Ernest Kung

Big newsrooms pave the way for AI agents in journalism “The goal is to preserve and operationalize the institutional knowledge that newsrooms accumulate.” -ig-newsrooms-pave-the-way-for-agents-in-journalis In 2025, you probably heard the word “agents” used more often in conversations about AI. In a newsroom context, that might mean agents that look at content you’re creating and provide additional context that may be relevant in the research and editing process.

This past year has been professionally gratifying, as larger local news organizations have begun to take AI adoption seriously. They have refocused internal resources to move beyond mere experimentation, integrating AI-powered products into meaningful workflows. These well-resourced newsrooms now approach AI adoption with the discipline derived from formal product management principles and the software development lifecycle.

Throughout our two years of work on AP’s Local News AI Initiative, funded by the Knight Foundation, we’ve come to this general observation: Smaller newsrooms are hungry for automation and AI. Along with my colleague, AI program manager Aimee Rinehart, we published the first nationwide findings in March 2022 on how local newsrooms were approaching AI. Some news managers were talking about AI then, but not many were using it.