The new book all journalists should read

Need some summer reading? This week’s newsletter comes in the form of a book review. Not perhaps a suggestion for the sun lounger, but nevertheless one that every journalist should read. It’s called AI in the News Room and it was written by Martin Schori, former head of the AI Hub at Aftonbladet in Stockholm and now the co-founder of Hint Media.

Martin is a journalist turned evangelist for AI in news and his advice is rooted in this newsroom experience. He provides tips for journalists, managers and AI specialists alike, but core to his guidance is the idea that AI is not just for the technically adept. “Development work actually needs those of us who are not tech nerds – the people who can formulate relevant problems, set boundaries, understand target groups (and editorial teams!), and think journalistically,” he writes.

This book functions as a practical guide for how to embed AI in your newsroom. I will leave you to buy the book to read Martin’s invaluable advice on this front. What I’m interested in is his thinking about the philosophical and more challenging aspects of AI implementation

He is emphatic that AI is not just a tool to make our lives easier or more efficient. Instead it must be a catalyst for change. “If journalism wants to matter in an AI era, we have to stop protecting legacy workflows and start designing for people,” he says. He adds that while the arrival of the internet disrupted the distribution of news, AI will primarily disrupt its production (while acknowledging that it will affect distribution too).

This feels important. Newsrooms felt they could largely leave the internet revolution to other people – mostly the “kids” in their digital teams – as it was a transformation was happening, or seemed to be happening, after they had done their work. This had a profound negative impact on the industry’s digital fortunes. This time, though, the change will be anchored in the actual day-to-day activities of journalists and there is a recognition that this is definitely a revolution we can’t sit out. I think this is a good thing.

Martin recognises that there are cultural hurdles to overcome. He wisely says that we should stop talking about AI as a thing in itself and instead talk about the products/tools and value that it can produce because “people are sick of hearing about AI”.

As a veteran of newsroom transformation projects, to me this feels crucial. A decade ago I used to talk to my team about how the main part of our job was to be salespeople for digital and to always be selling. And of course the best salespeople don’t flog products, they sell outcomes. For journalists the outcome they want will never be just “using AI”, but offer them better stories and they’ll bite your hand off.

This understanding of how newsrooms actually work runs through the book. Martin knows that each one contains groups of people with different attitudes to change. He names them “The excited”, “The uninterested” and “The opponents”, three immediately understandable groups. To win over the second and third, or at least to stop them killing your ideas, Martin says the newsroom’s middle managers are key: “In the end, people do what their boss says. So if you want change, don’t forget the middle managers.”

Martin is also keen to warn what we have to avoid. Notably, “We must do journalism that cannot be summarised in three points” and “We need to get better at verifying all information, not just videos that could be deepfakes”. Again these are areas where the newsroom must take responsibility. We can’t just complain about it. “If audiences receive poor quality material,” says Martin, “it doesn’t matter whether it came from a language mode, a Google search or from language skills picked up in fourth grade.”

AI will cause mistakes, just as humans will always do. But Martin is emphatically not a pearl-clutcher but someone who believes AI can herald a positive transformation in journalism. An enduring theme of the book is that we should take this opportunity to rethink how we create value for our users. We haven’t been good at this in the past, he says, and I agree.

Now there is an opportunity though. “We should use AI for tasks that require less cognitive effort, in order to free up time and attention for those that need more,” he says. Later in the book he picks up on this theme: the idea that we need to reconnect with what journalism is all about. “Imagine if, thanks to AI, we could reclaim what perhaps disappeared first when journalism went digital: presence, curiosity, time to see patterns. And maybe to truly listen.”

This sits alongside his observation that the volume era of journalism has led to an emphasis on writing as the heart of the profession when actually it should be reporting. And that’s something that AI will never – we hope – be able to do.

All in all, this is both a practical and thoughtful guide to the revolution that will reshape our industry.

AI in the News Room is available from Martin’s website

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