How AI agents are changing journalism

I’ve been using Claude Cowork extensively over the past month and a half. And not coincidentally, I’ve been more productive than I ever have in that same period. The shift to working agentically is something so profound, you really can’t understand it until you experience it for yourself.

Just one example: As the operator of a business selling AI training courses online, email marketing is an important component of getting the word out about them. But much of the work is rote: segmenting my email list, creating templates, writing largely similar drafts, and scheduling them in my email provider—a piece of software I look forward to using about as much as a visit to the dentist.

Now I hardly ever touch that software; Claude Cowork does it for me. When you have access to agents, you can loop them in on any computer task with three beautiful words: “You do it.” Now AI doesn’t just draft emails for me—it puts them in the campaign builder, targets the right audience, gets all the settings right, and then taps me on the shoulder (via a notification) so I can approve the work before it schedules the emails to go out. Once you start working with agents, you quickly start crossing things off your to-do list faster than ever before.

From doing to directing 

This is not just faster work. It is different work. It shifts the focus from slogging through individual tasks to focusing on outcomes, assigning the actual execution to an army of digital workers, then reviewing what they’ve done. You essentially become the CEO of your job.

So what happens to a newsroom when everyone starts working agentically? Over the past 30 years, reporters and editors have needed to become skilled at many different systems: project-management software for tracking stories, content management systems for publishing them, SEO plug-ins, social media management platforms—the list goes on. Working alongside agents, journalists can theoretically assign agents to deal with all of that while they go and do the important, human-centered work of reporting and editing.

Where this gets uncomfortable is when this paradigm is applied to the writing itself. This came to a head recently with the uproar over what The Plain Dealer, Cleveland’s primary newspaper, is doing: leveraging an AI writing agent so reporters can simply feed notes and context to create stories. To be clear, all the stories are then edited, and the reporter has final say over the copy. But applying agents this way brings up hard questions about jobs, skill-building, and career paths.

But even putting aside that specific use case, it seems inevitable that agents will eventually take on much of the production and distribution work around content and storytelling. Whether it’s social media management, SEO (and GEO), or getting all the little drop-down menus, boxes, and tag fields in your CMS just right—those are all jobs for agents. More importantly, roles that are centered around optimizing those tasks will gradually go away.

If you think about it, that inherently devalues certain kinds of content. When search and social platforms drove audiences, newsrooms set up workflows around those patterns. Many roles emerged that were simply writing to a trend, publishing undifferentiated “quick hits” around trending topics to maximize clicks. Those roles were effectively hyper-optimizing production of formulaic stories, writing for algorithms and chasing virality through pattern recognition. That has very little value in a world where a robot can do all of that much faster than a human ever could.

And this is the mechanism by which AI can actually be healthy for journalism, something I predicted in my first column. Agents are a crucible for knowledge work, burning away anything and everything that can be automated, leaving only the parts of the job that can’t be easily repeated—the work that requires either creating new information or judgment, context, and taste.

The new shape of the newsroom

If you were building an AI-first newsroom today with this idea at its core, virtually all roles would be centered on the parts of the job that are exclusively human: building trust with sources through access and relationships, doing original reporting and finding information that’s exclusive to your brand, determining what stories matter most to your audiences and what angles to take, and applying the art of storytelling to all of it.

While that sounds idyllic in some ways, the reality is that with agents handling most of the execution, there will probably be less work to go around. In almost all cases, organizations will be smaller, with different career paths, even if the work is richer.

A constraint, for now, is access. Tools like Claude Cowork and Claude Code become truly powerful only when they can move beyond drafting and into systems (email, CMS, analytics, internal documents). That is where most organizations get uneasy. Granting an agent permission to act inside those environments raises questions about security and accountability. Most teams are still feeling their way through this, limiting agents to narrow tasks or read-only access. But that tension is temporary. As guardrails improve and familiarity grows, those permissions will expand, and with them, the scope of what agents can do. 

Once that happens, journalism does not lose its purpose. It comes into sharper focus. An AI-first newsroom doesn’t mean a less human one. In fact, it means the opposite. When the repeatable work is handled by machines, what remains is the work that defines the craft: earning trust, finding new information, and making sense of it for an audience. The uncomfortable part is that there may be fewer people doing that work. The hopeful part is that the work itself becomes more meaningful.

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