The Dorset Echo is hiring Ai-enhanced journalists. While this is par for the course in journalism, it is a worrying sign of things to come in the trade, but ultimately, without some pretty extreme engineering, we journalists aren’t going to disappear.
The job advert
The Dorset Echo, a longstanding if somewhat right wing bastion of the Fourth Estate in South and West Dorset, is advertising for an “Ai-enhanced news reporter”. The ad states, “The role combines traditional journalism with innovative AI tools, ensuring high-quality storytelling. You will be responsible for sourcing stories, maintaining ethical standards, and collaborating with editorial teams.”
The Echo is known for working the backsides of its journalists, who are overworked and seriously underpaid, thanks in large part to not being unionised. This appears to be another way of generating newsprint on the cheap, asking their embattled hacks to do more for less.
Doing more for less has led to howlers like in around 2011, when I remember the paper suggested an old man who had a fatal heart attack while driving his car on the A352 might have had too much to drink. Locals routinely howl in despair at its weak journalism, which again is down to the paper instituting cuts when investing in journalists would achieve quite a different outcome.
The real purpose of a newspaper journalist
Having worked in this business for over 20 years, I’ll see things a little differently to the way a newspaper reader might.
Journalists are not at newspapers to uncover the latest, greatest scandal in local or national affairs, but to sell advertising space.
Our stories are next to print adverts in the knowledge that the reader will see – and hopefully engage with – the ad on the next page or on the sidebar online.
Quality journalism is expensive. I’m not talking about how much an hour a journalist gets, but in terms of the amount of hours the journalist needs to put into breaking that story that shakes the world.
This article, written largely off the top of my head, will have taken me 2.5 hours. A fully researched, five-interview, 1800 word piece would take me the best part of a day to write as well as the five to seven hours of interviews and prep. The sort of journalism like Wikileaks and the Panama Papers can take thousands of hours to break as data is analysed and key players are contacted and interviewed.
With plummeting advertising revenues thanks to online competition, there is less to pay the journalists who are there to attract your eyes to the ads next to their work.
This is why media giants like Reach (owner of a constellation of local newspapers as well as the Mirror and Express) are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Newsquest, owner of the Echo, is hardly FT100 material either.
Who’s to blame? The likes of Meta (Facebook), Amazon and Google, who provide targeted ads such as those that are annoying you right now as you read the Dorset Eye edition of this post.
(Dorset Eye is hardly FT100 material either, with its committed owners Jason and Deb Cridland keeping it afloat with ad revenue and donations).
Targeted internet advertising has killed off the big money ads that used to pay us journalists a decent income and allow for quality journalism to be done the world over.
I’m not going to continue defending capitalist newspaper owners. In 2024 the Daily Mail General Trust (another major newspaper owner, with the Daily Mail as its national outlet) achieved a net income margin of 5.7%, which isn’t a bad margin for a company achieving £1.1bn in revenues. Key growth drivers were cuts (think: sacking journalists) and improvements in online advertising revenue.
AI saving newspapers?
The idea behind sacking journalists and hiring AI to do a lot of our work is to save costs and improve margins for their shareholders. It will not necessarily improve journalism, but it will enable those newsroom journalists left to do more for less effort.
When it comes to my business of feature writing, an AI bot can, in theory, write the copy and shape it in a few minutes, with the selected quotes thrown into the pot. Consequently a day’s writing can be saved and instead the interviews and background research are only done on ‘pay-packet time’.
From a personal perspective, I won’t let it write for me – the whole effort of writing is one where each word and paragraph is carefully considered and edited, and AI can’t do as well as I can in crafting a piece.
The Dorset Echo news reporter role is less complex than mine. Most of the journalism you will read is based on news releases – largely rewriting public relations-written copy and putting it in a newspaper.
Occasionally, the hard-pressed hack will phone someone up for a brief interview and insert the quote. Much of that can now be automated as the ‘churnalism’ is taken on by robots.
Relationship building and other journalism crafts
The leadership of the Sunday Express used to praise my work as it came from ‘real people’ as opposed to those put forward in press releases.
This was my doing journalism the old-fashioned way – forming relationships with people and gaining their trust before pitching the story and getting it in print.
I had a scary conversation the other week with someone who works with a property developer in London. They buy property and rent it out. They told me that their team had developed an AI bot that can speak in audio to potential renters and take the call from the beginning of the conversation to the close of the deal. He said that it only works in office hours and even makes breathing sounds at the correct moment. I can’t verify this, but he had no agenda in telling me except that we were telling each other AI scare stories over lunch.
Could such a bot be configured to convince a desperate family being bullied by NHS administrators that it would look after them and get their story in the newspaper? If it can convince someone to rent a flat in London from them, the time isn’t too far off.
There are limits. Where this stops – until humanoid robots are that good in the next decade at least – is in turning up to that family’s house, talking to them and getting the best out of them for the story. What would the capital expenditure be on an intelligent humanoid robot that can fake empathy? CAPEX would be like front-loading the wages of a journalist for 5-10 years per unit initially.
Where a story is spotted by the journalist, data can be mined quickly from publicly available sources using AI too. Could an AI bot then get a whistleblower to speak out about that data? No.
The end is not nigh for journalists
Admittedly, for us at the more experienced end of the spectrum, the end is not nigh for journalists. At the entry level too, for the junior journalist who has media law fresh in his/her head from university and a Generation Z level of understanding of generative AI, the end is still a way away. We just need to upskill. Will it improve the output of the Dorset Echo? Sadly, I don’t think so – it just means fewer people will do even more work!
