I am spending a sabbatical year in Berlin. The time I love most is walking through the neighborhood alone. As I walk, small brass plates embedded in the pavement in front of houses catch at my feet. They are Stolpersteine — "stumbling stones" in Korean. They are memorial plaques set, one by one, in front of the last homes where Jews dragged away by the Nazis once lived. Engraved on them are names, years of birth, dates of deportation, and the places where they were killed. These are not grand memorial halls. They lie on everyday sidewalks, placed so that anyone may encounter them at any time. Only when they catch the eye and trip the feet do we finally stop.
Something else catches my eye: birds. Even though this is the city center, there are unusually many of them. Forests cover 20 percent of Berlin's total area. Vacant lots left in ruins after the war were revived as parks and forests, and the old boundary line where the Berlin Wall once stood has been transformed into a 160-kilometer green walking trail. A history of destruction paradoxically created an ecosystem.
The culture of remembrance and the habitats of birds were both possible only because of foundations cultivated with great care over a long time. As a media researcher, I naturally think of the journalism ecosystem. At its annual developer conference held last month, Google announced that it would completely overhaul search into an artificial intelligence (AI) answer engine. It called this "the biggest change in 25 years." Now Google puts AI-generated answers ahead of links. Users stay within Google, looking only at the answers AI provides. News outlets' articles are not clicked. According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Google's traffic to news outlets fell 33 percent worldwide over the course of 2025. Some news outlets have already reported losing 90 percent of their traffic. In Korea, where all news passes through portals, this shock is more direct. AI may now take over the place where portals once held traffic. The era of "zero clicks" has already begun.
Advising the theses of graduate students majoring in journalism, I see the trends. The students, who are working journalists, have recently been bringing me similar topics: AI news summaries, automatically generated articles, algorithmic recommendations. These are problems they confront directly in the field. One question a student raised lingers in my mind. "Will a reader who has read an AI-summarized article go and look for the original?" A reader who has consumed the summary already feels they have read it all. There is no reason to click. Neither subscriptions nor advertising revenue follow. So who bears the cost of reporting? Who is left in the field? You cannot bring in the birds alone while the forest where they would nest disappears.
Berlin's Stolpersteine hold memory longer than any vast memorial hall. That is because, embedded in everyday life, they catch the eye and trip the feet, making us stop. The same is true of the journalism ecosystem. A forest does not grow simply because reporters do the legwork alone. Only when readers seek out the original beyond the summary and choose to subscribe, when advertisers recognize the value of journalism, when platforms pay a fair price for articles, and when governments support good journalism, can the ecosystem be sustained. Journalism that catches at the feet and makes us stop amid the things the algorithm lets slip by. Protecting that stumbling stone is not the work of reporters alone.
