Opinion: Newsrooms don’t need an AI strategy. They need an editing strategy.
The debate about AI in journalism keeps getting the emphasis backwards. The scarce skill is judgement, not production.
Every media conference this year has had the same panel: what should newsrooms do about AI? The question is reasonable. The answers are mostly beside the point.
Producing words has never been the hard part of journalism. Deciding which words are true, fair and worth a reader’s time is the hard part. That is editing — and it is exactly the skill most newsrooms have spent a decade cutting.
The bottleneck was never typing
Tools that generate copy faster only make the editing bottleneck worse. A newsroom with half the editors it had in 2015 and ten times the drafts is not more productive. It is more exposed.
Readers don’t pay for volume. They pay for being able to trust what they read.
Invest in the desk
If publishers want to use new tools responsibly, the first investment should be in people who check, question and cut. Clear disclosure rules, a named editor on every story and visible corrections will do more for trust than any software rollout.
The newsrooms that thrive will not be the ones that publish the most. They will be the ones readers believe.
Sample article for testing the Viewpoints website layout. Names, figures and quotes are illustrative, not real reporting. Delete before launch (filter by the “Sample content” tag).
