An Old-Fashioned Blogroll-Style Dogpile
I was, in a moment of conflict, casting about for something to write about, the thought being a) it's good to keep the habit going but also b) it's getting late and I'm tired; I honestly didn't know which would win out.
Then, sitting in my inbox, was my salvation: a post from my friend Ty on the scourge of AI in journalism, and by god, it got me fired up.
I'd missed this story (which is just one of the benefits of subscribing to Ty's newsletter, which you should absolutely do — he finds you good stuff to read on this slop-infested hell-scape we know as the internet) but after reading about it, it's all I want to talk about, even at this late stage of the day.
No one is eager to chat with me about it, so I'm going to try my luck at simply aggregating Ty's post and adding to it a few of my own thoughts, in the glorious tradition of the blogs of yore.
The topic, as I mentioned in passing, is AI in journalism. More specifically, it's about Chris Quinn, the editor at Cleveland (dot com), and his telling-on-himself editorial decrying not only a principled young journalist who was willing to turn down a job (because the paper stresses the use of AI) but also the very institutions of journalism schools for daring to churn out such cheeky little bastards in the first place.
So for starters, go read Ty be more eloquent and thoughtful than I will be:
If push came to shove and I was forced to choose between delivering Quinn a swift kick to the crotch or shaking the hand of this student journalist — well, I'd have to think about it for a long minute, but I think I'd choose the handshake.
Why? (Certainly not because the swift kick wouldn't be justified and oh-so-very satisfying.)
Because it's more and more evidence of the principled folks that are needed to keep journalism alive.
Ty sums up the struggle he and I faced when we got out of journalism school perfectly (emphasis mine):
I went to j-school. So did Chris, incidentally. But whereas Chris graduated sometime in the last century, I went to school with people who had to look for their first journalism job in the 2020s. I can tell you with great confidence that recent graduates and young reporters may not know everything about their chosen profession — they are, after all, young — but they’re aware that their industry is stuck in a catastrophic death spiral of layoffs and budget cuts and that their most realistic options are to either accept a $30k-a-year position at a hedge fund–owned paper in central nowheresville population 300 where they will serve as reporter, editor, copyeditor, photographer, videographer, social media poster, and town punching bag for two years before burning out — or look for a PR job.
This is all too true. I'm a before-and-after case study: I took one of those very same reporting jobs he described and now I work in PR.
Stuff is even bleaker now than when I was working in newspapers; by the time I left, I don't think anyone had heard of ChatGPT yet.
So for a student/recent graduate to come into a professional newsroom and have the maturity and discernment to know this particular institution, by and large, endorses and encourages hackery — well, I can't help but get a little misty eyed at that.
It reminds me of this line from The West Wing. Leo McGarry is yelling at his sister because she'd been a superintendent who was against prayer in schools and had called a photographer ahead of an event where she knew students would be praying and cops would be enforcing the law, making for a good photo.
Leo, with equal parts exasperation at his sister and admiration for students who were technically breaking the law by exercising their faith, said:
Those kids are commendable in this day in age, those kids are
phenomenal...
That's all I could think when I imagined this recent graduate saying, "Thanks but no thanks," to a "professional" "newspaperman" (scare quotes very much intended because those words would be doing some work in Quinn's case) whose standards didn't pass muster with a neophyte journalist.
It's so depressing to think about this story from the industry side of things, which is why I'm choosing to think about it from the more hopeful side of things. I see it in the students I work with in the very same j-school that Ty and I attended: a profound and sincere earnestness about this thing we call reporting the news.
If we'd just give them an environment in which they could thrive, I think we'd be fine. But society's wholesale leap into the seemingly-warm-but-ulimately-frigid embrace of AI give me a great deal of pause. I don't expect principled stances from cash-strapped and subscription-starved publications, so I'm going to hold my breath and hope more kids like this one in Cleveland emerge to make us proud.
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