How Journalism Will Adapt in the Age of AI: Essay

We journalists are by nature a pretty paranoid lot. Permanently worried that somebody somewhere — governments, lawyers, our colleagues, the IT department — is about to do something terrible to us, or our copy.

So far the 21st century has only fed that paranoia. Back in 2006, one of my first covers as editor of The Economist was entitled “Who Killed the Newspaper?” At the time the internet was wrecking the cozy business model of most big city papers that relied on their monopoly of classified advertising.

Looking back, though, it was less a case of assassination than suicide. Far ...