In the post‑pandemic news cycle, it became easy to treat charts as a kind of journalistic spell: visualize the data and legitimacy will follow. But the flood of partisan "stat dumps" has trained plenty of people to see numbers as just another weapon in a never-ending culture war. In 2026, the task for data journalism is not to make more extravagant visualizations, but to rebuild data as a shared language between people who no longer trust one another.
If trends continue, Google's ecosystem may evolve as follows: 1. Topic clusters go mainstream. To cut LLM-generated clutter, expensive features like topic clustering, once restricted to niche products like Google News (since the 2010s), will go mainstream across Search, Gemini, Discover, and YouTube. Discover's mid-2025 AI summary cards already signaled this shift. Here's how topic clusters look on YouTube. 2. On Discover, YouTube, and Gemini, traffic will go to fewer, deeper stories on a topic.
The question today isn't whether we are using AI in journalism, because we do it already," but whether "we can do journalism without outsourcing our skepticism, our ethics, and our sense of accountability, both as journalists ourselves and the accountability we are asking people and organizations that hold power to provide," said Sideris who is studying how generative AI can better assist investigative reporting as a 2026 Nieman Fellow.
Kontinentalist is an original storytelling startup that gives visual data journalism a distinctly Asian flavor, focusing on impactful longform storytelling and immersive design.
