The journalism industry is no stranger to artificial intelligence. News organizations have been using versions of AI for the better part of a decade — we were writing about it years before OpenAI ever even mentioned ChatGPT.
As AI has become more accessible, the relationship between journalism and AI has only grown closer. Despite widespread commentary about the negative impact AI may have on the industry, there are actually plenty of material ways in which this technology can support journalists and news organizations.
This week, OpenAI advanced that relationship by announcing new initiatives aimed toward journalism schools and training the next generation of news professionals. For the new school year, OpenAI is granting more than 400 ChatGPT Edu subscriptions to interested graduate students and faculty at the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures at CUNY’s Newmark J-School and the Medill’s Knight Lab at Northwestern University.
“Generative AI is a transformative technology that will remake the information landscape, and one that the journalism industry will need to adapt to and shape in order to fulfill our mission of informing the public,” Gina Chua, Executive Director of the Tow-Knight Center, said. “We intend for the Newmark community to be at the forefront of this transformation, and it’s critical that they learn about and be immersed in this technology.”
With any emerging technology, immersion and education are foundational elements that fuel understanding, adoption and responsible use. And when it comes to AI, understanding how the technology works and the ability to adopt and use it responsibly are paramount.
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Education Fuels the Future of Work
OpenAI’s initiative comes at a time when AI is still a relatively new addition to the way in which professionals — in journalism and beyond — approach their work.
From a marketing perspective, we’ve seen first the advent of AI content creation tools, then the proliferation of AI search, and now industry conversations about how to use AI tools, how to optimize for AI search, how to measure the impact AI has on an organization and more.
One of the most common themes surrounding these conversations is the relative newness of it all. The influence of AI is still so recent, that we’re all seeing the rapid development of tools, workflows and strategies. Amid this change, marketers are telling us that keeping up is not a simple endeavor.
In our AI in Marketing survey, 61% percent of respondents told us they’ve never gone through any sort of AI training. Then, in our GEO adoption survey, 24% of respondents said they haven’t had any training related to generative engine optimization; another 41% said they had, but only because they sought it out themselves.
The theme here is clear: Education is lagging behind technological advancement. But our surveys are aimed at working professionals — people who, in many cases, may be well beyond their years pursuing higher education. With every class of graduates entering the workforce, new skills and attitudes are brought more into focus. OpenAI’s initiatives for journalism schools gives these aspiring professionals a head start on developing the skills that will be relevant for the journalism jobs, and other related roles, in the future.
AI and information processing technologies are predicted to be the top driver of business transformation over the next 5 years, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs survey. At the same time, lack of skills to support AI adoption was the No. 1 barrier to adoption reported by WEF’s survey respondents.
In other words, OpenAI’s focus on giving students the skills they need to work within AI environments is primed to be a huge value to the workforce of the not-so-distant future.
How Marketing Benefits from Journalistic Advancements
They’re totally different industries, but anyone who works in them will tell you: There’s plenty of cross-over between journalism and marketing.
It’s the reason why 15% of journalism majors wind up in marketing or marketing-adjacent careers. Journalistic writing is itself a marketing skill. Both professions prioritize skills like storytelling, communication, research and analysis. Both professions place great emphasis on honesty, building trust and providing others with information they need or want. Both professions focus on target audiences and catering their work to those audiences.
And that’s not to mention the direct relationship journalists have always had with PR professionals, whereby journalists seek out interesting announcements to write about and PR pros seek out journalists to help tell their stories.
So, given all this direct cross-over between the journalism and marketing industries, we can see the direct benefit that initiatives like OpenAI’s can have on the future of our profession. But how, specifically, can AI help either side of the coin?
6 AI Skills Journalists and Marketers Both Need
OpenAI’s objective is to not just provide technology to students, but to also provide them a safe environment in which they can experiment, learn and develop their AI literacy while advancing their AI skills at the same time.
Some of the immediate ways AI can benefit professionals on either side of the press release include:
1. Research Assistance
Initial research into a topic is a key part of writing anything. AI assistants are incredibly helpful in pulling information from the web and synthesizing it for the user. This makes the research process much shorter, allowing the journalist or marketer to dive deeper into their research, or begin their writing process faster.
