By John Patrick Pullen, founding editor of Long Lead

My new podcast has a big problem: Despite our best intentions, there are far too many journalists appearing as sources. If you’re part of the WAN-IFRA community, you might wonder, “What’s so bad about that?” The rub is that this show isn’t about the news at all, at least not directly. It’s the story of mankind’s greatest invention, a tool that promised to unite people across the globe – and then tore the world apart, instead.

Hosted by Pulitzer-finalist historian and journalist Garrett Graff (I am the story editor and executive producer), Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet traces an arc from Y2K to the age of AI slop we’re currently enduring, and what this new reality ultimately means for American democracy.

And though we endeavoured to get as many everyday internet users and first-person sources in the podcast as we could, it turns out many of the best ones are, well… journalists.

In hindsight, this isn’t surprising. The rise of social media and the decline of news media aren’t just two trends that are seemingly the inverse of each other; they’re interrelated. The last days of two-paper towns and kids with paper routes occurred as the ink was drying on news distribution deals with internet service providers like America Online. It would take a few more years for home pages to get more eyeballs than front pages, and that’s when things really started to change.

One journalist we interview, the Washington Post’s Alex Horton, got his start writing a personal blog as a soldier in the Iraq War. He wanted to tell folks back home what was really going on, and in doing so he became part of a media revolution that had far-flung reporters publishing around traditional gatekeepers.

Another trailblazing internet user we talk with is Bill Wasik, who was an editor at Harper’s when he invented the flash mob by simply organising people via email to do something random, somewhere, for no reason at all. In doing so, he inadvertently revealed a superpower of the web for affecting real world impact and action.

And then there’s Cates Holderness, the Buzzfeed editor who posted “The Dress” online and set the standard of internet virality. Was the dress blue-and-black or white-and-gold? It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

But there is a universal truth that’s emerged in the decade since the meme was posted, something we have all come to feel: “It’s a metaphor for the fact that people can approach an objective fact and be so far divided in how they view and interpret that fact,” Holderness says in the show’s opening episode.

But with the rise of AI, people are increasingly leaving the viewing and interpretation of objective facts to chatbots like ChatGPT and Grok – a terrifying proposition. Distrusting of news media and unsatisfied by the degradation of search engines (or their ad bloat), more people are turning to machines to construct their realities.

Asking both these bots “Did the US obliterate Iran’s nuclear site?” produces wildly different answers. Grok, noting the June 21, 2025 strikes says “No, the U.S. did not obliterate Iran’s nuclear sites.” ChatGPT, meanwhile, insists “despite tensions and threats, the U.S. has never launched an open military strike to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities.”

(It’s worth noting Alex Horton’s reporting, though a couple of days old, says the experts are still making determinations.)

With ChatGPT’s hallucinations and lies well-documented and Grok’s biases noted, seasoned pros like Horton ought to get the benefit of news consumers’ doubts – even if he’s throwing his hands in the air.

But regular people want their news fast and frictionless first, accurate next. This is how, according to Pew Research, 54% of Americans came to get their news from social media, after all. Teeming with friends’ baby pictures and status updates, the platforms already held people’s attention. They just sprinkled in enough news to keep them from straying off to another site.

But as Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet shows when covering the 2016 and 2020 elections, even that was more trouble for sites like Facebook than it was worth. Last year the site shuttered its news tab completely, turning off a vital spigot of revenue and traffic to media outlets.

In the interim and over the years, social media’s slow bloodletting has drained news media of revenue, talent, and ultimately value. This means outlets like WIRED don’t have the budget to send journalists like David Wolman to Egypt to report on tech savvy dissidents years before they eventually overthrow their authoritarian government (it’s in the podcast).

It also means that reporters like Sheera Frenkel can’t report on the adoption of the internet in Myanmar, only to discover a misinformation-fueled genocide there (also in the pod) for outlets like Buzzfeed News – because it’s now gone out of business. Grok and ChatGPT can’t walk those streets, but Wolman and Frankel did and have remarkable stories to tell.

At Long Lead, we have been bringing bold features journalism back through multimedia productions like Home of the Brave, our National Press Foundation Award-winning deep dive on veteran homelessness, and our Webby Award-winning profile The Catch. Now in its fourth season, our podcast Long Shadow has won the Edward R. Murrow Award and the RFK Human Rights Journalism Award.

The Long Shadow team doesn’t regret featuring so many journalists in Breaking the Internet; there are plenty of non-media folks in there, too. Perhaps in hindsight, to use a Silicon Valley phrase, “it’s a feature, not a bug.”

It takes strong hearts, passionate voices, and smart editorial judgment to tell the story of the technological forces that are bent on destroying journalism. We’re reporting this out it because people need to hear it to understand it – and that’s something AI will never understand.

About the author:

John Patrick Pullen is founding editor of Long Lead, a journalism studio focused on finding, financing, producing, and publishing original, in-depth reporting