Essential reading for your AI future

Futures of Journalism is an anthology packed with important ideas

I was tempted to start this week’s newsletter by saying that I’ve read Futures of Journalism, the new anthology of essays about AI-enabled news, so you don’t have to. But that would be a lie.

You really have to read it yourself. If you don’t, you are selling yourself and your future career short (and your employers, of course, but that’s their lookout).

I’m not kidding. These essays, edited by Agnes Stenbom Swedling for Nordic AI Journalism and the Fojo Media Institute, are by turns eye-opening and inspiring, practical and philosophical. It is not a guide to the AI future – nobody really knows what that looks like – but a collection of ideas from some of the smartest thinkers in the business about how to approach it.

For those, including me, who were trying to pilot the digital transformation last decade there were few such texts. The Innovation Report from the New York Times in 2014 got talked about so much because it was such a rare beast in setting down in one place what the future could look like.

I know the Wall Street Journal digital team published their own version and I tried to do the same at The Times (the fact that I couldn’t is a very long story for a very dimly lit bar some day). I’m sure there were others but the thinking about what the post-transformation landscape would look like and news organisations place in it was local and not widely shared.

I’ve written before about how the Paid Content Summit organised annually by Axel Springer was like a group therapy session for publishers trying to build subscription businesses in the 2010s. Now we can deal with our fears, hopes and dreams in public through initiatives like Futures in Journalism.

There’s also Signals at Scale, the report by Shuwei Fang and David Caswell on the summits addressing an AI-enabled information ecosystem that they have held over the past couple of years; The Three-Layer Cake, by the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures; and the Generative AI and News Report 2026 by the Reuters Institute. All of these provide the kind of thinking material that the industry needs.

Futures of Journalism is 11 essays. Each one probably takes 20 minutes to read and digest in detail. I recognise that is quite an investment of time to complete in one go, so here are a few takeaways. Please don’t take this as a reason not to do your homework!

1 Stop catastrophising

At the heart of this collection is optimism. Not a starry-eyed version – after all, more than one contributor predicts that many news organisations will fail in the next few years – but one based on the logic that societies need journalism to function effectively and that people value its output. They just might not want it from existing sources.

In her introduction, Stenbom Swedling reflects on journalism’s challenges and “whether we have become a little too comfortable talking about them”. She worries that “our ability to diagnose what is wrong has outpaced our willingness to imagine what could be right”.

2 You might not recognise the future

Shuwei Fang outlines a future where the mechanics of journalism become like those of finance – that is, effectively invisible to consumers. Do you know the intricacies of how your insurance premiums are calculated? Of course you don’t.

Similarly, journalism might end up being part of a process whereby machines are the primary audience for information which they then pass on to humans. The discovery, verification and contextualisation of events that currently makes up journalistic endeavour today will still exist, but it will be “unrecognisable”, says Fang.

In this landscape, AI is not just a series of new tools – don’t let anyone tell you that – but a strategic force of awesome power. We must beware, as Olle Zachrison says, how easy it is to tinker around the edges than focus on what AI should do to your organisation’s strategy.

What could that strategy be? Kasper Lindskow outlines a number of different possibilities but believes that fundamentally “the central opportunity for news providers is to transform themselves from producers of media products into companies that originate, maintain and commercialise trustworthy information across multiple markets”. That’s quite a shift.

3 Stop doing what AI can do

Talking of strategy, Martin Schori says that newsrooms will have to “radically reconstruct their organisation, culture and incentives around the things that AI cannot replicate”. The reason is that AI-enabled tools and workflows will soon be available to everyone, not just first movers.

In short, if AI can do it, you shouldn’t – or at least plan not to very soon. That goes for certain types of newsgathering as much as writing, production and distribution.

4 There is a role for humans in this future

It was striking how many of the essayists stressed that AI would not make human journalists obsolete – unless of course the doomsayers are right about it killing us all (sidebar: imagine writing this sentence even as recently as five years ago!).

Schori imagines a 2032 newsroom in which “AI handles the information supply; humans hold the relational trust that people pay for”.

David Caswell sees a divide between a “humanistic” and “scientific” approach to the world and journalism. He believes that they can combine to deliver “radical new benefits” to us all. Rather than oppose the AI-powered journalism that is coming, “human journalism and its institutions should help facilitate that arrival”.

5 AI is a challenge for the whole organisation

Zahrison said something that really resonated with me. “In all our feverish excitement about the dizzying opportunities of generative AI, I believe we forgot one thing: bringing the vast majority of our colleagues with us.”

He said that what we might call the policies-and-guidelines period of AI adoption was all about what we should not do, rather than the value these new technologies could bring. “No wonder journalists were put off when the basic message was ‘Be careful!’ rather than ‘Have a go!’” he writes.

I think that is changing now, certainly in terms of using AI tools. But it must extend to imagining what the future looks like and the strategies required to get there.

As Sarq Inkeri Vardar says: “Maybe what journalism needs isn’t another brilliant idea for the future, but the curiosity to question the assumptions that shape the ideas we come up with in the first place.”

This is a job for everyone involved in journalism. Nobody is going to tell you the right answer for what the future looks like. You have to work it out for yourself. Or rather, we have to work it out collectively.