If making money is what you want to do, there are better ways than journalism. Nor is the trade easy in the sense that you don’t have to work hard. The editor’s day starts at 7:00 a.m., if not earlier. (At one job, my day began at 6:30 a.m. and ran until 8:00 p.m.) Writers and reporters must keep odd hours. And, like hurdle-jumpers, they live with the neverending questions: Will I be able to do it again? What must I do next? Will I clear the deadline with news, or will I finally stumble?
The recompense is that you are doing something that you would want to be doing anyway: scribbling, seeing new things, talking to new people. Even as the years have straitened the industry—hollowed it out and mashed it down—journalism has remained one of the precious few trades (for it is a trade, not a learnèd profession like lawyering or medicine) where you can live a picaresque life and make a living at it.
Of course, the world has been picking away at the romance for a while now. The latest onslaught comes from technologists in the form of “artificial intelligence” (an irritating exercise in question-begging, that name is). Some publications have decided that this tool is the future of journalism. Last week, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, in a troubling “Letter from the Editor,” gloried in how A.I. is transforming its news coverage:
Because we want reporters gathering information, these jobs are 100 percent reporting. We have an AI rewrite specialist who turns their material into drafts. We fact-check everything. Editors review it. Reporters get the final say. Humans — not AI — control every step.
By removing writing from reporters’ workloads, we’ve effectively freed up an extra workday for them each week. They’re spending it on the street — doing in-person interviews, meeting sources for coffee. That’s where real stories emerge, and they’re returning with more ideas than we can handle.
Reporters who don’t write! What a thought.
Let us lay aside for now the amusingly blithe remark about the extra workday, which brings to mind an exchange in the J. G. Ballard story set in a world where clocks are banned:
“It’s against the law to have a gun because you might shoot someone. How can you hurt anybody with a clock?”
“Isn’t it obvious? You can time him, know exactly how long it takes him to do something.”
“Well?”
“Then you can make him do it faster.”
In some ways, the Plain Dealer’s new regime is a strange recapitulation of newspaper history. After the advent of the telephone, reporters (“legmen”) in the field would call back their findings to “rewrite men,” who would transform quotes and observations into finished copy. This system is memorialized in the still-fresh 1940 Cary Grant vehicle, His Girl Friday, where the court reporters sit around playing cards until it’s time to rush to the phones with as much lurid detail as they can rack out of their gin-addled brains. In exceptional modern circumstances, this is a practice that recurs in emergencies. Sarah Kugler of the Associated Press delivered her eyewitness account of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by payphone, scooping the rest of the world press. More recently, when one of my own reporters was at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman tried to assassinate Donald Trump, he called in his copy. (The disappearance of landlines has made this harder—cell reception during mass events is a harsh constraint, as we discovered over a frustrating hour of dropped calls.)
The rewrite man is a concession to the simple fact that many very good reporters can’t write; when they try to, the consequences can be disastrous. There’s a certain psychological sense to this. Writing well is basically a solitary, introspective activity; it is often time-consuming, and it usually is built on wide reading, another solitary activity. Reporting is fundamentally social and generally its products demand a quick turnaround. (The contradiction between these two, a brother in the trade once suggested to me, is why journalists run to alcoholism—they tend to be basically antisocial people who spend much of their time talking to people.) And, it is true that as a newsmagazine editor, I will prefer a reporter who has only a passing familiarity with the American tongue but gets stories to a belletrist who doesn’t have much new to say. In the worst case, I will be the rewrite man.
H. L. Mencken regarded this collaborative practice with mild disdain. He wrote in his memoirs that in his early career, “Rewrite men were unheard of. Every reporter, no matter how remote the scene of his story, came back to the office and wrote it himself.” (Other characters he disliked: editorial writers, press agents, journalist trade unionists. Characters he liked: compositors, alcoholic court reporters, ex-Confederate managing editors.) As so often seems to happen, I think Mencken was right on the merits. Much as I hate the hours of groaning over howlers that go into churning out twenty or thirty thousand words of passable copy every week, much as I wish my writers would look at a copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage from time to time, the embrace of the electronic rewrite man is a mortgage against the future of the industry. I don’t think that’s worth the candle.
This isn’t just sentimentalism, hysteria, or self-preservation. (Although I won’t deny those are in the mix, too—not to mention how degrading it is to edit copy that someone clearly produced with A.I. and didn’t even bother to humanize.) The Plain Dealer’s electronic rewrite man misses the point of having the kids write. For most national and much local coverage, you can still subscribe to one of the wire services (which remain admirable redoubts of newswriting skill) and print their coverage without alteration or further effort. You don’t have your kids write squibs because they are going to produce world-class literature, or even because they can do it better than anyone else. You have your kids write squibs because it makes them think about news in a particular way, and this is a low-cost way of making them do it. Journalism isn’t just a product for consumption; it is something that people do (even under the new system in Cleveland). Writing is an artifact of thought and research. For the young reporter, it helps you realize how to frame a piece after you have worked it out on the paper, or what you should have asked in an interview but didn’t. It’s how you learn to do good journalism.
If you’re just feeding quotes into the robot and the editors are quietly sprucing it up in post, yes, maybe you’re adding a workday to your week. But it’s not clear that you’ll learn how to distinguish what is actually interesting and newsworthy, that you’ll develop the eye and ear that will make you better at what you do. The robot will take whatever you have and just bundle it neatly, without forcing you to reckon with whether what you got is worthwhile. This is perhaps most important for those who want to leap from the writing ladder to the editorial ladder.
As usual, the tacit assumption here seems to be that nobody in a senior role will ever retire or die or have an embarrassing sex scandal and need replacing. Maybe that’s a good bet. I tend to think in the long run it isn’t. We’ll miss having people who know what they’re doing when they’re gone and there are none to take their places.
My criticism is an instance of a broader skepticism of the use of A.I. The problem is less that it produces a shoddy product (although it often does, at least right now). The problem is it saves users the trouble of thinking. In the case of journalism, where the goal is clarity of observation, thought, and communication, this outsourcing seems risky.
Journalism does have certain peculiar advantages vis-a-vis the machine. Foremost among these is that it is already a ruined industry; there’s just not much meat left on these bones. Most publications, whether formally non-profits or not, operate under the expectation that they’ll lose money. Market pressures no longer strictly apply. In some sense, the product is already a luxury item like literary fiction. A collective effort could protect the talent pipeline if the problem were articulated and emphasized, because the expectation of profitability is already nil.
But this does not seem likely. Easy measures of productivity (or pseudo-productivity) always win, even in industries untethered from economics. That is sad. I do not think the electronic rewrite man could pen Tom Jones or The Rings of Saturn. And I think the greater risk is that no one will see that it is worth trying, that audiences will move on and that writers will lose the skill. To some extent, this has already happened. (“Name me, muse, the immortal singer . . . who, abandoned by his mortal audience . . . lost his voice.”)
Journalism’s product may be easier to replicate, but the long-term degradation could be consequential. We are often little more than entertainers, yes. But our trade’s output does, at its best, help people be adults in a roughly free society of which, for now, the human beings are in charge. The world will be worse when we’re gone.
