How do Journalists Use GenAIs?

Companies hire me to distill their purpose and values into something accessible and attractive to journalists. What do we do? What do we stand for? How can we help our customers? These are not easy questions for even the most established companies to answer. Jargon rears its ugly head and insanity ensues. A taxi company becomes a mobility enterprise. An oil company becomes an integrated energy outfit.

GenAI can help. ChatGPT has a remarkably plain spoken way about it, even Copilot has its moments. What’s more you can have a conversation with it and ask for more detail, more clarity, even more literary verve. You can say: ‘write that for a smart high school student instead of a HBS applicant.’ ChatGPT is now my first port of call for all the messaging I do. I upload the report, the deck or even the annual report I have been given and see what it spits out. Most of the time, I get an excellent first draft. Every once in a while I get complete and utter nonsense.

But when the draft is good I have something solid to work with. I put on my journalist hat to find what is most newsy, what is most unexpected or counterintuitive. GenAI doesn’t have a good handle on what is in the Wall Street Journal or how the markets have done that day. But I do. If Bill Gates mentioned his love of energy efficiency stocks a week ago and a report makes glancing note of heat pumps, I will bump that up to make the messaging. I am sure GenAI will be up to the moment in a few years, but we might have to wait for AGI for that level of human touch.

Much is made of how resistant journalists are to GenAI. They resent the way it writes (yes, I am jealous too) and the heartless efficiency of the thing. But journalists are also using it to wade through the quagmire of annual reports, 10-Ks and S-1s. They are using it to go through speeches and transcribed meetings and data-driven forecasts on the future of everything from rare earth materials to arms production in Ukraine.

Here is my advice: use ChatGPT for your messaging. For all of you out there in the communications department, make sure whatever executive summary or press release you put out has gone through a GenAI. It’s poor form to send out a summary that doesnt’ reflect the report well. Gen AI has made it difficult to hide the most salient and awkward data point at the back. (And yes, many of my clients still try to bury their own research, for reasons that are beyond me). The days when the Fed chairman could play cat and mouse with journalists by dropping a line about froth in the housing market 27 paragraphs into congressional testimony are over. With a decent prompt ChatGPT would have picked that up in a heartbeat.

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