AI can write the news now. What's left for me to do?
You did not train to arrange words. You trained to find out what actually happened, when people had reason to hide it or shade it. That skill has not disappeared. What disappeared is any reward for the parts of the job that were always mechanical — summarizing, rewriting, filling column inches. So stop mourning the mechanical parts. They were never the point, even when they paid the bills. The point was judgment: what to chase, who to trust, what to leave out, what to risk your name on. No machine has a name to risk. Be honest with yourself about which kind of journalist you were. If you were mostly producing copy, the ground has moved under you, and no amount of complaint will move it back. If you were finding things out and making people answer for them, you still have work no one else can do. Find out which one you are before you decide what to do next.
What's left is the part that was never really writing: deciding what matters, verifying it's true, and standing behind it with your name. A machine can produce sentences about an event. It cannot walk into a room, earn a source's trust, or bear responsibility for being wrong. Do that, or find other work.
What changes unlock by starting
- A clear, honest answer to whether your work was mechanical or judgment-based
- One concrete skill you're building that a machine cannot replicate
- A specific story or beat that plays to what only you can do
- Less time spent resenting the change, more time spent acting inside it