#ai-in-journalism

#ai-in-journalism

As AI accelerates and expands in media, journalism needs a pedagogy of wonder. This is an approach in education that encourages students to be critical, curious, and creative. For journalists, a pedagogy of wonder calls on them to become explorers, treating AI as a partner in inquiry to help them ask better questions, notice more, and deepen public understanding. It treats the newsroom as a learning space where curiosity is a method, and ethics is a practice.

Audiences increasingly evaluate individual pieces of information and contributors rather than trusting institutional brands wholesale. They assemble their understanding of the world as a patchwork: a podcast recap, a TikTok debunk, a Reddit thread, a traditional news article. Pew finds that about one in five U.S. adults now regularly get news from influencers on social platforms, often citing helping them to understand the issues and perceived authenticity. The numbers are higher for younger generations.

In fact, a recent report on the use of AI in news media from the Reuters Institute showed a pretty clear pattern of audiences' trust declining the more AI was used in the journalistic process. Only 12% of people were comfortable with fully AI-generated content, increasing to 21% for mostly AI, 43% for mostly human, and a respectable (but, notably, not amazing) 62% for fully human content.

The question today isn't whether we are using AI in journalism, because we do it already," but whether "we can do journalism without outsourcing our skepticism, our ethics, and our sense of accountability, both as journalists ourselves and the accountability we are asking people and organizations that hold power to provide," said Sideris who is studying how generative AI can better assist investigative reporting as a 2026 Nieman Fellow.

by far the biggest use of our resources and I think the biggest opportunity right now when it comes to AI in media,

The Connecticut Mirror's new artificial intelligence data reporter and product developer is trying to figure out how to tell stories that were previously impossible because of the volume of documents or deadline pressure. In Connecticut, where news is often made in municipal meetings, the nonprofit's beat reporters can't make it to all 169 different towns, Eichhorst said. One of her goals is to generate leads and get material from those meetings to reporters using AI tools.

If you go to CalMatters, they are using AI to track all of the committee hearings and all the transcripts of all the committee hearings in the California state legislature.

The 'Best of Summer' inserts in the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer included factual inaccuracies signifying the impact of AI in journalism.