AI’s presence in newsrooms across the globe is increasing rapidly. Ostensibly, it’s here to help newsrooms manage workloads, increase efficiency and identify stories that may otherwise go uncovered.
In the US, The Philadelphia Inquirer is openly using AI tools to scan agendas and transcripts from local community meetings to flag any potential news leads that could otherwise take hours if not days to uncover.
The adopted approach coincided with the launch of four local newsletters, which have drawn in more than 50,000 subscribers in the past year. The initiative is supported partially by a partnership involving Microsoft and OpenAI, as well as the mastheads owner, the non-profit Lenfest Institute.
Other international newsrooms admit to using AI in a much higher capacity, having the technology draft entire stories. Journalists would simply feed their press releases to AI which would then spit out a draft article ready for human edit.
In the UK, publications including the Hampshire Chronicle and the Andover Advertiser have adopted AI as a tool to write full stories. The Wall Street Journal reported that in the month of January alone, more than a quarter of the some 60,000 articles published by USA Today’s UK network were AI-generated. Journalists would input press releases and prompts into AI, which would produce stories that were then sub edited before being published—something we would never do at B&T, to be clear. Especially so when copy-and-pasting is far easier.
The argument is that the adoption of AI tools into journalistic practices fosters time efficiency, allowing journalists to ensure the most pressing, breaking news stories can be written as quickly as possible.
That said, not everyone is sold on its benefits.
Vannessa Lyons CEO ThinkNewsBrands said: “ThinkNewsBrands latest research, our News Nation report, shows 74 per cent of Australians are worried about misinformation, and 78 per cent say they trust national news publishers.”
“Australian journalists have to abide by strict editorial standards. They take pride in verifying facts and having their work professionally and legally vetted.”
Many Australian newsrooms have openly adopted AI as a means to absorb tedious tasks.
A spokesperson from News Corp Australia said: “AI reinforces a simple truth for the news media: our greatest asset is the professional journalism we produce.
“In our newsrooms, we use AI in practical, innovative ways to streamline routine work and free journalists to focus on the stories and investigations that matter. To support this, we’ve trained more than 1,000 newsroom staff through specialised editorial AI boot camps, with a strong emphasis on effective and ethical integration.”
Human oversight still remains critical to journalism, however, as AI continues to evolve rapidly there is cause for concern as to whether publications could in future, opt for the more cost effective AI tools to replace their human journalists.
“AI will never be able to replace the work needed to carry out investigative journalism, which underpins our democracy. ” said Lyons.
In Australia, the adoption of AI is viewed as a tool to help newsrooms cope with the realities of smaller teams and a growing flood of information.
Scott Purcell, CFA co-founder Man of Many said: “The key distinction is that AI handles the ingestion and triage, the grunt work of reading everything, while journalists make the editorial decisions about what matters, how to frame it, and what to investigate further. It’s augmentation, not replacement.”
For independent publishers in particular, AI is something of a competitive necessity. With a lack of staffing resources of larger established mastheads, smaller newsrooms must rely on new technology to accomplish tasks that would otherwise require more time and staff.
“For Australian publishers specifically, this is a competitive necessity. We don’t have the newsroom sizes of legacy mastheads, so using AI to do what would otherwise require a team of five is how independents stay competitive and keep covering stories that matter,” said Purcell.
In surfacing the most relevant information, AI can act as “a research assistant that never sleeps,” allowing reporters to focus more on context, analysis and investigative work.
As AI becomes increasingly normalised in newsrooms, its role remains clear: support journalists, not replace them. This aims to help newsrooms keep pace in a modern world of ever-growing information.
