I just wish people would remember how awful and unprofessional and lazy most "journalists" are in 2026.

It's a slop job now.

Ars Technica, a supposedly reputable institution, has no editorial review. No checks. Just a lazy slop cannon journalist prompting an LLM to research and write articles for her.

Ask yourself if you think it's much different at other publications.

I would assume that most who were journalists 10 years ago have now either gone independent or changed careers

The ones that remain are probably at some extreme on one or more attributes (e.g. overworked, underpaid) and are leaning on genAI out of desperation.

I work with the journalists at a local (state-wide) public media organization. It's night and day different from what is described at ars. These are people who are paid a third (or less) of what a sales engineer at meta makes. We have editorial review and ban LLMs for any editorial work except maybe alt-text if I can convince them to use it. They're over-worked, underpaid, and doing what very few people here (including me) have the dedication to do. But hey, if people didn't hate journalists they wouldn't be doing their job.