If you aren’t using Qwen3-Max-Thinking already, you’re … just like me. As much as I try to stay current, I also have to get real work done. So for me it’s the latest Claude Opus and the latest Gemini, for both writing and coding. I bounce between the two: most days I start with Opus,...
/ AI & Journalism
How to use AI without getting dumb: Strategies for critical prompt design to keep AI from becoming a cheap shortcut or decision-maker. (Paul Bradshaw, Online Journalism Blog)
Google says no: “We really don’t want you to think you need to be doing that or produce two versions of your content, one for the LLM and one for the net.” (Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land)
The name says “Code,” but you don’t need to write any: Florent Daudens walks journalists through setting up Claude Code as a persistent reporting assistant that can read your files, track your story, and stop asking you to re-upload that PDF for the fifth time.
Ask AI “what’s the biggest pay gap?” and it’ll miss negative numbers. Ask for “the company” with the top score and it’ll ignore ties. Paul Bradshaw tested ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot for data analysis – and catalogues where tools trip up. (Medium)
Scale back service journalism, evergreen content, and general news – instead, focus more on original investigations and on-the-ground reporting. That’s one response to AI. More trends for the year in Nic Newman’s Trend Report. (Reuters Institute)
Read-aloud articles and entire podcasts now come with AI voices. Ironically, it’s a highly trained professional speaker, journalist Victoria Craig, who is now being mistaken for a robot voice. And listeners are complaining. (Financial Times)
26 AI and Journalism Links for 2026
Look, I get it. Your inbox is drowning in trend reports. Another one just dropped. And another. Plus seventeen meta-analyses of the meta-analyses, and at this point everyone's just rage-feeding the whole mess into NotebookLM like it's some kind of AI garbage disposal. It's exhausting. Truly. I've done the scrolling. Consider this your cheat code....
The Brutal Economics of Liquid Content: “Only organizations with massive scale or premium brand differentiation can survive these economics.” The article? Commodified. “What if news media were to let go of the artifact as the product and productize the process instead?” (Shuwei Fang, Radically Informed)
Reinforcing competence: AI companies are paying thousands of lawyers, consultants, and other professionals through startups like Mercor and Surge to write out in detail what counts as a job well done in every conceivable context. (Josh Dzieza and Hayden Field, The Verge)
Vibe coding starter guide for newsrooms (Joe Amditis, Center for Cooperative Media)
Sci-fi author and digital activist Cory Doctorow on the AI bubble: “The promise AI companies make to investors is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company. (…) But AI can’t do your job.”
