---
title: Sniff test
description: Readers are adept at spotting lazy journalism
---

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# Sniff test

[Alan Hunter](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/author/alan-hunter)  30 May 2025

 3 min read

**Readers are adept at spotting lazy journalism**

When I worked at The Times, a group of colleagues and I used to regularly share screenshots of comments under articles with just two words attached: “Readers know…”

This happened when an article was so clearly angled to align with the paper’s political view and tendentious in its selection of facts or quotes. The thing was, the readers – or at least those who were moved to comment – always noticed.

I saw a variation of this theme earlier in the week when a broadsheet published an article about a fire at a significant building near London (I’m not going to say which paper because the individual journalist does not deserve opprobrium – it’s the system that’s at fault.) It was a pick-up from another paper and it was clear that the reporter, in a hurry and under pressure to produce a certain amount of content, had essentially “borrowed” the description of the property from an estate agent’s listing, as well as copying out quotes and details from other newspapers.

What interested me was the readers’ response in the comments below the line. Their assumption was that the piece had been written by or with the help of AI. Here is a selection: “You could just have put a link to the estate agent’s blurb and not typed all that out… or is it Chat GPT?”

“The article almost feels as though it \[was\] written by AI. With its concentration on the house descriptions and house values.” “I feel like a competent human author would have got the tenses right in the description of the property.”

It’s interesting that their immediate response was that the subpar journalism had been produced by AI. I suspect they are wrong in this case – ”Readers don’t always know…” – but it highlights how human journalists are going to have to raise their game to satisfy subscribers. They are going to demand more than that which can be produced by bots – and actually bots can already produce a hell of a lot better work than the report about the fire.

So the challenge is there…

## Next blog post

<https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/text-rip>

## [Text RIP](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/text-rip)

[Read more](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/text-rip)

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