Tech journalist Joanna Stern on leaving the Wall Street Journal and moving on to New Things
Joanna Stern is no stranger to new things. It’s part of the job: Stern began working as a technology journalist in 2007, the year Apple launched the first iPhone, and has covered the shifts in the industry through the rise of smartphones, the mobile internet, and AI. Along the way, she won an Emmy and helped launch The Verge, and spent the last 12 years at The Wall Street Journal, where she had a regular video and text column about personal technology. On April 22, she made an announcement: she was leaving her prestigious media job to make YouTube videos. Fittingly, she’s calling her channel New Things.
“I really wanted my own channel, to do things on my own terms,” Stern explained in her announcement. “With more humor and personality. And because we’re at a moment where we need tech guidance more than ever.”
Stern isn’t the first journalist to tread this path; last year, I wrote about Dave Jorgenson, the former Washington Post TikTok Guy who left to start Local News International, and Joss Fong and Adam Cole, the co-founders of Howtown, who had previously worked for Vox and NPR. Newpress, a relatively recent creator collective, is helmed entirely by veteran journalists.
Like those journalists, Stern is relying on a mix of subscriptions and sponsored content (denoted by a large label and her use of a large golden mic in her videos). But Stern isn’t leaving legacy media entirely behind: a longtime NBC contributor, she now has a deal with the channel that lets it use her content and customize it for its own platforms, which provides a baseline of stability that many independent journalists would be envious of.
I spoke with Stern about her vision for the channel, the work of building up a new audience from scratch, her new book — I Am Not A Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything — and how she’s using AI in her work. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve also talked to Dave Jorgenson [of Local News International] and Joss Fong and Adam Cole [of Howtown], and one thing in common for all of you is that you left large publications to do your own thing. They told me something similar about how they like having a team and the structures of journalism around them.
Speaking of which: you laid out those tenets on your website, and you clearly identify as a journalist rather than a creator. What’s behind those decisions?
Stern: We’ve been describing it as tech journalism for humans who like fun. The humans part is a reaction to AI slop, but I think my guiding principle has always been, whether at the Journal or the Verge or ABC News, to be the person who guides you through the world of technology, both what’s coming and what’s [already] here. I did that with my book, too.
Humor and personality are a big part of it. I want to tackle big topics, but I want to do it in a way that is fun. I think people are like, “Oh, you’re going to become really unhinged.” But we’ll rein it in. We’re not going full Jackass.
Stern: I think I actually need to come up with a list of things that make a story for us. I generally follow my curiosity, and I like to think I still have a finger on the pulse of what everyday people are doing. But I also realize sometimes I definitely don’t, because I’m [doing things like] living with AI for a full year, and putting robots in my house, and wearing connected glasses. These are clearly not things that everyday people do.
The Chinese robot, for example, happened because I was genuinely interested in it, but it was also a thing that had gone viral. You see it at the Chinese New Year, or roaming the streets. And I was curious: What’s the story behind it? Where’s it coming from? Then I realized it’s coming from China, and there was a geopolitical story there.
There are different layers to every story, which I can unpack and hopefully find a throughline that connects it all. But then we’re also going to have stuff like, hey, the new iOS comes out and I’m gonna give you all my tips, because that’s my favorite thing to do every year. It’s also the biggest hit of the year. This is the software that powers 50% of the country’s computers, you know? If I can be the person helping you use that, I want to do that. But if I can be the person telling a very niche story about security and privacy, I also want to do that.
Stern: Well, we’re using AI a lot. There’s a whole chapter in my book about AI and work and AI in journalism. When I started the book, I had a reporting assistant. By the mid year, I no longer needed the reporting assistant because my chat bots for the book had gotten so good.
But I now have a production assistant, Amaya Austin, and we 100% could not be functioning without her right now. When she came in, I said, “AI is going to be your partner. I don’t want AI writing for you, but wherever you think you need to use AI in your workflow to get things done or to improve things, use it.”
We’re also building this AI agent that’s a member of our team, the AI intern. It’s called Thingy. I started asking Thingy to do a lot of the things that I asked Amaya to do. I’ll say, like, “Start the script document, share it with me, put in these notes. Then we can go back and forth on it.”
There’s no reason Thingy shouldn’t be doing that, right? Amaya went to journalism school. She wants to be a journalist. She wants to be doing video editing. She doesn’t want to be doing a lot of administrative tasks. So if we can get Thingy in here, doing those things, or even pulling two pages of research for us as we think about a story, that’s great. I want it to be ingrained in the newsroom that we’re building,
But I don’t want it writing. I’m fine with it copy-editing; it copy-edits pretty much everything I write now. But I want everything to be very much my voice.
Stern: Right now it’s just to make enough money and keep it going. A lot of people asked me if I want to build a full media company with a big newsroom. But I think if the way I got here was because I felt a traditional newsroom was not the way of the future, then I need to start to think about what that future would look like.
I hope to eventually hire more humans. I hope this AI agent that’s sitting in my Mac Mini starts working better, no doubt. But I also hope that doesn’t mean we don’t hire great humans. I have the freedom to pivot a lot quicker now if I want to, but I also want to have people and guardrails in place so I can’t just decide to turn our company into an iPhone case company one day.