Publishers are increasingly making use of AI tools to crunch the numbers, interrogate the data, perform repetitive tasks, personalise marketing ops, streamline workflows and much more. We will be exploring in-depth how publishers are using AI in practice in the September / October issue of InPublishing magazine (not yet on the mailing list? Register here).
Inevitably, some publishing-related jobs will be at risk, although forward-looking publishers will redeploy people rather than lose them.
One role that shouldn’t be at risk, is journalism.
On the NCTJ website, there’s a list of the attributes that make a good journalist: curiosity, being a people person, passion, a hunger for news, a desire to learn.
These are human attributes, which are hard to automate.
In our July / August issue, which is being mailed out this week, we carry an interview with Guardian Political Editor Pippa Crerar, one of the most successful investigative journalists of the last decade.
In it, she tells Ray Snoddy what attracted her to journalism: “I was interested in what was going on in the world and I wanted a ringside seat and I was also, as my friends know, really nosey. So, journalism it was.”
So, ‘curiosity’, tick, ‘hunger for news’, tick.
She continued, “you live or die as a political journalist by your relationships,” so, ‘being a people person’, tick.
Reading the interview, it’s clear that ‘passion’ and ‘desire to learn’ are there in abundance too.
Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame, also considered relationship building to be of fundamental importance. Talking to people was how he would get to the bottom of a story: “The approach is to talk to people, then go back, then go back again. Talk to more people.”
Talk, listen, go back for more. Keep digging.
According to Woodward, the other thing all great investigative journalists had was time. Their editors gave them the time to develop relationships and follow the leads wherever they took them.
What Woodward, Crerar, and journalists like them do can’t be done by AI. AI can’t wine and dine sources, can’t read body language, can’t pick up on verbal cues, can’t unearth what hasn’t been unearthed before.
That needs people and publishers need to invest in them.
You can catch James Evelegh’s regular column in the InPubWeekly newsletter, which you can register to receive here.
