The AI tools were the easy part
By Martin Schori
That’s probably where this ends up, but we’re just not there yet.
ChatGPT has been around for nearly four years now, and it’s striking how small the real leaps have actually been.
“It must be so different working in a newsroom today compared to a few years ago,” is another question I get a lot.
But the truth is: it isn’t, really. It probably will be, but show me the newsroom that’s actually transformed for real. Centered its entire operations around the new information economy. I haven’t seen many hands go up (but would be very happy to be disproved).
David Caswell, one of the sharper voices on AI in journalism, said recently that it’s in the big, complex workflows and prompt chains that you actually see how far the models have come. But if you’re still just asking a chatbot for a summary, the difference between, say, Opus 4.6 and 4.8 is close to meaningless.
So my answer to “Is AI a skill?” is: Yes, still. For a while longer, at least. But we also need to start looking past it, now.
The tools are here. They work. And within a year or two, more or less everyone will have them. Whether you build your own or buy off the shelf, whether you move first or move late, you end up in roughly the same place. The gap between the fast adopter and the slow one keeps closing.
The real questions we should be asking right now
Which means the question most newsrooms are quietly organising themselves around – which tools, how fast, build or buy – is becoming the wrong one. Or at least the easier one.
The hard question has none of that. It’s simply: can your organisation actually change?
Out with the tools, in with the change management!
That’s the work almost no one takes seriously, because it can’t be bought from a bunch of of 20-year-old wizkids over a Google Meet demo.
I’m talking about culture. Workflows, incentives. What you reward. How you organise, what you measure. And, maybe most importantly, who and how you hire.
I’ve argued before that we need to hire differently, bring in people who don’t fit a predefined job description, whose value is voice and relationship rather than, let’s say speed.
I stand by that. But hiring is not sufficient. You can recruit the most interesting reporter in the country, and if you slot her into a templated role built for production, you’ll likely lose her within a year, to a newsletter, a podcast, a platform of her own.
Because the soft values everyone now nods along to, communication, creativity, judgement, the ability to build a relationship a reader recognises among a thousand generated texts, aren’t a layer you add on top of the “real” craft. As AI absorbs production, they become the craft.
You have all heard the quote “AI won’t take your job but someone who can use AI will.”
The Swedish researcher Emma Frans said it better: AI won’t take your job, but someone more fun to be around might. Translated to media: AI won’t replace journalism and the organisations that build unique human relationships in an AI world will survive. The ones that treat AI as a cheaper way to do the same old production, well they probably won’t.
Suggestions for what to prioritise
So what does the actual work look like? A few things I’d put at the top of the list:
Stop measuring old values. If your KPIs and your praise still flow to clicks and speed, nothing will change. You’ll just produce the same things slightly faster.
Actually redirect the hours you free up. The promise of AI is that it hands time back. If those hours quietly refill with more output instead of more reporting and more relationship-building, you’ve automated the wrong half of the job.
Organise around audience needs, not production habits. Many newsrooms are still structured around production rhythms, fast, in-depth, and so on. Try organising around what the audience actually needs instead, keep-me-updated, engage-me, help-me-understand. That’s where the creative energy gets room to grow.
Lead it visibly. If you are a leader and constantly tell your colleagues that AI is important, and never use it yourself, they will notice. And you have a credibility problem.
Stay out of “the middle.” Choose if you want to do smart, fast and UX friendly news experiences (then you compete with AI) or go all in on human-centered journalism. Don’t do both at the same time.
The tools were the easy part. We’re mostly done with them. What comes is harder, but something we should start working with right away.
Martin Schori is a media consultant, former AI & innovation officer at Aftonbladet, and co-founder of media startup Hint. His book AI in the Newsroom is available in both Swedish and English.
A version of this text was published in Swedish in Dagens Media.
