The news media industry is buzzing about Artificial Intelligence (AI). There is talk about the rapid pace at which Generative AI technology is becoming more advanced, sophisticated and measurably more accurate. Debates continue to swirl around when and how to leverage AI tools, which tools best support the workflow, how codes of ethics should apply, and when to be transparent about AI usage.
Last month, E&P polled its readers about AI, hoping to glean where news media publishers stand with adoption; what tools they’ve leveraged and return on investment; and where they fall on a comfort-level scale as they experiment with these increasingly sophisticated technologies.
Thirty-nine news media publishers shared their perspectives, ranging in organization sizes from fewer than five employees to more than 100. They represent a spectrum — from eager, early adopters to news outlets that remain reluctant to implement AI. The most common concerns they cited related to accuracy and hallucinations, transparency and audience trust, copyright and intellectual property risks, the impact on news media jobs, data privacy, and fear of amplifying misinformation.
The companies that took part in the survey primarily use AI for newsroom processes — interview transcription, data analysis, headline writing, copyediting, creating story summaries and social media posts. However, in some cases, AI supports tasks such as coding, audience/readership analysis, sales prospecting and SEO.
Among the respondents, nine said they have a formal, published AI policy; seven reported having AI policies “in development.” Just five respondents disclosed they’d entered into content-usage/licensing agreements with AI developers.
E&P also asked how they expect AI to impact their organizations in the next few years. One person responded with a succinct, “Hugely.” Another wrote: “At the current growth rate, AI will design ads, page layout, website design and content, sales, bookkeeping — literally everything we do.”
Conversely, another publisher predicted, “AI is a bubble that is due to pop relatively soon, and the whole industry is likely to crash. I believe the biggest impact will be the removal of unnecessary and annoying AI features from the programs we utilize.”
A second skeptic replied, “We are purposely staying away from it. We work for our readers, not for technology.”
AI at the Goldendale Sentinel
Lou Marzeles took a “circuitous” route to his role as publisher and editor of The Goldendale Sentinel. For most of his career in journalism, he served as editor for titles in major markets, like New York City and Washington, D.C. The path led him to Goldendale, a small town in south-central Washington State — population 3,453, per the 2020 U.S. Census.
“It’s a small, rural community, where a weekly newspaper has been publishing consecutively and has never missed a week since 1879,” Marzeles said. The Sentinel is published by a lean team of just seven employees and a few freelancers. The print edition is still delivered every Wednesday by carriers. The paper’s motto is “The Mouse That Roared: small paper, big reach.”
At the Sentinel, they’re using two primary Generative AI tools: ChatGPT and Perplexity.
“I like the fact that they give footnotes with links to source sites, so it makes it easier to vet the information,” Marzeles said.
Recently, while covering a landmark defamation case playing out in Superior Court, AI proved invaluable. Rulings and pleadings are often complicated by legalese. Marzeles found AI to be a great solution for summarizing the documents “in plain English.”
Facing an imminent deadline, Marzeles also used AI to help outline an article.
“I dropped [the interview transcripts] into ChatGPT-5 and first had it number all of the paragraphs. Then I could refer to the paragraphs I wanted to cite in the article, which were the chief points. I didn’t ask it to write the story for me, but it consolidated the information blocks and suggested some transitions, so I could take that outline and begin writing my story. I was able to write it in 45 minutes when it probably would've taken me two hours or more without [AI],” Marzeles said.
When AI is used for newsgathering, the content is thoroughly proofed and fact-checked before it’s published. Independently, they verify names, quotations and facts.
“We are not going to pass on hallucinations,” he said. “Interestingly, in ChatGPT-5, every reference it’s made has been accurate. Every single one — not that we would ever relax our practice of vetting the information, but it is encouraging to see that it has that level of accuracy.”
Asked how they might use AI in the future, Marzeles said they’re beginning to use AI for marketing tasks and hope to one day use it for subscription management.
To be fully transparent with their audience, their AI policy is outlined in the Sentinel’s 12-page Code of Ethics.
Marzeles has been following news about publishers and AI developers signing content agreements, but noted that many of those partnerships have been with much larger news media companies.
“We’re looking at a collaborative effort,” Marzeles said — meaning, he hopes the state press association will enable Washington’s small publications to take part in similar negotiations. He said he was looking ahead to the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association (WNPA) annual conference, where he expected AI use, licensing and compensation to be hot topics.
