The year AI actually changes the media business

“New companies will appear that use AI to aggregate and summarize journalism; reporters will learn how to use the new tools to find ideas; writers will figure out how it can help them compose new stories or at least get through writer’s block.”

This will be the year that AI actually changes the media business.

In the past, we’ve had AI writing short sports stories and helping with basic copy editing. This year, new companies will appear that use AI to aggregate and summarize journalism; reporters will learn how to use the new tools to find ideas; writers will figure out how it can help them compose new stories or at least get through writer’s block.

It’ll change the ad side too, with AI content production coming to advertising studios. It will change copy-editing to some degree, and it will help with fact-checking, too. It’s already changing the work of illustrators and changing the kind of skills needed to thrive in that field.

I also suspect that there will be intense debates about whether these changes are good or not. Regardless, I’m certain they are coming.

Nicholas Thompson is CEO of The Atlantic.

This will be the year that AI actually changes the media business.

In the past, we’ve had AI writing short sports stories and helping with basic copy editing. This year, new companies will appear that use AI to aggregate and summarize journalism; reporters will learn how to use the new tools to find ideas; writers will figure out how it can help them compose new stories or at least get through writer’s block.

It’ll change the ad side too, with AI content production coming to advertising studios. It will change copy-editing to some degree, and it will help with fact-checking, too. It’s already changing the work of illustrators and changing the kind of skills needed to thrive in that field.

I also suspect that there will be intense debates about whether these changes are good or not. Regardless, I’m certain they are coming.

Nicholas Thompson is CEO of The Atlantic.

Larry Ryckman   We’ll work together with our competitors

Jennifer Brandel   AI couldn’t care less. Journalists will care more. 

Jody Brannon   We’ll embrace policy remedies

Kaitlin C. Miller   Harassment in journalism won’t get better, but we’ll talk about it more openly

Ayala Panievsky   It’s time for PR for journalism

Eric Ulken   Generative AI brings wrongness at scale

Moreno Cruz Osório   Brazilian journalism turns wounds into action

Anika Anand   Independent news businesses lead the way on healthy work cultures

Jessica Maddox   Journalists keep getting manipulated by internet culture

Alan Henry   A reckoning with why trust in news is so low

Matt Rasnic   More newsroom workers turn to organized labor

Alex Sujong Laughlin   Credit where it’s due

Brian Stelter   Finding new ways to reach news avoiders

Nik Usher   This is the year of the RSS reader. (Really!)

Nicholas Jackson   There will be launches — and we’ll keep doing the work

Jessica Clark   Open discourse retrenches

Sarabeth Berman   Nonprofit local news shows that it can scale

Sumi Aggarwal   Smart newsrooms will prioritize board development

Walter Frick   Journalists wake up to the power of prediction markets

Michael W. Wagner   The backlash against pro-democracy reporting is coming

Ben Werdmuller   The internet is up for grabs again

Cory Bergman   The AI content flood

Simon Galperin   Philanthropy stops investing in corporate media

Joni Deutsch   Podcast collaboration — not competition — breeds excellence

Jennifer Choi and Jonathan Jackson   Funders finally bet on next-generation news entrepreneurs

Cassandra Etienne   Local news fellowships will help fight newsroom inequities

Juleyka Lantigua   Newsrooms recognize women of color as the canaries in the coal mine

Taylor Lorenz   The “creator economy” will be astroturfed

Christina Shih   Shared values move from nice-to-haves to essentials

Shanté Cosme   The answer to “quiet quitting” is radical empathy

Elite Truong   In platform collapse, an opportunity for community

Joanne McNeil   Facebook and the media kiss and make up

Ariel Zirulnick   Journalism doubles down on user needs

Janet Haven   ChatGPT and the future of trust 

Anthony Nadler   Confronting media gerrymandering

Stefanie Murray   The year U.S. media stops screwing around and becomes pro-democracy

Joe Amditis   AI throws a lifeline to local publishers

Sarah Marshall   A web channel strategy won’t be enough

Esther Kezia Thorpe   Subscription pressures force product innovation

Delano Massey   The industry shakes its imposter syndrome

Susan Chira   Equipping local journalism

Danielle K. Brown and Kathleen Searles   DEI efforts must consider mental health and online abuse

Emily Nonko   Incarcerated reporters get more bylines

Alex Perry   New paths to transparency without Twitter

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Well-being will become a core tenet of journalism

Gordon Crovitz   The year advertisers stop funding misinformation

John Davidow   A year of intergenerational learning

Gabe Schneider   Well-funded journalism leaders stop making disparate pay

Kathy Lu   We need emotionally agile newsroom leaders

Emma Carew Grovum   The year to resist forgetting about diversity

Jonas Kaiser   Rejecting the “free speech” frame

Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau   More of the same

Priyanjana Bengani   Partisan local news networks will collaborate

Peter Bale   Rising costs force more digital innovation

Sarah Alvarez   Dream bigger or lose out

Eric Nuzum   A focus on people instead of power

Jenna Weiss-Berman   The economic downturn benefits the podcasting industry. (No, really!)

