Dadhood in the era of media collapse

It's been five months since my last update, and though I wanted to wait and send this out once I'd published more work, I thought it might be good for me to get some thoughts out.

This post is different than my past posts, and my future ones probably won't be similar to this. It's a little more personal than usual. But I also think it has insights that could be useful for others, including journalists. And with so much out there obviously written by AI, here's a post you can trust came from a human.

In case it wasn't clear already, my wife and I had our first child in February, and it's come with all the action and sleeplessness you've heard about. Our daughter has truly become the light of our lives. I had three months combined leave from work to play with her, a rarity in the U.S.

The time away also gave me some much needed space to reflect on the world and the journalism industry, and more than a few reasons to feel anxious about the future. Yet I've also felt invigorated.

I took an online class on "AI Prompt Engineering for Journalists" that started a month after the baby was born, thinking it might be useful for understanding how other people are using it. The class itself was fine. But it became a springboard for much deeper thoughts. I didn't expect to come away feeling so utterly transformed in how I view my profession and even the value of the written word.

At one moment a sense of dread gripped me. I feared that the market demand for written articles was now essentially dead. But I've also been fascinated by a cottage industry of generative AI tools for journalists and other researchers to enhance their research. I've learned about a lot of them from The Indicator, a new investigative news site focused on power and tech that also features a resources page with many open source intelligence tools.

For example, this video summarizer for YouTube videos seems like it could be useful, though I haven't used it. I've used DorkGPT to improve a few Google searchers. Here's another program, by the same guy, who says it's not intended to replace writing or research but meant to point you toward legitimate sources. But be careful: When I asked it for a list of controversies about a certain environmental topic, it gave me a lot of legitimate links but made up some facts because it had cited another AI site that inaccurately summarized a city council meeting.

The class also gave me some motivation to increase my own abilities. For decades, the trend in journalism and media has been for workers to increasingly take on roles that were once discrete: Photography, video, writing, even fact-checking and copy-editing your own work. It's fucked up, and it will take political power to change.

For now though, the rigid distinction between "narrative journalist" and "data journalist" is probably collapsing. For about a decade it's been an increasing expectation to have competency in things like spreadsheet analysis. My data-based reporting has focused on gathering new information via public records requests, interviews and legal documents, and making my own database.

However, there's so much more I could do—especially in climate reporting—if I knew how to fetch data already publicly available, and query it using the ol' brain. You can use a chatbot to write code and assess the newsworthiness of a data set, and I'm not opposed to those uses. But I think that needs to happen in addition to doing it yourself.

To that end, I've started teaching myself some TypeScript/JavaScript techniques by following along with Code Like a Journalist, a free course by Canadian journalist Nael Shiab. I've tried asking ChatGPT to create simple exercises for me to practice some of what I've learned, but so far have had trouble getting useful outputs from it.

What I'm hoping is that by teaching myself the underlying structures, methods and processes of coding, I'll be able to use the AI as an enhancer of what I've already learned as a way of increasing "velocity" in my investigative work. That's a term common in the tech world and put to good use by Danilo Campos, whose post on the subject is worth reading.

Having a kid has acted as a major catalyst for jumping into this world. I don't feel like I can really afford scorning new things anymore, or remaining loyal to bespoke ways of doing my job. It's honestly hard to get sources on the phone these days, even for routine interviews. Sometimes I get the sense they're surprised journalists still exist.

But I don't feel as much despair as I thought I might. I'm at a point of my life where I have enough energy to try new things and, hopefully, the sense to put it in a fruitful direction. So, that's what I'm trying to do. (It should go without saying: I have no desire or intention of using AI to generate text or even smaller bits of copy.)

Thanks for humoring me with this personal essay. If you're interested, I did publish a story about California's polluters pay bill in May. The climate politics landscape in this state has radically shifted, with real lessons for me going forward. I'll save those for a future post.