If you’ve been paying attention to AI at all lately, you’ve certainly seen the “Something Big Is Happening” essay by Matt Shumer, or at least some of the reaction to it. In it, Shumer describes how coding, for him, has completely transitioned from manually writing code to simply prompting and approving the near-flawless work done by AI. The piece was meant as a warning to all knowledge workers, essentially saying: AI has taken over my job, and it’s coming for yours next.
There have been countless thought pieces on the merits and flaws of Shumer’s argument, and I have no intention of adding to the pile. But journalism is knowledge work, too, and the field had its own, slightly less viral, moment of AI existential crisis this past week.
The editor of Cleveland.com, Chris Quinn, wrote a column this week, describing how a college student who had applied for a reporting job withdrew their application when they found out how the publication uses AI. Besides using AI to help generate story ideas, the newsroom developed an “AI rewrite specialist” to write stories based on the material that reporters gather. By ditching writing, according to Quinn, their reporters have been able to reclaim an extra workday each week.
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The backlash was predictably vicious. On X, Axios reporter Sam Allard earned a lot of likes by comparing what Cleveland.com is doing to being an “AI content farmer,” while various veteran journalists on Substack expressed various degrees of outrage and dismay. Most of the reaction was along the lines of this piece from journalist Stacey Woelfel: “Writing is an integral part of the reporting process.”
The AI newsroom split
That’s true, but I think what Quinn describes isn’t so easily dismissed. After all, reporters often work in teams on single articles, with one of them taking the lead on the draft. Did the others then . . . not report? And I’ve certainly been in breaking-news situations where a reporter would text, email, or call in their notes to an editor or writer who would put together the piece.
It’s generally recognized that writing and reporting are different skills, and what Quinn and Cleveland.com appear to have done is use AI to fully separate them. The conventional wisdom on the “correct” way to use AI is to let it take over the tasks that it can do faster and better than humans, freeing them up to do the things that absolutely require human engagement and judgment. In the case of a reporter, that’s talking to sources, learning new things, and earning their trust.
Well, at long last, AI is actually very good at writing. Certainly, much of the text that’s come out of AI systems over the past few years hasn’t done much for its literary reputation (yes, we’re all tired of the rampant em-dashes and the “it’s not X—it’s Y” bits). But if you use the most powerful models with a modest amount of deliberate prompting, they can produce highly competent prose.
And if we’re being honest, highly competent prose is all that’s needed for a large amount of reported stories. Many, if not most, news reports are meant to convey basic information about what happened, with little judgment or opinion, and typically written in AP style, which is essentially a formula. It’s not quite code, but it’s a very functional way of writing. The most important thing is conveying the facts, accurately and with context, as quickly as possible.
Again, it’s important to understand that the reporter is not removed from the process, but their role changes significantly. Just as Shumer found himself becoming a supervisor to an AI building machine, reporters may become operators of writing bots, ensuring they’re crafting stories properly out of the raw material they’ve been given. In the case of Quinn’s newsroom, reporters have final say over the copy.
Bleeding between the lines
None of this is to say this approach will result in a perfect future. There are writers who aren’t great at reporting, and there are reporters who aren’t skilled at writing, but there are plenty who are good at both. Will they need to pick a side—either become a feature or opinion writer, or settle for just doing the reporting part?
And what about skill building? Even if this approach is as successful as Quinn says, how will junior staff become better writers without the day-in, day-out act of writing stories? When Woelfel says writing is integral to reporting, I think he means it’s integral to storytelling, which is an act of curation, prioritization, and expression—all with an audience in mind. This is what Ben Affleck meant when he famously drew a distinction between AI as a craftsman and AI as an artist. But how do you become an artist if AI is doing all the crafting?
The irony of Shumer’s piece is that, while he makes a solid case that AI will soon disrupt most knowledge work—and even name-checks journalism as one of the areas in the crosshairs—he did it with an essay with a distinctly human voice. I honestly don’t know if he used AI to fully or partially write the piece, but I’m certain that if he did, he also was meticulous about every word.
I think that’s a hopeful sign that, even if we relegate some of the craft of writing to AI, that we might not lose as much as we might think. Audiences will always demand a human touch, so that touch will need to manifest in some form. It’s true that no one wants to read AI slop. But it might turn out that the most valuable reporting skill in the future will be the ability to turn slop into stories.
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