Gina Chua   The traditional story structure gets deconstructed

Dannagal G. Young   Stop rewarding elite performances of identity threat

Julia Beizer   News fatigue shows us a clear path forward

Megan Lucero and Shirish Kulkarni   The future of journalism is not you

Paul Cheung   More news organizations will realize they are in the business of impact, not eyeballs

Jesse Holcomb   Buffeted, whipped, bullied, pulled

Raney Aronson-Rath   Journalists will band together to fight intimidation

Ryan Gantz   “I’m sorry, but I’m a large language model”

Kavya Sukumar   Belling the cat: The rise of independent fact-checking at scale

Bill Grueskin   Local news will come to rely on AI

Brian Moritz   Rebuilding the news bundle

Sue Cross   Thinking and acting collectively to save the news

Anita Varma   Journalism prioritizes the basic need for survival

Felicitas Carrique and Becca Aaronson   News product goes from trend to standard

J. Siguru Wahutu   American journalism reckons with its colonialist tendencies

Ryan Kellett   Airline-like loyalty programs try to tie down news readers

David Skok   Renewed interest in human-powered reporting

Karina Montoya   More reporters on the antitrust beat

Kaitlyn Wells   We’ll prioritize media literacy for children

Sue Robinson   Engagement journalism will have to confront a tougher reality

Mario García   More newsrooms go mobile-first

Victor Pickard   The year journalism and capitalism finally divorce

Wilson Liévano   Diaspora journalism takes the next step

Amy Schmitz Weiss   Journalism education faces a crossroads

Tim Carmody   Newsletter writers need a new ethics

Pia Frey   Publishers start polling their users at scale

Amethyst J. Davis   The slight of the great contraction

Julia Angwin   Democracies will get serious about saving journalism

Barbara Raab   More journalism funders will take more risks

Mael Vallejo   More threats to press freedom across the Americas

Alexandra Borchardt   The year of the climate journalism strategy

Parker Molloy   We’ll reach new heights of moral panic

Doris Truong   Workers demand to be paid what the job is worth

S. Mitra Kalita   “Everything sucks. Good luck to you.”

Anna Nirmala   News organizations get new structures

Cindy Royal   Yes, journalists should learn to code, but…

Tamar Charney   Flux is the new stability

Hillary Frey   Death to the labor-intensive memo for prospective hires

Lisa Heyamoto   The independent news industry gets a roadmap to sustainability

Snigdha Sur   Newsrooms get nimble in a recession

Khushbu Shah   Global reporting will suffer

Jarrad Henderson   Video editing will help people understand the media they consume

Kerri Hoffman   Podcasting goes local

Martina Efeyini   Talk to Gen Z. They’re the experts of Gen Z.

Sarah Stonbely   Growth in public funding for news and information at the state and local levels

Jakob Moll   Journalism startups will think beyond English

Andrew Losowsky   Journalism realizes the replacement for Twitter is not a new Twitter

Eric Holthaus   As social media fragments, marginalized voices gain more power

Zizi Papacharissi   Platforms are over

Francesco Zaffarano   There is no end of “social media”

Johannes Klingebiel   The innovation team, R.I.P.

Andrew Donohue   We’ll find out whether journalism can, indeed, save democracy

Nicholas Thompson   The year AI actually changes the media business

Mar Cabra   The inevitable mental health revolution

Errin Haines   Journalists on the campaign trail mend trust with the public

Alexandra Svokos   Working harder to reach audiences where they are

Richard Tofel   The press might get better at vetting presidential candidates

Jacob L. Nelson   Despite it all, people will still want to be journalists

Eric Thurm   Journalists think of themselves as workers

Nicholas Diakopoulos   Journalists productively harness generative AI tools

Rodney Gibbs   Recalibrating how we work apart

Jim Friedlich   Local journalism steps up to the challenge of civic coverage

A.J. Bauer   Covering the right wrong

Dana Lacey   Tech will screw publishers over

Molly de Aguiar and Mandy Van Deven   Narrative change trend brings new money to journalism

Laxmi Parthasarathy   Unlocking the silent demand for international journalism

Dominic-Madori Davis   Everyone finally realizes the need for diverse voices in tech reporting

Jaden Amos   TikTok personality journalists continue to rise

Tre'vell Anderson   Continued culpability in anti-trans campaigns

AX Mina   Journalism in a time of permacrisis

Surya Mattu   Data journalists learn from photojournalists

Christoph Mergerson   The rot at the core of the news business

Mary Walter-Brown and Tristan Loper   Mission-driven metrics become our North Star

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-check (no, really!)

Jim VandeHei   There is no “peak newsletter”

Upasna Gautam   Technology that performs at the speed of news

Burt Herman   The year AI truly arrives — and with it the reckoning

Laura E. Davis   The year we embrace the robots — and ourselves

Kirstin McCudden   We’ll codify protection of journalism and newsgathering

Ståle Grut   Your newsroom experiences a Midjourney-gate, too

James Salanga   Journalists work from a place of harm reduction

Cari Nazeer and Emily Goligoski   News organizations step up their support for caregivers

Mariana Moura Santos   A woman who speaks is a woman who changes the world

Leezel Tanglao   Community partnerships drive better reporting

Joshua P. Darr   Local to live, wire to wither

Sam Guzik   AI will start fact-checking. We may not like the results.

Masuma Ahuja   Journalism starts working for and with its communities

David Cohn   AI made this prediction

Al Lucca   Digital news design gets interesting again

Peter Sterne   AI enters the newsroom

Sue Schardt   Toward a new poetics of journalism

Josh Schwartz   The AI spammers are coming

Ryan Nave   Citizen journalism, but make it equitable

Basile Simon   Towards supporting criminal accountability

Sam Gregory   Synthetic media forces us to understand how media gets made

Rachel Glickhouse   Humanizing newsrooms will be a badge of honor

Michael Schudson   Journalism gets more and more difficult

Mauricio Cabrera   It’s no longer about audiences, it’s about communities

Don Day   The news about the news is bad. I’m optimistic.

Daniel Trielli   Trust in news will continue to fall. Just look at Brazil.