Journalism Dreams

I wrote about the "Heat Index" scandal and why it may not matter

Photo appropriated from Monica Eng at Axios Chicago. Sorry Monica!

It’s rare that a national news story surfaces right at my sweet spot of journalism, book publishing, and Chicago, but yesterday, May 20, was one such special day. On that day, it was discovered by a reader on BlueSky that the May 18 Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, one of the city’s two daily papers, had published a 64-page summer-themed insert titled “Heat Index” that appeared to have been largely generated by AI hallucination. A section on “summer reading” recommending fake books by real authors like Isabel Allende and Rebecca Makkai was what tipped astute readers off.

The internet exploded, as it will. You can read same-day analyses at the Atlantic, 404 Media, the Chicago Tribune, and the Sun-Times itself, where the unionized staff are understandably apoplectic. Google “Sun-Times summer books” and you risk being crushed by the takes.

The issues are layered and complex and also just so depressing. Authors (and book publicists) who fight for a millimeter of attention in a media ecosystem where books coverage has all but disappeared, and for whom AI-generated writing poses an existential threat, are furious. Summer reading lists are already mainly pre-determined by the marketing budgets of Big 5 publishers and the other mechanisms (advance reviews, etc.) that push some books to the top of the pile every season. Even if the lists are created by actual humans they most often all look the same, and read the same — the descriptive copy regurgitated from the press kit by some poor junior editor on deadline. Now it’s being compiled by robots? And of course, the cherry on this insult sundae: Actual working authors’ books have likely been already been pirated by Meta, Microsoft, or OpenAI to train the very LLMs that produced such hallucinations as Percival Everett’s “The Rainmaker,” satirical cli-fi set in “a near-future American West where artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity.” It’s as bleak as any dystopian novel.

On the journalism side, months ago the Sun-Times lost 20% of its staff as part of a buyout. As Block Club Chicago noted, the departing staffers “leave in their wake a crater of institutional knowledge and centuries’ worth of collective experience.” Those who remain are now left to put out the fire they had no part in starting. As I’ve been trying to explain to people unfamiliar with the byways of journalism, syndicated content like this is produced whole-cloth by the packager, down to the layout design, and sold to clients like the Sun-Times as a way to fill pages. It is cheaper than generating such filler with your unionized workforce. It is purchased as a business decision, something to wrap around ads, and never runs through the editorial pipeline of a newsroom (thus getting around that union) — not that “newsrooms” exist anymore either as anything but a CMS and a Slack channel. If it gets edited or fact-checked, that happens on the packager’s dime, though in this instance it clearly did not, for reasons that remain murky. Often, such content is contracted with a clause that it is to run as-is, no changes. It gets dumped into the page layout of the paper and shipped off to the printer.

Syndicated content is nothing new. King Features Syndicate, the Hearst-run operation that produced the “Heat Index” package, also syndicates “Dennis the Menace,” Sudoku puzzles, and columns by the “Car Talk” guy. And while I am beyond sympathetic to the pain of all involved — I am, after all, an author with a book coming out this summer, and have about a .001% chance of seeing said book included in any summer reading lists — it’s also silly to pretend that this stuff has ever been anything but lowest-common-denominator filler. Did anyone actually read Parade magazine? The “Heat Index” disaster is as much a cautionary tale for the business side as it is for editorial. As publishing expert Jane Friedman writes:

“Rather than be outraged at this freelancer or newspaper, I find myself wondering what changes must be on the horizon for journalism and advertising-driven content. Will newspapers and magazines be forced to take greater responsibility for advertising supplements they carry? Are supplements that deliver generic content now a vestigial tail of print publications? How will advertisers and sponsors think about generating, paying for, and vetting content in the future? If any of these entities want to remain in business and keep earning advertiser (and reader) dollars, they cannot continue business as usual.”

Meanwhile, the freelancer responsible for putting together the package freely admits to using AI to produce the content (here, for once, the appropriate term). It’s his side hustle, something he does at night to make extra money, as he can’t make ends meet with just a day job. He has been appropriately apologetic but, also, interestingly sanguine. A former journalist, he sees the reality on the ground as corporate consolidation of media demands unattainable profit margins. As he told the Atlantic, “I always thought I would retire in some little town—a campus town in Michigan or Wisconsin—and just be editor of their weekly paper. Now that doesn’t seem that possible.” Instead, having probably lost his job at the Underpaid Freelancer’s Dreck Factory, he says he’ll probably go be a shoe salesman or something.

