the simple reason that Google demolished the advertising business that has supported news from Day One. Now it is sucking up all the news produced by newspeople and, in effect, selling it back to us. The one consolation was that, until recently, Google sent traffic to its lowly servants, the news outlets of the land. It has largely stopped doing this and today simply makes off with the news and bundles it up for AI clients, leaving news organizations to starve and go out of business. This all sounds fairly alarming but is still pretty abstract to most news consumers. So let me give you an example. Our ConsumerNews.ai site is tiny but without any paid or unpaid promotion it built a small daily audience in the low hundreds – measly but at least enough to count. Since D-Day, August 18 or so, our daily web visits have been in single digits – literally 3 or, if we're lucky, 5\. That's about the time Google stopped displaying much of what it sweeps up from news sites every day. It still gathers it, but doesn't display it, except in its AI summaries and deep dives. Frankly, this doesn't matter to me from an economic standpoint, since we have never sought to turn this into a commercial enterprise. But it illustrates what's happening out there in Newsland and explains why you see daily reports of newspeople being laid off, fired and otherwise eliminated. No one seems very upset about this, except those directly affected. But Thomas Jefferson and those guys built their manifestos around the notion that a functioning democracy requires an informed public and an aggressive press. Whether we ever had that can be argued in assorted dissertations yet to come but the pathway we're currently on leads somewhere else entirely. You already know all of this, of course. You probably feel bad about it. So here's something you can do to keep our little experiment running: forward a few of your favorite ConsumerNews.ai newsletters to multiple friends or family. No one can find us on the web right now so the only way to find new free subscribers and replace the ones who drift away is for our friends and readers to promote our content if you think it's worthwhile. ### The larger question Like blind people studying an elephant, the great minds are at a loss as to how to support news, or at least the news they like. They have turned it into a maze of conflicting notions but it all seems pretty simple to me, so here is Hood's Plan to Save Journalism: 1. Charge every AI LLM a few cents for each digit they appropriate (i.e., steal) from news sites. 2. Define a news site as anything that publishes public policy news and information on a regular basis. Appoint some journalism professors – not an algorithm – to select the sites. 3. Declare that this solution stinks and is woefully inadequate. Then get to work devising something better. That's it. Have a nice day.