I need to get this out of my head.
Trying to figure out what to teach in a journalism class in 2026 feels like being torn apart from the insides. And I can already feel the people thinking It’s Not That Hard, Just Teach The Basics blah blah blah sure. Easy for you to say. You’re either not teaching journalism in 2026 or you’re willfully blind as to what is going on right now.
Faculty are under enormous pressure from university leadership and voices in industry that students must have AI skills when they leave. When asked what those are – what do they mean by AI skills? – the answer we get is Yes. AI skills. The kids need the AI skills. AI. Skills. Yes.
They don’t know.
And they’re quick to tell you that you’re a useless dinosaur if you don’t teach them these magical skills that they can’t describe.
Worse, the journalism world is being fractured into two warring tribes that are disingenuously arguing right past each other. Everyone is screaming, no one is listening, and everyone is full of shit in their own way. Trying to engage with everyone’s arguments on their merits is enough to drive you crazy.
Oversimplifying and being as disingenuous to all as they are to each others arguments, here are the two tribes fighting with each other: The Stochastic Parrot/Plagiarism Machine is Evil And I Will Never Touch It Group vs the Make The Meat Bags Talk To Other Meat Bags And AI Will Lead Us To Glory Group. There’s a third group – the Supernerds Making Micro Tools Only 3 People Need/Understand That Can’t Be Trusted Without Massive Human Oversight Group but they’re not fighting this fight.
Just by writing this, I’m going to get shit from all of them. Oh, you’re actually using AI in your class? Poison! Heretic! Earth/Job killer! Oh, you’re not allowing your students to use AI? Lol dinosaur so out of step and irrelevant! Just quit already! Oh, you’re worried that if you let students use AI you’ll actually make them dumber? Or you’ll be the one that puts them on a path to a delusional spiral? Doomer.
Further frustrating me is that every argument contains danger. Every suggestion carries a risk of actually harming students. Go one way too far and you make them two letter grades dumber than you got them – which, to be clear, is not the gig. Go too far the other way and you hurt their chances of finding a place in a new world that includes an alien brain on call 24/7 that isn’t going to magically go away.
No one knows where the lines are. There is no manual for this. No one knows that you can do This, but Not This. The best we’ve got is Try Some Stuff, See What Happens.
And to be clear, I do think there are useful things that AI can do for journalism. And I’m quite sure there are things that will absolutely harm the profession. More on those in future posts, but I’m struggling to find why we shouldn’t use the thing that enables things we couldn’t do before if it serves the mission.
But here is the problem that keeps me awake at night: How do you teach someone how to do something with AI when they don’t know what success looks like in the first place? Someone who struggles with critical reading. Someone so riven with anxiety about failure they’ll accept anything that appears to help.
My spiral with all of this started with a February column by Chris Quinn, editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer where he bagged on a recent grad for rejecting their job offer after the kid learned that they’ll be the one feeding AI so it can write stories. The headline: Journalism schools are teaching fear of the future. The kid wanted more out of a journalism career than feeding an AI quotes. Good for them. Not a reason to write a letter from the editor crapping on the kid and every j-school without knowing anything about what we do.
That sparked a lot of conversation online and in company Slacks, and that created even more journalism about journalism.
“It’s bots vs reporters at the AP” according to Semafor. This quote from the story sets the whole thing up:
“Because local newsrooms are so strapped, they are turning for assistance on the news making process in every direction. Advance Publications got there first, others will follow,” AP Senior Product Manager for AI Aimee Rinehart wrote in internal company Slack messages first shared with Semafor, referring to the Plain Dealer’s parent company. “Resistance is futile.”
The thing being “resisted”: the idea that people would go do the reporting and AI would write the story. Or at the very least, write the first version of the story.
Here is where this gets into a giant no-one-is-listening mess for me:
- If you’re in the no, never let AI write a story camp, you’re wrong. There are all kinds of stories that this could totally work for. They are not the stories you are thinking of. The stories you aspire to write? AI is bad at them. The stories you don’t want to write, or don’t have to think very much while writing them? They’re not bad at those. Notice I didn’t say good. I said not bad. And they’re really, really fast at them, which has it’s own value.
- If you’re in the absolutely yes, we’ll barely have to write anything again camp, you’re wrong. The set of stories this will work on is small, formulaic and low value. I’ve written hundreds of these stories in my career because I was cheap and it needed to be done. The city council will consider an ordinance that does xyz at its Tuesday meeting. Food trucks and puppies in costumes will star in this weekend’s local festival. The Department of Transportation said Jones Street will be closed for the next week as crews work on the sewer. That’s the level we’re talking here.
- If you’re in the why are we even thinking about this, we’ve never done something like this before camp, you’re wrong. I’m sure even older examples exist, but earlier this year my former employer, the Tampa Bay Times, took some flak for publishing AI generated real estate stories. Online commenters lamented in all the ways they lament. But I automated Tampa Bay real estate stories … in 2008 … no AI required. It was just a templated thing using public data. No one lamented then. No one feared I was taking a reporter’s job then. See for yourself what it did and ask yourself: would you get enough value out of that if you made a person do it? And yet thousands of people used it regularly.
A long time ago, I once complained to an older reporter working on a Big Story that I wanted to be working on a Big Story and all I was doing were stories that ended sentences with police said. And he told me that to build the Taj Mahal, you’ve got to build a lot of shacks. You don’t go from shack to mansion in one step. And I hated that answer at 22. But he was right.
What AI presents is the industrialization of my metaphorical shack. Push some buttons, poof, shack. Need more shacks? Push more buttons. Dozens of shacks. More content! Just what everyone wants! But if AI could write Pulitzer winners or stories that grab attention in an attention starved world by pushing a few more buttons, Anthropic/OpenAI/Google wouldn’t have free accounts marketed to college kids. The marketing – and pricing – would be very different. The marketing now? Automated volume. More Stuff for the Thing! Volume as a value in and of itself.
The student journalist of 2026 did not grow up reading a print newspaper at home like generations of students before them. That student who walks into my classroom in 2026 often has very little to zero experience with a news product. Journalism faculty at other institutions that I’ve talked to all report the same thing: We have journalism majors who have not and do not read news. Or watch it. There is nothing for them to emulate.
So please, tell me: how am I supposed to prepare a student for a future where AI can write a simple story for them if they just tell it to do that when they do not know what that story looks like. I do. And the reason I can tap a few words into a chat window and get a reasonable facsimile of what I used to do on the night cops desk in the 90s is because I did that. I know in my bones exactly what that looks like and what it takes to get it. An 18-year old kid doesn’t.
Add in that they know they don’t know, and this tool will do something that looks like a story, so the temptation to use it is enormous, and so is the chance of a generation of student journalists learning how to write like AI because of their reliance on it. A bonus dollop? They are, as a group, unable or unwilling to read. Close, careful, critical reading? Exceptionally bad at it, generally speaking. The bulk of them are the worst human for the human in the loop.
How do you make that student labor to build shacks now, knowing a machine will do it for them today and maybe after graduation, without them ever having set foot in a shack? How can I get them to understand the value of shackbuilding – and to not fear but embrace all the mistakes that come with that – all so they might have a chance to build mansions one day?