The reputational damage to the Sun-Times may be irreparable — or is it? Does anyone outside of BlueSky and the mediasphere really care?

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From 1998 to 2007 I was an editor at the Chicago Reader, the city’s storied alt-weekly and one of the few still standing. I had no journalism training, no J-school degree, just an erratically published feminist zine and a handful of clips, but editor Alison True hired me anyway and, over the course of those ten years, taught me everything I know. I worked my way up from assistant to senior editor and staff writer, editing just about every type of story along the way, including book reviews. At the time, the paper’s exhaustive coverage of the arts was legend. But compared to the pages of reviews of dinky storefront theater shows, the 3,000-word film reviews, the entire section devoted to music, books didn’t have a dedicated space or editor until, around 2002, I said, “Hey, we should do a books issue.” This wasn’t a marketing decision or even anything readers were clamoring for, just what seemed, to me, a hole that needed filling. And everyone else said “Sure, why not?

From that editorial instinct, grew what became for a time a biannual Reader tradition of fall and summer books issues. We ran long-form essays and quick-hit reviews of new releases, publishing-related business stories, interviews with authors. We ran the late Cliff Doerksen’s surgical debunking of “serial killer expert” Helen Morrison and my friend Liz Tamny’s epic exploration of the life and messy biography of MFK Fisher. We ran interviews with Laura Kipnis and Aleksandar Hemon. I wrote what I think was the first profile of writer Jessa Crispin, then the Chicago-based proprietor of an upstart blog titled “Bookslut.” I worked hard to cut against the grain, to publish original critical thinking not regurgitated PR, even as I came to learn how the sausage was made. It was meaningful work, and so much fun. These days, that work too feels like a hallucination.

Earlier this week I attended a standing-room-only memorial at Chicago’s Newberry Library honoring my Reader colleague Mike Miner. Mike, who started his career at the Sun-Times and who died May 1 at 81, was a wonderful man and a deft, supple writer; brilliant, honestly, with a wryly skeptical demeanor and a gentle sense of humor. He was for decades the Reader’s media critic and, as he was eulogized at the Newberry and elsewhere, the moral conscience of the city’s ink-stained class. He had the office next to mine, and I used to love hearing his rich baritone rumbling through the wall as he worked the phones in pursuit of that week’s column.

The memorial felt at times an elegy not just for the man but for journalism itself. Or a at least certain kind of dreamlike journalism that honored patience, encouraged curiosity, sat grounded in accuracy and command of language, and was for a long, privileged time untethered to the bottom line. As various people spoke from the lectern it was hard to shake the feeling that we were engaged in collective mourning not just for Mike — who was beloved by so many even if, as his wife Betsy said, “Mike would never have believed all these people would show up” — but for the values he embodied.

At the afterparty, some of my former colleagues and I sat for some time with one of the rare non-journalists present. She was open and curious about our bygone shared career, and we talked about what we believed to be valuable about the unusual newspapering we had done 20, 30, 40 years ago. We talked about what it was like to be women in positions of authority in the 90s and and early 2000s, the backbreaking collective labor of love we were so proud of, and how strange it is now to explain to people what our jobs used to be. The industry has changed so much, how do you explain why it mattered to someone with no frame of reference through which they might understand it?

“But you have to keep telling your story,” she said. “It’s important.”

“Why?” We responded, almost in unison. “No one cares. After a certain point it’s too depressing.”

Or, as a friend said on BlueSky regarding the “Heat Index” scandal:

Twenty-four hours later, the outrage cycle on this story has already lowered to a simmer, though the damage remains and, hopefully, some lessons are being learned. But Institutionalized Not Caring remains the coin of the realm, an easy path to profits and power, from the Oval Office on down. Will anyone remember this sordid business in a month? Does it matter if they don’t? My suspicion is that it will go the way of Signalgate, just one more absurd fuck-up in a culture increasingly inured to them.

But I wish Mike Miner were around to work the phones and run it down.

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