The End Of Journalism As I Knew It

After asking myself for the zillionth time what the late, great Molly Ivins would say after the latest mind-numbing actions by the Trump Administration, I dusted off and started rereading her first collection of essays (1991) " Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? " I think Ivins, who died in 2007, would've found a lot of similarities between Trump and others she wrote about back in the day. "One thing the Reagan years have accomplished is to take away the sting and shock of seeing homeless people in a land of plenty. The juxtaposition of extreme poverty and extreme wealth no long seems obscene because it's so familiar." (1989) Or: "When you see government encouraging the concentration of wealth, check your wallet." (1991) (What Trump would say about a 6-foot, brash-mouthed female journalist is easily guessed .) (Margo D. Beller) She was similarly sharply funny about presidents "Texan" George HW Bush and his son (she called him Shrub...

When the woman who later became my mother-in-law was a teenager, she wanted to be a journalist. Maybe she wanted to be a globe-trotting foreign correspondent like Martha Gellhorn . Her father forbade her, saying journalism was no profession for a lady. When she told me this, many years after I married her oldest son, I remarked that he was right. A lot had changed between her teenage years and mine but what had not changed is there are some professions where it is hard to be a working woman. In my case I had my mother, the doctor, as a role model for my journalism career. (Margo D. Beller) I don't know much about my mother's life as a child in western Canada except it wasn't an easy one. She was good in the sciences and wanted to be a doctor. It was not a profession for women then. When she applied to enter medical school there was a quota - only two women per class. My mother tied with another woman in taking the entrance exam and so the university had to let in three wome...

What follows is strictly my opinion and not generated by AI.  The other day I saw this article in the New York Times : Reporters at McClatchy Withhold Bylines in Dispute Over A.I. Content J ournalists at newspapers like The Miami Herald and The Sacramento Bee are refusing to let the chain use their names on summarized articles generated by a new A.I. tool. Toward the end of my time with the online cryptocurrency news publication, one of the editors started to test artificial intelligence to write some of the features. We were told many, many times the AI-generated articles would be rigorously checked by a real live person to make sure whatever AI created was factually correct.  (Vecteezy.com) At the time I wondered why bother with AI if you were going to have a person check the article anyway. Then I wondered if this was a prelude to replacing news people to close the major budget hole created when the price of bitcoin went south and the publisher wanted to attract another own...