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.
AI & Journalism Links
This started out as a spreadsheet. Now it's a blog. And a Newsletter.
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)
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)
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.”
Google is rolling out Preferred Sources globally and has unveiled new AI features as well as new partnerships with news publications. SPIEGEL is one of the partners. (Google)
“The Washington Post last week rolled out AI-generated podcasts, ignoring internal reviews that found errors in AI scripts, like fabricated quotes, and had deemed more than two-thirds of them unpublishable.” (Max Tani, Semafor)
A Kenyan author on the supposed markers of AI-generated text: “The very things you identify as the fingerprints of the machine are, in fact, the fossil records of our education.” (Marcus Olang’, This Man’s Mind)
To mark ChatGPT’s third birthday, the Guardian’s Robert Booth tours Silicon Valley in search of the future: “Everyone is working all the time,” said Madhavi Sewak, a senior leader at Google DeepMind, in a recent talk. “It’s extremely intense. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of natural stopping point, and everyone is really kind of getting ground down. Even the folks who are very wealthy now … all they do is work.”
Thoughts on ChatGPT apps and why they aren’t mini versions of existing news products: “The entire premise of building a ChatGPT App is to expose capabilities, not pages. This is the existential shift for news orgs accustomed to owning the screen.” (Florent Daudens, LinkedIn)
In left-leaning media outlets like n+1, resistance against AI is taking shape: “When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. (…) There’s still time to disenchant AI, provincialize it, make it uncompelling and uncool.”
Three examples of AI translation at Chicago’s La Voz, The Economist, and BBC News Polska. What unfortunately isn’t mentioned: What happens to quotes that need to be translated back into their original language. (Clare Spencer, Generative AI in the Newsroom)
Palantir is providing Fox News with three AI tools: “Topic Radar” generates custom briefings for reporters, “Text Editor” reviews articles for style and readability, and “Article Insights tracks performance and suggests optimizations. (Sara Fischer, Axios)
