Nu Journalism: Won’t Be Fooled Again

Reporting in the Age of AI

In the media game, AI is eating our lunch.

“I think we might reach 90% of online content generated by AI by 2025,” said Nina Schick, an adviser and AI thought leader, in a recent Yahoo Finance Live appearance. “I believe that the majority of digital content is going to start to be produced by AI.”

Well, now it’s 2026, and Schick is probably right.

Which brings us to an old, half-forgotten term that suddenly feels timely again: Parajournalism. The word comes courtesy of Dwight Macdonald, who, opining in the New York Review of Books in 1965, described it as a “bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction.”

To which I reply—channeling the surrealist Man Ray in Midnight in Paris—“Exactly correct—you inhabit two worlds—so far I see nothing strange.”

There’s no point in re-litigating a 60-year-old press club brawl. But in an era of fake news, alternative facts and the accelerating prevalence of …