As I prepare for a new semester of delivering journalism education to young university students, I am somewhat troubled. As I write, newsroom jobs are rapidly disappearing, making me worried about opportunities that lie ahead for my students.

The threat of AI is also looming

If I am honest, no one really knows its long-term impacts on newsrooms and news revenues.

In terms of opportunities for young journalists, things have radically changed in the past couple of years.

In 2022, the local digital publication The Spinoff noted it was “a very good time to be a journalist” as there were too many jobs, but not enough reporters. The publication reported that, “suddenly, journalists are in hot demand, giving them the upper hand in prospective job negotiations.”

Young journalists were graduating to a buoyant job market supported by the government’s extra funding.

Since then, the media landscape has become much more challenging.

A Reuters study describes how, in 2024, young journalists were struggling to find work or break into the news industry. The report says that, “despite this daunting landscape, young journalists still dream about entering the news industry, persuaded by an unflinching vocation to seek the truth and report it.”

While young people still have hopes and aspirations, they struggle to find stable jobs with a decent salary.

The news industry is in some sort of transition

AI is changing how news is gathered, produced, and distributed. Multiple newsrooms use AI to deliver efficiencies, speed up production, create content, translate transcripts, caption pictures and videos, and so on.

INMA generative AI initiative lead Sonali Verma noted “you can get AI to do 80% of the work, but for the remaining 20%, you need a human on either side asking the right questions and vetting the output.”

The ratio seems grim.

AI technologies retool newsrooms but don’t replace human journalists or the need for them

When I talked to a local news editor about the use of AI, he said the content created using these tools still requires the editor and news editor to check the content created by the AI before it can be published.

Recent research by the BBC also clearly demonstrates why journalists are still needed. The BBC gave OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity AI content from the BBC Web site, then asked them questions about the news.

The results are scary. The study found 51% of all AI answers to questions about the news had “significant issues of some form.”

Furthermore, 19% of answers citing BBC content presented factual errors, including factual statements. Worryingly, 13% of the quotes sourced from BBC’s articles were either altered or did not exist in the article.

Earlier studies highlight problems with new generative AI searches, chatbots

In 2024, a Reuters study found ChatGPT returned non-news output 52% to 54% of the time when prompted to provide top news headlines from specific news outlets.

Additionally, my study about Microsoft’s and Google’s search engines and their respective chatbots also showed chatbots increasingly link to unreliable or wrong sources.

With the job losses and AI, the future of journalism may look grim for budding journalists. But, let’s just remember that, as long there is journalism, there are and must be humans in the loop. It would be a good thing for the news industry itself to keep in mind.

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