As AI reshapes work, journalism relives its own arc of automation story

The threat of artificial intelligence (AI) wiping out swathes of occupations is becoming a grim reality when you note the pace of layoffs and the slowdown in hiring by Big Tech, banking, insurance, high-end manufacturing, and even the travel and hotel industries. The warp-speed pace of change has caught the world unawares. But technological change has been eliminating jobs since the post-war global manufacturing boom, well before AI made its job-threatening entrance on the world stage. The difference was that the pace of change was relatively slow. It was information technology (IT) that changed the velocity of the transformation.  

The industry in which this newspaper functions is a case in point. For at least a century, newspaper pages around the world were produced on hot metal presses, demanding a unique level of subeditorial skills in reading metal slugs backwards. In the West, this technology was gradually phased out between the 1960s and the 1980s (the New York Times made the transition only in 1978). India entered this phase in the early to mid-eighties, replacing hot metal with “cold press” or photo-typesetting. The clatter and romance of the old iron monsters operated by singlet-clad “composers” were replaced by the air-conditioned setting of green-screened computers and the anodyne buzz of dot matrix printers churning out “proofs”. 

This transition was accompanied by some loss of jobs as page-setters who could not make the transition to computer typing were laid off (not without a degree of industrial unrest, it must be added). But the basics of the daily creation process were more or less intact. Reporters bashed out their copy on recycled newsprint fed into massive typewriters, which demanded a fair level of physical stamina to operate. These were then sent to H-shaped desks peopled by subeditors, senior subeditors, and chief subeditors, who edited or rewrote the copy, again on those monstrous typewriters. Edited copy then went to the composers and returned as “proofs” to a battery of proofreaders, who sometimes demanded “second proofs” if the quality of the composition was not up to standard. 

The amended and corrected copy was then rendered in dark rooms into “galleys” or “pulls”. The processing was based on instructions from the subs and they now seem thrillingly cryptic — “s/c, 11 ems” or “d/c 22 ems, bld” and so on to fit a page layout, which was drawn out on an eight-column graph paper by dint of old-fashioned ruler and pencil. The relatively new “profession” was that of “paste-up” men, who cut and pasted the galleys on newspaper-sized paper, using a mixture of petrol-infused glue, the aroma of which was mildly addictive. These giant pages were sent to a dark room to be processed by men in white coats applying mysterious chemicals before being sent down to thundering printing machines to magically appear as the next day’s edition. 

It took less than a decade for this system to be swept away by changes that were more profound and lasting but less noticed. Page-making software entered the domain, allowing news copy to be written and edited on networked computers and “exported” directly to online page grids, together with photos processed using online software. At one shot, this transition eliminated at   four job functions — the composers, proofreaders, “paste-up” men, and even dark-room assistants, who processed photographs that were pasted on pages. Interestingly, this change in the newspaper business happened without much industrial unrest — and at a time when Indian public-sector bank employees’ unions were protesting the introduction of computerisation.  

Increasingly, software has come to dominate a desk producer’s life. If you use MS Word, the software helpfully underlines spelling errors and even grammatical infelicities to improve your editing and proofreading chops. Email services come embedded with sophisticated proofing and editing functions. One even corrected a misspelling of the name Ramalinga Raju, to my eternal admiration. Now, AI can subedit copy and rewrite it, though not always with the best results. An instruction to make a piece about dog shelters more reader-friendly, for instance, offered just two teeth-grindingly twee alterations: Dog owners became “pet parents” and pets became “our furry friends”.    

What has materially impacted the journalist profession is Google and the rise of online media. Clipping libraries from which edit writers did their research vanished. Google’s search engine has undoubtedly been a boon for the information industry. But the tech giant’s massive dominance of the digital-advertising market based on that very search engine has shifted advertising away from traditional channels like the print media and TV. The concurrent explosion of online media, which demands far less investment, has caused thousands of newspapers to close down. In the United States alone, almost 3,000 newspapers have shut shop under the double onslaught of IT, with more than half the journalists laid off as a result. India, happily, still bucks this trend. 

The next threat for journalists, we are told, may come from AI’s ability to write news reports, edits, and columns. That’s still to be fully tested and early experiments have yielded plenty of fiction rather than verified fact. The immediate future may well see the diminution of the subediting and rewriting profession, once the backbone of newspapering. But can AI ever replicate a reporter on the ground or lurking in the corridors of power for a news break? You would think not, but with “sentient” AI emerging as a new force, the jury is actually still out on that!