The newsroom staff at the Wall Street Journal are already ranking themselves as intermediate or above in AI tooling, while most other newsrooms are still trying to establish their AI strategies, reports Kari McMahon of A Media Operator.
McMahon reports, “Tess Jeffers, director of newsroom data and AI at the Wall Street Journal, first conducted an informal newsroom survey on AI in November 2024 and then repeated it a year later, finding that team experimentation had more than doubled, with the majority of respondents saying their teams are actively experimenting with AI and integrating the technology in their daily workflows. The newsroom’s AI readiness score had also risen significantly since the first survey.
“So, how did the newsroom get there? A lot of it has to do with framing, Jeffers said. Leadership encouraged experimentation rather than dictating a list of what can and can’t be with AI, she said.
“‘We’ve spent a lot of time moving through the newsroom doing foundational training,’ Jeffers said recently. ‘So here’s where you go to Gemini; here’s how you create a [Gemini] gem; here’s what you can do in NotebookLM. And then we’ve also spent time doing more advanced training sessions… We just had one today with our editors: here’s how editors are using AI as part of their editing process.'”
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