YOU know those pictures in which a lone surfer stands or wobbles on his board, while behind him, blue, vast, and implacable, a curling wall of water rises to ten times his height — a wave that looks like a ravening maw? Well, that is the state of journalism this winter, as the business is once more battered by another wave of technology on the internet.

The immediate threat is generative AI, and it’s more subtle than it may at first appear. At the moment, the way in which a website gets its traffic — which is to say, the way in which it can show ads to the readers — is largely through search engines. The magazine The Atlantic, for example, gets about 40 per cent of its traffic when people click through to it from links on Google’s site. That figure comes from a Wall Street Journal story; I’d be surprised if things were different in the British press.

The problem for publishers comes when Google can use generative AI to summarise the links that people would otherwise click through to reach The Atlantic’s site. Three-quarters of them wouldn’t bother. A short summary on Google’s own site would be all that they want or need.

Journalists have themselves been doing this to other journalists for as long as the trade has existed. The central professional activity of “following up” someone else’s story is almost always a matter finding some detail to add to a summary of a story that has appeared elsewhere.

It feels different when machines can do it, and the economic consequences are very different, too.

YET there is another sort of journalism which should have been immune to this. It is, in comparison, ponderous, earnest, self-important, and largely American. It is also how the BBC and the British broadsheets used to work, before the internet bowled them over. It depends on one weird trick: instead of just assuming that everyone who is not a journalist is self-interested, unreliable, and in need of fact-checking, assume that journalists are that way, too.

The reporter must verify for themselves everything that appears in the paper, and the story must not go further than what can be verified. It’s a ludicrous ambition, and it displaces to the reader the essential work of constructing a story by fitting these facts into a narrative charged with emotional significance. But it does serve to keep us honest, or at least to inoculate us against fairly deliberate dishonesty.

This principle is everywhere in retreat. The shrewd and experienced press critic Liz Gerard, in The New European, points out that the rage and self-congratulation with which the national papers are now exploiting the Post Office scandal derives from reporting that hardly ever made the national press.

“The Mail, which published just one front page lead in 15 years in its ‘victorious campaign’ for the postmasters, ran seven splashes on the bounce on Keir Starmer having a beer and a curry during the pandemic. I bet people don’t need reminding about that.

“There is a pattern here, where the big titles are constantly beaten on important issues by the trade press, the docudramas and the Panoramas.

“Don’t newspapers have specialists any more? People who read the trade press relevant to their beat and pick up and develop stories? And even if they don’t, everyone reads Private Eye. Why don’t news editors follow up its stuff? Is it because it’s too lefty? Too dangerous?”

The answer, I think, is that the readers of the trade press expect to act on what they read there, and so they have a use for truth. The readers of the mass-market, ad-supported press have no skin in any game. They are powerless. That is the political problem. They prefer entertainment because the truth of a story is irrelevant to them. They certainly don’t want their prejudices disturbed — and that’s just as true on the Left as on the Right.

THIS has a malign interaction with the economics of the web. Precisely because of the loss of traditional advertising revenue, the formerly broadsheet papers are dependent on subscriptions and are, therefore, terrified of offending their readers.

In the special cases of The New York Times and The Guardian, which compete for the affections of Left-leaning Americans, they are also bullied by internal cliques of precious and self-important younger journalists, who have never been reporters or internalised the disciplines of reporting only what can be verified, whether or not the readers would like it to be true.

Before Christmas, The Economist carried an impassioned attack on his former employer by James Bennett, who was sacked in 2020 as opinion editor of The New York Times, after a piece that he published by a Republican politician, urging that the National Guard be deployed to put down riots, made many of his colleagues feel unsafe. Apparently, they had gone into journalism to feel safe. Mr Bennett believed that it was his job to tell the readers what they did not want to hear. The readers disagreed, and his editor agreed with them.