The pursuit of truth is an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. Investigative journalism, by its very nature, demands months, sometimes years, of tireless work to bring a single substantive story to light. From a purely cynical, bottom-line perspective, it is difficult to justify the massive expenditures required to fund such deep-dive reporting. However, this misses the fundamental point of why these institutions exist in the first place: the public often underestimates how deeply organizations like ours are committed to the civic good. We operate on the foundational belief, shared by the Founding Fathers across all their ideological divides, that a free, self-governing people cannot function without a free press and access to reliable, independent information. Thomas Jefferson’s famous assertion that he would choose a press without government over a government without a press remains as poignant today as it was centuries ago, reminding us that journalism is the bedrock upon which a healthy society is built.
In the modern digital ecosystem, journalism serves a dual purpose: it is not only how the public understands the world around them, but it is also the primary mechanism through which emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence “know” what they know. As we stand at the precipice of an AI revolution, we have to approach the intersection of technology and journalism with extreme caution. At our publications, we categorize the AI challenge into two distinct buckets: the critical need to report on this technological era as a major news event, and the internal question of how AI will fundamentally alter the practice, craft, and consumption of journalism. Walking the line between leveraging innovation and protecting the integrity of our reportage is a delicate, ongoing dance that requires constant vigilance.
When considering the adoption of new tools, my personal philosophy favors a measured, patient approach. There is rarely a time when being the “first” to adopt an emerging technology is worth the risk of sacrificing credibility. In my view, there is far more danger in sprinting toward the hype than in taking the time to watch, learn, and experiment quietly behind the scenes. We have already seen the fallout of organizations that ignored this wisdom; some outlets foolishly handed over the keys to AI, allowing it to write and publish articles without sufficient human oversight. The result was a series of entirely foreseeable, public, and embarrassing failures—ranging from simple errors being published as fact to the creation of entirely fake journalists to “write” the news.
These failures served as a sobering lesson for the entire industry: human responsibility is non-negotiable. There is a strange, seductive quality to AI that seems to trick people into forgetting that it is merely a tool, not an author, an editor, or a reporter. When my colleagues express anxiety about AI making a mistake, I remind them of the obvious reality: it is their job to find those mistakes and excise them before anything goes to print. We would never excuse a factual error because “a computer made it,” and we shouldn’t treat AI with any more leniency. No machine should ever be shielded from the accountability that our human editors and reporters are expected to bear every single day. The buck stops with the humans, period.
Despite the risks, we don’t need to fear the tool itself; we just need to use it in the right lanes. I view AI primarily as a powerful, specialized reporting tool rather than a replacement for the craft of writing or editorial judgment. AI excels in ways that humans struggle—specifically, it is brilliant at identifying patterns and spotting anomalies within massive, unwieldy datasets. In a sense, this is the very essence of investigative journalism. Whether we are analyzing complex campaign finance records to see how donor distributions are shifting between parties or looking for subtle trends in public policy, AI can accelerate the legwork that once took analysts weeks to map out.
Ultimately, the goal is to enhance the human element of journalism, not eliminate it. By offloading the pattern-recognition work to a machine, our reporters are freed up to do what they do best: verify the findings, put them into historical and cultural context, and craft the human stories behind the data. We use technology to augment our curiosity, not to replace the moral and intellectual labor required to hold power to account. The future of the press will inevitably involve sophisticated new tools, but if we treat AI as an assistant meant to sharpen our investigation—rather than an oracle meant to replace our voices—we can uphold our duty to the public while navigating the complexities of this new technological frontier.
