Ryan Sabalow, a reporter for the newsroom Cal Matters, noticed something peculiar when he began covering California lawmakers in 2023. Politicians would often give impassioned speeches against a bill, then refrain from voting entirely.
He began to wonder how often legislators were ducking tough votes — and how that influenced California’s laws.
Not long ago, those questions would send Mr. Sabalow scurrying to some dreary records room or scrolling through a spreadsheet. In the dawning age of generative artificial intelligence, all he had to do was ask a machine.
He and his team turned to an AI tool, Digital Democracy, which tracks every word uttered in California legislative sessions, every donation, and every vote taken.
It led to an article and an Emmy-winning segment on CBS that revealed that Democratic lawmakers had killed a popular fentanyl bill by not voting at all.
“I don’t think I could have done that without this database,” Mr. Sabalow said.
Artificial intelligence is sweeping through newsrooms, transforming the way journalists worldwide gather and disseminate information.
Traditional news organizations are increasingly using tools from companies like OpenAI and Google to streamline work that used to take hours, such as sifting through reams of information, tracking down sources, and suggesting headlines.
In some cases, including at Fortune and Business Insider, publications have explored using AI to write full articles, notifying readers they intend to use it for drafts.
Almost all of the news organizations have some guardrails in place to prevent errors, such as requiring a human to review anything that A.I. writes before it is published. However, some embarrassing errors have still appeared, including those from top publications such as Bloomberg, Business Insider, and Wired.
And many journalists have also been left to wonder: Will AI replace journalism jobs in an already fast-shrinking market — or, instead, which jobs?
“AI is an extraordinary tool for journalists,” said Stephen Adler, a former editor in chief of Reuters who now runs the Ethics and Journalism Initiative at New York University.
“It excels at analyzing large data sets, organizing notes, checking spelling and grammar, and even pointing out possible flaws in a story. But, as with much of technology, it comes with significant risks.”
The stakes are incredibly high for the news industry. Over the past several decades, media executives have watched as the internet upended their business, laying waste to classified advertising and siphoning readers away to social media.
And many have come to realize they were flat-footed in the face of the technology transformation, giving away news content in the hopes of clawing back some digital advertising revenue.
The executives are eager not to make the same mistake with A.I. They are trying to force tech giants to pay for the original content used to train and service the large language models, either through commercial agreements or lawsuits, or both.
Proponents of A.I. in newsrooms argue that, regardless of the business implications, the technology is a powerful new tool to aid in reporting and editing, as well as to engage readers. And they are racing to figure out how to capitalize on that.
Newsquest, a British newspaper chain owned by USA Today Company, employs more than 30 journalists who use A.I. to delve deeper into stories. Axel Springer, the Berlin-based owner of Politico and Business Insider, recently used A.I. to create an interactive travel planner. Time magazine used an AI-powered chatbot for its 2024 Person of the Year, featuring President Trump. The New York Times has a team that experiments with AI and builds reporting tools.
Axios, the Beltway publication that has been outspokenly pro-AI, is experimenting with the technology for its Axios Local newsletters and automating news roundups by using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to find the most relevant news stories of the day, with oversight by a reporter, said Allison Murphy, Axios’s chief operating officer.
“The efforts to automate are not about cutting quality corners. It’s not about dropping reporter jobs,” Ms. Murphy explained. “It’s about anything that isn’t human expertise: Let’s find the best, fastest way to do it.”
Axios has also developed the Axiomizer, an AI tool to help generate the outlet’s trademark axioms, such as “why it matters” and “one big thing.” Ms. Murphy said reporters were able to chat with the tool to get recommendations and edits.
