AI makes human journalists more important than ever

As The Daily Memphian enters its eighth year since launch, we continue to see that the most engaged, most impactful and most read stories we produce are the stories with the greatest impact and relevance to the people that live here.

It sounds a little trite. But it’s true. True whether we’re putting a spotlight on a massive new xAI data center in Memphis or digging into the potential state takeover of our largest public school system or highlighting new restaurants and chefs doing amazing things or telling the stories of immigrants of all backgrounds who’ve made Memphis their home.

It’s true in the enterprise reporting we do. It’s true in the quick briefs and breaking news we produce. It’s true in the totality of the impact of the more than 8,000 stories we’ve produced in the last year.

And what’s striking to me about this seemingly trite notion is twofold.

First, those are all the same kinds of stories that were most important to cities and towns many (many) years ago when I first got into local news. Technology — whether it’s been the rise of the Web, social media, smartphones, or AI — hasn’t erased that reality.

Second, it’s clear that facts, research, good writing, and a deep, first-hand knowledge of what people in our community want to know and read still matter immensely.

All of which still requires great reporters, editors, photographers, digital producers, freelancers, and contributors. Which is why The Daily Memphian has nearly 40 people in our newsroom.

Of course, new technologies have radically changed the way we produce and distribute the news. But that’s not as new a phenomenon as some people would seem to believe. QuarkXPress, Photoshop, Netscape, Google, Facebook, iPhones, TikTok, and so many other technologies have all brought about massive change in this industry before the rise of AI.

But in the end, none of those radical technologies have changed the fact that news organizations still need talented, hardworking journalists. In fact, I’m convinced that the importance of journalists — real human journalists who of course utilize all kinds of technology in their work — has only gotten more important in the face of so much poorly written, strangely off-topic, and intermittently factual information.

Two examples from recent months:

The Washington Post’s AI confidently told me that Donald Trump had been President for eight and a half years. That’s The Washington Post. Were we at The Daily Memphian to tell our readers that our mayor had been in office for eight and a half years, I wouldn’t be able to go out in public given the amount of outrage, cancellations, mockery, and derision I’d have gotten.

Then Google’s AI took less than two seconds to tell me that the Chief Operating Officer of our local community foundation was in fact the Chief Operating Officer of another organization in Memphis. Again, were we to have published that information as fact, I’d have had to go into hiding — or simply start looking for a new job.

Put another way, the many semi-literate half-truths written by angry people on social media over the last 20 years didn’t negate the need for The Daily Memphian when we launched in 2018. Instead, our history shows that the need for quality, fact-based journalism is strong.

In fact, some of the biggest and most important sources of The Daily Memphian’s traffic and our paid subscriptions — subscriptions that make up 50% of our nearly $6 million in annual revenue — come from social media and search. Does that say people in Memphis are satisfied with those sources of information?

Or does it say that people simply aren’t finding what they want and need without coming to The Daily Memphian for news and information and their community?

I’m confident it’s the latter. Because the fundamentals of journalism haven’t changed as much as some people want to believe. Arguably, the slop of semi-true statements spewed by the AI models — models that of course quite obviously represent incredible advances in technology — only increase the importance of and the essential need for high-quality journalism written by the same sorts of humans who have done that work for decades.