Tools Without Rules: Most Journalists Using AI … Despite Most Newsrooms Lacking Official Company Policy

Last week, I wrote about AI’s increased adoption within the journalism industry, despite concerns about unchecked and unregulated use growing both in the public’s eye as well as with journalists.

The AI tools available to all in the publishing industry are too varied and full of potential to ignore entirely, which is why it’s no surprise 81% of journalists are using AI for work, according to a recent Thomson Reuters Foundation report, including almost half (49.4%) using AI tools on a daily basis.

That nearly four in five (79.3%) newsrooms have no established company policy about AI use echoes much of the previously heard concerns.

“Despite a high level of adoption among our survey sample, only 13% of participants reported having an official AI policy in their workplace,” says TRF’s Journalism In The AI Era report. “Nearly half (47.6%) of our respondents told us that their employers are neutral about AI integration. Around a quarter (22.6%) said their company actively encourages it, with similar numbers (24.5%) being cautiously supportive. Only a small number (5.3%) of our sample noted that their company had banned or opposed the use of AI.”

Editing and improving content was the AI function most used for journalism work (for 55.3%), followed by translating (51.8%), generating ideas (48.8%), and research (48.8%).

(Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation)

“Outside of these more popular uses of AI, tasks like transcription (34.1%), content creation (30.6% for text, 21.2% for multimedia), and design (18.2%) saw lower adoption rates,” the report says. “This may reflect the level of frequency with which individual journalists are undertaking these types of tasks, rather than being a reflection on AI technologies per se.”

As for the long-term impact of AI on their work, about half expressed concern about the loss of creativity and original reporting (54.3%), the erosion of critical thinking skills (51.4%), and the proliferation of misinformation (49%).

“Put simply,” the report says, “the conundrum that newsrooms face is rooted in finding the right balance between leveraging the benefits that AI may bring, without deskilling their journalists, and losing the key elements of people-powered reporting.”