Journalists should use A.I. more

Increasing productivity is good, actually

Robot reporters interview a local politician. (Image created with Claude)

There was some discourse about the use of A.I. in journalism recently, and while I think there are obvious downsides to anyone outsourcing too much thinking to computers, I want to try to make a pretty strong case that large language models are currently being under-used in journalism.

My strength as a journalist is writing, and in particular writing quickly.

So I see personal risk in relying on A.I. to generate prose, and I don’t see a lot of upside to it. On the other hand, I have absolutely in my career known journalists who are excellent reporters but who struggle with writing. For journalists with that balance of skills, the ability to dump notebooks and interviews into a context window and have it come up with some story ideas could be really useful.

In particular, it could be really useful to society. Because while I know some strong reporters who struggle with writing, the truth is that people with that skill mix have become quite a bit rarer on the ground.

When journalism had a more stable revenue base, strong reporters were valuable assets to the team and were just supported by more editing or were paired up with other journalists who could act as writing partners. But that revenue base is gone. The level of editorial support that used to be provided is much more costly and rare. So a certain amount of potentially promising reporting just doesn’t get done.

That’s bad. It’s important to remember that the point of journalism is the journalistic outputs — bringing facts to light, creating a more informed reading public — not the process. And journalism in an outputs sense is in a state of crisis, with many of its forms simply not as economically viable as they used to be. The world urgently needs ways to improve the productivity of journalism, especially coverage of workaday aspects of state and local government that have been gutted by shifts in the technological landscape.

I think there’s good reason to believe that A.I. can be a big help here.

My experiment in automating local journalism