AI at Newcom Media
John G. Smith is the vice president of content and design at Newcom Media, Incorporated, a Toronto-based family-owned trade publisher. The company publishes B2B magazines, produces companion websites and hosts trade shows and events. In his role, Smith leads a team of 30 full-time editors, the creative services team and a bullpen of freelance contributors.
Smith said AI came on the company’s radar a couple of years ago. He was given a mandate to test AI technologies. For about a year, a group of six journalists tested popular AI tools, including Otter.ai, ChatGPT and Google NotebookLM.
AI has proven to be a huge time saver for translating their content from English to French and vice versa. “Prior to AI, every single word of that would need to be translated by hand, but what we’ve been able to use it for is rough translation, so that the editor can then go in and refine and fix it before we post it. It’s a much quicker process.”
AI is not being used to generate images, and that’s due to concerns about copyright. “Pictures of real people doing real things in real environments — that is what will engage your reader,” he observed.
Smith has found journalists receptive to using AI tools.
“Nobody goes to journalism school with dreams of tagging articles, optimizing content for SEO or transcribing interviews. But if we apply AI to tasks like these, the hope is that this is going to free up time for journalists to spend more of their skills and time speaking with sources and investigating ideas — the actual art of storytelling,” he said.
Newcom Media publishes its formal policy on AI at newcom.ca/ai-policy/.
“If any of our journalists use AI to analyze a large dataset to come up with a story idea — so that it helps generate the concept of the story — that is when we want to disclose that AI was used. But if we use AI for a copyediting, editing or tagging task, that wouldn’t need to be disclosed,” Smith explained.
“It is about maintaining trust with our readers — to let them know where the content is coming from and how it was developed,” he added. “But there is always a concern that the very fact that we use AI may erode trust.”
AI at The Paper
Based in Morganton, North Carolina, The Paper is an independently owned, three-year-old newspaper that’s wholly focused on local news for residents of Burke County, North Carolina.
“Our mission was to fill the news desert that had occurred here in the past 20 to 30 years and provide the communities of Burke County with a solid, responsible and thorough source of local news, sports, entertainment and opinion,” explained Publisher Allen VanNoppen.
In three short years, The Paper has built its weekly print circulation to 1,000, delivered to subscribers’ homes and distributed at retail outlets. VanNoppen reported a digital audience of roughly 4,000 active members. In a county with a population of 90,000, he said, “There’s a long way to go.”
At The Paper, the team uses ChatGPT for suggesting headlines, generating social media teasers and story summaries, SEO, data mining and pattern recognition.
“ChatGPT-5 is really good at fact-checking and verification,” he said. “It can now analyze videos and images. Editorial planning, transcribing, translation and content tagging — all those types of tasks that used to be done manually — can now be automated, freeing up our reporters to focus on reporting. … It’s great for planning follow-up stories. You can feed the AI a story and ask it, ‘What are the appropriate follow-up questions?’ And we should ask it things like that.”
VanNoppen is of the mind that AI should be embraced by news publishers, with limitations.
“Any entity — and especially in the media world, with the fast pace it demands and the ever-changing habits of consuming news — any entity that does not explore new technology and figure out its fit is really setting themselves up for trouble,” he said. “Think about how much easier the reporter’s job is today because of cell phones, Google, email and the rest, compared to 40 years ago. … AI is another technological tool in the toolbox. To prosper, you must learn to use it responsibly. And that’s the key, to use it responsibly.”
Unethical uses of AI are already impacting the business of local news. VanNoppen cited AI-produced websites that cast themselves as trusted news sources; however, they employ no journalists nor editors. Instead, they leverage AI automation to scrape the internet for local stories, repackage them and publish them as if they were original reporting.
“And all of a sudden, they’re an ‘authoritative’ media source that sells ads, gets subscribers, and it hasn’t cost the owners a dime,” he said. “We are very protective of the authenticity, reliability and credibility of our content.”
They are not using AI to create graphics at The Paper.
“Our experience has been that AI-created graphics and images are not working for a publication like ours,” he said. “They’re just too fabricated. In one case, to accompany a humor column, we used AI to create a sketch to accompany it. A reader wrote back and said, ‘I’m disappointed because the paper is standing on its authenticity policies, yet you used AI.’ That was the last time we did that. Authenticity is paramount.”
Gretchen A. Peck is a contributing editor to Editor & Publisher. She's reported for E&P since 2010 and welcomes comments at gretchenapeck@gmail.com.
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