AI is disrupting journalism—you’ve heard that a thousand times. You’ve tried ChatGPT, written some prompts, maybe caught David Caswell talking about having 20,000 virtual reporters at your fingertips.
But now what? You need a real starting point. Here’s what I’d recommend:
- Read “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI” by Ethan Mollick. Subscribe to his newsletter and follow him on LinkedIn. He’s your best companion for the generative AI journey, with strategies for assessing current model capabilities and actually using them. Fewer technical deep dives into transformer architecture or OpenAI gossip, more practical applications. Like this: Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide. If I sound like a fanboy, it’s because I am. But I’m not alone—The New York Times’ Rubina Fillion is a fan, too. The book “was helpful for me in thinking about how AI can supplement human expertise, rather than replace it.”
- I made a practical introduction to AI, without the hype: It’s basically fancy math that’s eaten the internet and now pretends to have conversations with you. Short-term memory included. Forget the AGI hype—it’s mostly marketing fluff. And those academic papers? Usually testing last year’s models while we’re living in the future. 10 Facts Everyone Should Know About AI.
- What are we all doing with generative AI? On a personal level: 18 journalists and news executives share how they use AI and where they draw the line in this article in Columbia Journalism Review. The message? Proceed with caution, but don’t stick your head in the sand. As for newsrooms and news products, Kalle Pirhonen keeps track. When he’s not working on AI strategy, he writes for his blog, Numeroiden takaa (it’s in Finnish), where he shares his extensive collection: 90+ tools and products from around the world. Similar: Sergei Yakupov has collected 93 initiatives and 58 resources.
- Go deeper with this extensive EBU report on how newsrooms tackle generative AI. It’s from the European Broadcasting Union, the umbrella organization of public broadcasters. Alexandra Borchardt and her co-authors have compiled a 75-page overview with hands-on use cases and Q&As.
- Get practical experience and immerse yourself in AI. Journalism teacher Joe Amditis has collected tools and prompts for journalists and built a practical interface for them: his LLM journalism tool advisor. Next: Start learning good prompt techniques to get better results from chatbots. If you want more, start exploring open-source models, easy-to-understand code, or even newsroom-ready tools with Journalists on Hugging Face, a community shepherded by Brigitte Tousignant and Florent Daudens.
- Keep up to date with Generative AI in the Newsroom. It’s a blog founded at the Computational Journalism Lab at Northwestern University and edited by Nick Diakopoulos. Journalism applied to AI and journalism, yes, please. Of course, NiemanLab has stellar reporting on the topic as well.
- Listen to AI and media experts on the Newsroom Robots podcast. If you’re looking into AI, you know about Hard Fork, the New York Times’ technology podcast. Newsroom Robots is like that, but for AI and journalism. Host Nikita Roy is one of the leading figures in the field, when she’s not advising media companies or giving keynotes all over the world, she’s interviewing Zach Seward from the New York Times, the AP’s Aimee Rinehart, or CNN’s Upasna Gautam (and not to brag, but also myself).
- Check out the Nordic AI in Media Summit in Copenhagen. Our Nordic colleagues explore AI’s pitfalls and possibilities. They share insights into their AI adoption and user-facing products. You can watch recordings on YouTube. Besides the yearly summit, there’s a Slack community and virtual sessions. There’s no other meeting like it–huge shout-out to Agnes Stenbom, Kasper Lindskow, Sara Inkeri Vardar, and Olle Zachrison.
- Also worth connecting: The International News Media Association’s Generative AI Initiative (members only), run by Sonali Verma, with Slack, virtual sessions, and a recently launched chatbot. WAN-IFRA now has its own AI in News Media initiative for members, run by Ezra Eeman. In Germany, the AI for Media Network organizes both virtual and in-person meetups, headed by Uli Köppen and Bernd Oswald.
- Learn more about the concept of “liquid content.” Futurist Sofie Hvitved gave a presentation this year at the Nordic AI in Media Summit that’s on YouTube. And she’s written about it. This report doesn’t even mention the buzzword of the moment, but it shows what kind of personalization and context-dependent news usage is already possible. If AI can personalize ads, why not news? Readers view text already as fungible. Then get to know Google’s AI Mode, Particle.News, and Perplexity. Don’t just wonder about the future of search, plan for “Google Zero”, and think about the future of media companies and journalism’s role. First-principles thinking seems helpful here.
- Find even more experts in AI and journalism to follow. There’s an international list: 85 expert voices at the intersection of AI and journalism from journalism.co.uk. And I published a who’s who in the German-speaking LinkedIn universe when it comes to AI and journalism.
- Apply to CUNY’s AI Journalism Lab. It’s a 3-month hybrid, tuition-free program. You kick it off in New York, then you meet virtually, while working on your own project. I’m biased because I was in the first cohort of this, but I think it’s an extremely useful program. I’ve met stellar experts along the way and grew my network. Just confirmed with Kyle Plantz, Senior Director of Leadership Programs: The AI Labs will return in 2026 and applications will open soon. Across the pond, LSE professor Charlie Beckett runs JournalismAI which offers programs and fellowships. They also produced a 28-page starter pack, full of links and resources.
Finally, if you want to keep exploring these topics, I report on AI and journalism developments weekly in my newsletter.
