Washington Post has opened a new front in the war on trust. It’s letting people quoted in news stories go back in and add their own take, right beneath the journalist’s words. The feature is called From the Source. It’s launching on climate coverage first. Only named sources can use it. Their input will be screened for factual accuracy and legal risk. The paper’s newsroom leadership says the idea is to “enhance transparency.” The rollout memo came from Executive Editor Matt Murray. The tool is live this week.
This all unfolds as the Post loses readers. Subscriptions have dipped again. Ad revenue is flatlining. Readers don’t pay. A new Pew survey found that 83% of Americans have not paid for news in the past year. Only 1% say they pay when they hit a paywall. Most just leave. Some hunt for the same story on social media. Others give up. News has become background noise with a price tag.
To pull them back, the Post now runs a chatbot called Ask The Post AI. It scrapes archives to auto-answer reader questions. The company has also rolled out discount subscriptions with fewer clicks and shorter commitments. The economics remain brutal.
Over on Reddit, it’s worse. The University of Zurich ran a covert AI experiment in April. Fake profiles posted comments in the r/ChangeMyView subreddit. One bot posed as a rape victim. Another claimed to be a Black conservative opposing racial equity policies. None of it was disclosed. Moderators didn’t know. Reddit banned the accounts. The study was pulled. But users noticed. Now “dead internet theory” is trending again, the belief that most content online is fake and most users are bots.
Publishing has no firewall. AI is generating author blurbs, chapter synopses, and even ghostwritten novels. Forbes says the shift is permanent. AI now shapes editorial strategy and writes content tailored to niche interest groups. Readers don’t always know if the content came from a person or a prompt.
Traditional outlets are falling behind. Washington Post’s annotation tool isn’t a glitch. It’s a pivot. Sources now help write the story. Journalists share the page with their subjects. Readers are being taught to expect rewrites, footnotes, and editorial blur. In the background, algorithms rewrite it all again for ads, SEO, and engagement. The news is still coming. It just no longer comes from the top down.
Sources:
https://www.newscaststudio.com/2025/06/25/pew-83-of-u-s-adults-did-not-pay-for-news-in-past-year/
https://www.mergesociety.com/tech/reddit
https://publishingstate.com/what-is-the-future-of-ai-in-publishing/2025/