• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, January 12, 2025

Journalists can worry all they want about the impact of AI on their jobs. But it’s too late: AI is here, and it is already streamlining the writing and editing process, says John Micklethwait, editor in chief of Bloomberg, in an essay based on the James Cameron Memorial Lecture he delivered at City St. George's, University of London in December. 

“Out of the 5,000 stories we produce every day there is some form of automation in more than a third of them,” Micklethwait admits.  

And that’s just the start. Micklethwait adds that “AI promises to get under the hood of our industry — to change the way we write and edit stories.” 

How so? Micklethwait offers these eight predictions. We apologize for omissions and paraphrases:

1. AI will change journalists' jobs more than it will replace them. Case in point: “When I first came to Bloomberg, there was a ‘Speed’ team of fast-fingered journalists who specialized in banging out headlines, hoping to beat our closest rivals by a few seconds,” Micklethwait writes. “Then automation appeared — computers that could scour a company’s press release in fractions of a second.”

Of course, Bloomberg serves audiences that are greatly affected by breaking market news. It needs editors to tell the reporters what to look for — "the number of iPhones sold in China could matter more to Apple’s share price than the actual income,”  Micklethwait continues. “And the machine also needs humans to look for and interpret the unexpected — the sudden resignation of a CEO, for instance, could be meaningful or not.” 

2. In line with this, breaking news will be more perishable than ever. “AI is going to speed that process up still faster — and universalize it," Micklethwait predicts. “A lot depends on how copyright deals are sorted out, but the chances are that ever more news, as it appears, will be immediately ingested into machines like ChatGPT that consider more than just one market — and added to what might be called immediate general knowledge. Micklethwait hazards “an unscientific guess that the time it takes for prices to move has collapsed from several seconds to milliseconds in my time at Bloomberg.”

3. Newspapers have to hire journalists. "Crucially, a newsroom will still need boots on the ground,” Micklethwait asserts. “Especially in a world where you can no longer presume that an emerging country like Indonesia or India is going to follow Western models of freedom, and where many countries are trying to clamp down on reporting, you will need people who know people.” 

4. The AI change will affect editors more than reporters; this is especially when it comes to commissioning stories. “Again, I think that will remain mainly a human skill — although at Bloomberg we already use AI to prompt us to consider writing a story (pointing out that a share price has jumped or social media is talking about an explosion).”

Then there is the editing component. “I think you will see AI tools coming into play more and more, restructuring and rewriting drafts, checking facts and so on, Micklethwait contends. “Again, I am not talking about New Yorker level editing. But a lot of news reporting is more formulaic.”

Based on this, Micklethwait can perhaps be forgiven for boasting, "You will be unsurprised to know that I smugly still think newsrooms will need people like me.”

5. Search will give way to a Question and Answer format. “As mass summarization tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity suck in ever more stories, they are using them to construct answers,” Micklethwait points out. “You can already see that when you ask Google a question. Rather than getting a long string of links to other stories, you get an answer that runs to a couple of sentences, sometimes close to a paragraph.” 

6. Hallucinations will be easier to spot in text than video or audio. Serious journalists are concerned that the machine will “invent a story or be hoodwinked into inventing one.” In indeed, there is “no shortage of people who think they can gain commercial or political advantage by scamming us,” he observes. But he adds, “My hunch is that for the foreseeable future, the main danger is AI being used to generate fake video or audio images that distort or malignly amplify an event that actually happened, rather than inventing completely fake events.” 

7. Personalization will become more of a reality, although this can be problematic. “Many people don’t like handing over their details to news organizations — even if it would appear to be in their interest to do so,” Micklethwait reports. “Some readers get creeped out when you suggest things to them. They worry about being stuck in opinion ghettoes. They miss that element of serendipity — the story that you didn’t know you would be interested in.” 

8. Regulation is coming, although its form may not be predictable. "In the 1990s, US politicians wanted to free up young internet companies so they could innovate,” Micklethwait recalls. “Nobody now thinks the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook need to be protected from anybody. Rather the reverse."

There you have it. It all sounds reasonable, but we’re not as sanguine about journalistic jobs being safe. The hedge funds that are taking over newspapers already have a business model based, in part, on staff reductions — surely, they will leverage AI to cut staff even further. And, local news is being thwarted by lack of personnel and newspaper closures.  

The takeaway? Organizations that can make AI work for everyone should go for it. But pay heed to Micklethwait's caveats.