Talking about AI
Honestly, I lost count (twice) trying to count all the Nieman Lab predictions - but there seem to be 250 so far. And of course, a bunch are about AI.
But SO MANY are cautionary tales about platform dependency and the failure of adopting the industrial logics of Big Tech into local newsrooms, as well as suggestions for a path forward. So I started collecting and categorizing so I could make some sense of it all. The categories are semi-arbitrary, as categories often are.
Certainly, I missed some predictions, and I may add/revise/recategorize a bit as I am able to read through the full set.
AI, Automation, and the Shape of Journalistic Work
- AI breaks the hamster wheel of journalism
- AI isn’t the threat anymore. Avoiding it is.
- AI makes human journalists more important than ever
- Newsrooms will reckon with AI slop
- Big newsrooms pave the way for AI agents in journalism
- The rise of agentic journalism
- AI will rewrite the architecture of the newsroom
- We will stop freaking out about AI
Platforms, Power, and Tech Dependency
- Big Tech needs us more than we need them
- Journalism is in danger of bending itself around AI
- We won’t get fooled again (we hope)
- Publishers will see no meaningful AI licensing revenue
Newsroom Products, Formats, and Structures
- Publishers fight Big Tech with small local language models
- A renaissance for structured journalism
- Forget “Google Zero.” We need to talk about “People Zero.”
- Sorry, the explainer is dead
- Pressured by chatbots, newsrooms push past the one-story-fits-all model
- APIs for news
- Rethinking the news experience
- News product teams are uniquely positioned to unlock AI value
- Local news starts becoming local infrastructure
Audiences and Trust and Place
Member discussion