David Caswell argues legacy newsrooms will not fundamentally transform for AI but will instead optimize existing workflows until they hit a wall built from old assumptions about articles and human-in-the-loop processes. Long interview, worth it. (Mirko Lorenz, Babylon)

The public isn’t impressed: If you ask people what AI in news will do for them, the answer is mostly “make it worse.” High assumed use, low expected benefit. News media rank below search engines and social media on public AI optimism. One reason: journalists are unusually good at publicizing their own AI screw-ups. (Rasmus Kleis Nielsen)

Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei thinks AI made him a better writer and editor and wants to tell us. He’s not showing us his (boring?) prompts, but flexes about a conversation loop that teaches Claude his style.

Six provocations from Reuters Institute researcher Felix Simon: The low-hanging fruit of AI in journalism has been picked, human-in-the-loop is becoming a polite fiction, and “responsible AI” labels won’t fix the trust problem.

A book about AI warping reality contained fake AI-generated quotes. Where exactly is the line between using AI as a tool and letting it do your job for you? (Will Oremus, The Atlantic)

Stop calling everything “AI”: A spam filter, a chatbot, and a hospital bed sensor are not the same thing. The case for more precise language, and why journalists are the people most responsible for fixing this mess. (Alexa Steinbrück)

Are human journalists irreplaceable? Beware of newsrooms that keep optimizing for speed and scale while telling themselves they’re building something human-centric. (Agnes Stenbom Swedling, Reuters Institute)

A book about AI and truth contains quotes made up by AI. The author says it was an accident and blames ChatGPT and Claude. (Benjamin Mullin, New York Times)

A brief look at how German news agency dpa is building a “trusted information layer” designed to plug its verified news, data, and partner sources directly into the AI workflows of its clients. (Teemu Henriksson, WAN-IFRA)

Vibecoding a data visualization dashboard for a Philippine health survey turned out to be “AI does the boring parts while you have to make a lot of editorial calls.” Jaemark Tordecilla covers the wins (data cleaning, pivoting fast, chart generation) and the walls he hit. (Generative AI in the Newsroom)

Casey Newton is rebuilding his newsletter around scoops and original reporting, cutting the link roundups and even analysis. The bigger question: What kinds of editorial businesses cannot be replaced by AI? (Laura Hazard Owen, Nieman Lab)

Is raw reporting material, all those notes, photos and audio that never made it into the CMS, the actual product? Journalists verify and judge, AI handles the packaging. Burt Herman of Hacks/Hackers shows a proof-of-concept with NYC mayoral communications.

Journalism under siege, but Perugia delivered anyway: the Reuters Institute rounds up the International Journalism Festival, from AI editorial responsibility to a Romanian poverty podcast, a WhatsApp newsroom serving 100,000 people across the US-Mexico border, and whether news creators and traditional journalists can stop being weird about each other.

“The New York Times has cut ties with a freelance journalist after discovering he used artificial intelligence to help write a book review that echoed elements of a review of the same book in the Guardian.”

Who’s hyping whom? We cover AI while AI puts our industry under pressure. Transformation has become the default framing. A special issue of Digital Journalism looks at the hype cycle.