Nieman Lab.
Predictions for
Journalism, 2025.
See if any of these are familiar to you:
A reporter uses ChatGPT in her personal life, but isn’t allowed to do so at work.
A large newsroom allows just one (!) person to “look into AI.”
A journalist doesn’t want his boss to know he applied for an AI class.
A journalism professor discourages a student from trying an AI tool.
Everywhere you turn, finger-waggers and wrist-slappers are trying to slow a high-speed train. But here’s the thing: Their livelihood doesn’t depend on understanding this revolutionary technology. Yours does.
In 2025 and beyond, AI will change everything we know about this business, from audience behaviors to business models. If you are a journalist or a journalism student, you should play with it, a lot, while it’s still open and cheap.
Prompt Claude, build a custom GPT, fine-tune an LLM, make a podcast from your meeting notes, make a cute picture of a fairy and turn it into a video. Do like Nikita Roy from the Newsroom Robots podcast and talk to the ChatGPT voice app. Do it every morning until it knows you so well, it becomes your brainstorming partner. The more you understand the tools, the more you understand what’s possible.
This will not last forever. AI companies will change their terms of service, increase their rates or even go out of business. Now is the time to tinker.
The people I’ve seen experiment with AI so far, including those in my programs, are not doing so recklessly. They believe in ethics (transparency, human in the loop). They use caution, building tools and processes that increase newsroom efficiency and creativity, while largely staying away from riskier, audience-facing applications like chatbots. They maintain editorial integrity and report critically on AI companies while simultaneously using their products, like they do with social media.
They don’t try to slow the train; they jump aboard and poke around the engine room. They haven’t broken anything and you won’t either.
Go play.
Marie Gilot is executive director of J+, the professional training arm of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
See if any of these are familiar to you:
A reporter uses ChatGPT in her personal life, but isn’t allowed to do so at work.
A large newsroom allows just one (!) person to “look into AI.”
A journalist doesn’t want his boss to know he applied for an AI class.
A journalism professor discourages a student from trying an AI tool.
Everywhere you turn, finger-waggers and wrist-slappers are trying to slow a high-speed train. But here’s the thing: Their livelihood doesn’t depend on understanding this revolutionary technology. Yours does.
In 2025 and beyond, AI will change everything we know about this business, from audience behaviors to business models. If you are a journalist or a journalism student, you should play with it, a lot, while it’s still open and cheap.
Prompt Claude, build a custom GPT, fine-tune an LLM, make a podcast from your meeting notes, make a cute picture of a fairy and turn it into a video. Do like Nikita Roy from the Newsroom Robots podcast and talk to the ChatGPT voice app. Do it every morning until it knows you so well, it becomes your brainstorming partner. The more you understand the tools, the more you understand what’s possible.
This will not last forever. AI companies will change their terms of service, increase their rates or even go out of business. Now is the time to tinker.
The people I’ve seen experiment with AI so far, including those in my programs, are not doing so recklessly. They believe in ethics (transparency, human in the loop). They use caution, building tools and processes that increase newsroom efficiency and creativity, while largely staying away from riskier, audience-facing applications like chatbots. They maintain editorial integrity and report critically on AI companies while simultaneously using their products, like they do with social media.
They don’t try to slow the train; they jump aboard and poke around the engine room. They haven’t broken anything and you won’t either.
Go play.
Marie Gilot is executive director of J+, the professional training arm of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
