I'm a journalist, and this is problematic. Over the past five years, we've seen AI platforms come in and replace us in our day-to-day content, like sports stories, stocks and market news, and syndicated news content. It's very possible that the only human jobs in this industry will be linked to editorialized and interview-based content, where human interaction is necessary for the creation of a cogent story.
The problem here is that, historically, journalism has had something of a pipeline for content creation. Reporters, gathering information on their beats, would hand that information over to a writer. Writers would stitch that information into a story, which would be sent to an editorial staff responsible for correcting technical errors, facts, and voice. The story would then be arranged in the next publication alongside photographs, which would be printed, collated, shipped and distributed.
There was an entire industry built around this production pipeline. The Internet, self-publishing, and AI have cut that down to effectively three jobs: Editorial and Multimedia journalists, and office techs. Some publications are attempting to maintain separate writing and editing teams, but the discrete beat reporter is all but gone, fact checkers and copy editors are a dying breed, and the entire newsprint industry is on its death bed. In the last paper I worked at, a team of three people did page layout for print, and one man was responsible for maintaining the site (writers self-published), managing the multimedia teams, and sending finalized layouts to the printer.
We also went from printing five days a week to Mondays only, with the majority of our content on our site or our YouTube channel.
I think this is part of why we're seeing more editorialized journalism. Chances are, if you're seeing a straight-facts story, that's a direct reprint or modified version of a newswire story, which are often written by a program like the AP's Natural Language Generation system. The robots can't yet have opinions, but they can deliver the hard news better than we ever could. I wonder how long that'll last, though, before we can program wit and bias.
Personally, I find it all terrifying, but I'll just keep doing my job until the machines take it from me.
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