Nieman Lab.
Predictions for
Journalism, 2024.
Throughout our two years of work on AP’s Local News AI Initiative, funded by the Knight Foundation, we’ve come to this general observation: Smaller newsrooms are hungry for automation and AI.
Along with my colleague, AI program manager Aimee Rinehart, we published the first nationwide findings in March 2022 on how local newsrooms were approaching AI. Some news managers were talking about AI then, but not many were using it.
Fast forward to 2023: As ChatGPT gained traction, even more smaller newsrooms started paying attention to AI. Local news managers who initially brushed off our requests to participate in our prior survey wrote back to us and asked for help with AI.
My prediction for 2024 is that smaller newsrooms will widely adopt some sort of AI tool into their workflow.
I will admit that it’s an ambitious forecast. But the barriers aren’t necessarily high to adoption. My favorite example is automated transcription. Any newsroom using one of the many commercially available transcription tools is taking advantage of AI.
Some newsrooms may choose to go further and adopt ChatGPT, Claude, Bard, or some other large language model-powered chat tool into their workflow. For example, a journalist looking to craft a catchy headline may ask a generative AI tool to offer suggestions. It could be as simple as that.
At AP, I’m proud of our cooperative’s support for exploring building AI-based tools for smaller newsrooms. We created five experimental products for local newsrooms. Some of the projects use generative AI, but sometimes, there are reasons where generative AI isn’t appropriate because of its capacity to make mistakes. To that end, AP has also developed standards around generative AI.
My hope is that in 2024, journalists at smaller newsrooms learn to adopt cutting-edge generative AI tools responsibly, paying attention to the significant risks involved in their usage. Our colleagues at Partnership on AI have crafted a helpful guide for newsrooms starting their AI adoption journey.
Adopting AI will be as critical to smaller newsrooms as it was to shift away from typewriters to computers. Based on the enormous response we’ve seen to generative AI in 2023, I predict 2024 will be a year of broad adoption of AI in smaller newsrooms.
Ernest Kung is the AI product manager at the Associated Press.
Throughout our two years of work on AP’s Local News AI Initiative, funded by the Knight Foundation, we’ve come to this general observation: Smaller newsrooms are hungry for automation and AI.
Along with my colleague, AI program manager Aimee Rinehart, we published the first nationwide findings in March 2022 on how local newsrooms were approaching AI. Some news managers were talking about AI then, but not many were using it.
Fast forward to 2023: As ChatGPT gained traction, even more smaller newsrooms started paying attention to AI. Local news managers who initially brushed off our requests to participate in our prior survey wrote back to us and asked for help with AI.
My prediction for 2024 is that smaller newsrooms will widely adopt some sort of AI tool into their workflow.
I will admit that it’s an ambitious forecast. But the barriers aren’t necessarily high to adoption. My favorite example is automated transcription. Any newsroom using one of the many commercially available transcription tools is taking advantage of AI.
Some newsrooms may choose to go further and adopt ChatGPT, Claude, Bard, or some other large language model-powered chat tool into their workflow. For example, a journalist looking to craft a catchy headline may ask a generative AI tool to offer suggestions. It could be as simple as that.
At AP, I’m proud of our cooperative’s support for exploring building AI-based tools for smaller newsrooms. We created five experimental products for local newsrooms. Some of the projects use generative AI, but sometimes, there are reasons where generative AI isn’t appropriate because of its capacity to make mistakes. To that end, AP has also developed standards around generative AI.
My hope is that in 2024, journalists at smaller newsrooms learn to adopt cutting-edge generative AI tools responsibly, paying attention to the significant risks involved in their usage. Our colleagues at Partnership on AI have crafted a helpful guide for newsrooms starting their AI adoption journey.
Adopting AI will be as critical to smaller newsrooms as it was to shift away from typewriters to computers. Based on the enormous response we’ve seen to generative AI in 2023, I predict 2024 will be a year of broad adoption of AI in smaller newsrooms.
Ernest Kung is the AI product manager at the Associated Press.