The important thing to always keep in mind, though, is the potential for inaccuracies. Researchers using AI should follow the data out of the chatbot to the original sources to understand the context around each source and stat.
2. Data Analysis
AI can also help evaluate a dataset and extract trends worth highlighting in an article. The typical data analysis process without AI typically includes gathering the data, formatting it, cleaning and de-duplicating it, structuring and filtering it to surface insights, and then, finally, reviewing and analyzing those insights. With AI, the tool can carry out all those steps, right through and including the insight analysis.
However, it’s important to understand that any data analysis done with AI should be reviewed by a human expert. Every step of the data analysis process has the potential to introduce bias or inaccuracies, and it’s critical that the human reviewer stay vigilant throughout the whole process.
3. Questions Development
Interviews are a key component of writing a news story, a case study, a team leader bio and countless other types of content. In journalism school, you learn about developing natural lines of questions that help advance conversations and home in on the heart of the matter (whatever it happens to be).
Coming up with questions isn’t always easy, especially when the topic is either greatly unfamiliar to the writer, or so familiar that they run out of question variants to ask (this happens sometimes with client success storytelling). In either case, AI can help suggest new topics to cover or new ways to ask a question during an interview.
4. Ideation and Brainstorming
Both marketers and journalists are expected to be never-ending wells of content and story ideas. But we’re all only human, and sometimes the creativity well dries up. AI can put more water in our buckets by suggesting new topics, or new angles to old topics, to cover for our audience.
Not every idea will be worth pursuing, but that’s exactly the point. A brainstorming session — human-led or AI-led — always results in good, bad and mediocre ideas. It’s the process of evaluating and thinking critically about each one that gives us a stronger sense of the direction we need to take.
5. Storytelling Formats
There are a million ways to tell a story. Some formats are better suited to certain types of stories than others — but all stories can be repurposed into new formats.
For example, consider a case study, one of the most common types of stories coming out of marketing departments. You could:
- Write a case study as an editorial-driven piece of content.
- Reformat their wins into a numbers-focused infographic.
- Repurpose the client’s glowing feedback into a video to share on social media.
- Reframe the whole story behind the success as a how-to guide for prospects looking for advice on how to achieve a particular type of marketing goal.
- Rewrite the case study into a podcast script.
- Condense the stats from the case study into an interactive carousel post for LinkedIn.
I could go on and on about how to make the most out of any given story. So can AI — but AI can also help you actually repurpose that content, giving you first drafts of infographic outlines, social media posts, instructional guides, or video or podcast scripts.
6. Human Judgement
When I went off to college, one thing my high school teachers said to me was that college isn’t where we go to learn what to think, but rather where we learn how to think. Learning critical thinking skills has always been critical for just about every profession, but it’s especially pertinent to journalists and marketers.
Think about it: The content journalists put out into the world are what people engage with to understand the world. And the content marketers put out into the world are what people engage with to understand the options they have for addressing a particular problem.
When AI is involved in creating that content, it’s our responsibility — whether we’re inside a newsroom or working from the marketing department — to ensure it’s accurate and useful, and not misleading or incorrect.
Human judgement is an AI literacy skill that anyone using AI needs to develop. One of the best environments to develop this is within the tools themselves; and that’s exactly what OpenAI is providing with their gifts to Northwestern and CUNY’s programs.
OpenAI Invests in the Future of AI Literacy
OpenAI’s recent announcement is far from the first time they’ve given support to the journalism industry. Previously, they’ve partnered with organizations like the American Journalism Project, the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, WAN-IFRA and others to make their technology accessible and available to reporters around the world. Their latest venture into journalism — this time, with a focus on the future of the industry — just reinforces how the company views the potential of AI for the future of reporting.
“Together, these educational collaborations, professional partnerships, and industry conferences are helping shape the next phases of OpenAI’s journalism work—ensuring the deployment and use of AI is grounded in the real needs and experiences of the people building the future of news,” the press release concludes.
That sentiment rings true for the marketing industry, too; it’s imperative that we guide AI use toward the benefit of our audiences and teams; to ground the use of AI in real human needs and utilize it to address the real pain points our audiences face.
