George Lawton
Verified
(He/Him)
As seen in:
Diginomica,
SearchAppArchitecture,
SearchAWS,
SearchBusinessAnalytics,
SearchCIO,
SearchCloudComputing,
SearchContentManagement,
SearchCustomerExperience,
SearchDataCenter,
SearchEnterpriseAI,
TechTarget
and
Covers:
Enterprise AI, agentic systems, content provenance, digital sovereignty, AI governance, quantum sensing, digital twins
Doesn't Cover:
Consumer gadgets, gaming, crypto price speculation, vendor news without a substantive story, product launches without independent context
Interview
What was your first job as a journalist?
Fact checking, light editing and carrying equipment for some early inspirational journalists further along than me in the beginning.
Have you ever used a typewriter?
Yes, and I'm old enough to have learned to write on one rather than at one. There's a kind of patience the typewriter teaches that the keyboard quietly takes back. You couldn't revise without paying for it. Every sentence had to be roughly right before it left your fingers.
How is social media changing news?
Social media moved news from a context-heavy product to a context-stripped signal. That's neither good nor bad on its own; what matters is who's left holding the context. Journalists used to be the default carriers of it. Now we share that work with platforms that aren't built for it, audiences who don't always want it, and AI systems that can produce plausible-sounding context without any. The interesting question isn't whether social media is changing news. It's whether the felt sense of being properly informed is something we still know how to cultivate, individually or collectively, when most of the signal arriving has been pre-stripped of the things that would let us tell.
Who's your favorite fictional journalist?
Hard to pick. Most fictional journalists are written as types (the crusader, the cynic, the disillusioned drinker) and the writers who actually get the texture right tend to be working journalists themselves. So: probably whoever the next really good piece I read happens to feature.
What does it mean to be a journalist?
To do the work that lets a reader walk away knowing something they didn't know before, in a way that's honest about how confident they should be in what they've just learned. That second part matters more than it used to. AI can produce a plausible-sounding paragraph on almost anything in seconds. The thing that's still scarce, and getting more so, is the felt sense of whether what you're reading was actually thought about by someone who took the time to understand it. Journalism, when it works, is one of the few remaining places that distinction is being held visibly enough for readers to learn how to make it themselves.
What's the funniest news-related #hashtag you've seen?
The various "-pocalypse" coinages making the rounds: #SaaSpocalypse, #COBOLocalypse, even #secpocalypse. They're funny because they're half-serious, which is the actual trance of how AI dread propagates through enterprise tech right now. Memes pretending to be jokes pretending to be analysis.
How do you prefer to be pitched on stories?
Email, two or three sentences, with a clear point of view. The pitches that work are the ones where the sender has read something of mine and has a specific idea about what story we might do together rather than a generic announcement looking for a home. Embargoes honored. Followups not necessary; if I don't respond, I'm not the right person for that story.
What tools and software do you use to do your job?
The usual journalist stack (Zoom, Otter, email, LinkedIn) plus a few things worth naming. Wispr Flow for voice-to-text capture has changed how I draft; speaking is faster than typing and the quality of thinking that comes out is different. Claude as a research and editing partner across long-form work, treated as a collaborator rather than a tool. Typora and a deep markdown folder structure for organizing source material across hundreds of stories. Google Scholar more than people realize, because the technical pieces I write often need peer-reviewed grounding underneath the journalism.
What's your favorite social network?
LinkedIn, by default rather than by love. It's where the people I cover and the people who pitch me actually are, which makes it the closest thing journalism still has to a working professional commons. I'm on X as @glawton but read it more than I post.
Who do you wish followed you?
The people building the systems I write about, and the people who have to work alongside those systems without having chosen to. Most journalism gets read by one of those two groups but rarely by both at once. The interesting conversations happen when they're in the same room. Specific names that come to mind: Karl Friston, who I've written about; Maggie Appleton, who thinks well about AI and human attention; the small set of people inside the AI labs who are actually wrestling with what they're building rather than just shipping it.
Why did you become a journalist?
I came to journalism sideways. In the late 1980s I noticed that I was usually the person in the room asking how the technology actually worked rather than what it did, and that the explanations I got were almost never the ones I would have written. Eventually I figured out that translating the gap between what specialists knew and what everyone else needed to understand was a thing someone could do for a living. Thirty-five years later I'm still doing it.
Did you work for your high school newspaper? If so, what did you do there?
No. I came to journalism sideways, in the late 1980s, after realizing that explaining how complex technology works was something I could do for a living. The route in mattered more than the credential; nothing about the work I do now would have been recognizable to a high-school version of me looking at a school paper.
What story are you most proud of writing or working on?
The Diginomica piece arguing that AI is best understood as a kind of collective trance rather than a technology or a meme. Most coverage of AI sits in one of those two frames; neither one explains the actual contradictions in what we're watching. Bringing Stephen Gilligan's work on generative trance into the conversation gave me a way to write about the felt sense of AI rather than just its mechanics. It's the piece I keep noticing other people's writing not quite reaching, which is probably the closest thing to what "proud" means in this work.
What advice can you offer to aspiring journalists?
Two things, both unfashionable. Patience: most of the work that's still worth reading after a decade was done by someone willing to sit with a question longer than the news cycle wanted them to. And voice: the thing that sounds like you is the thing readers stay for. Most beginners sound generic because they're imitating something they think journalism is supposed to sound like. The work gets interesting when you stop and start writing the way you actually think.
When's the best time to pitch you?
Late morning UK time, between 10 AM and noon. The earlier window is when I'm reading; everything after lunch is when I'm writing. Pitches that arrive when I'm writing get triaged faster and less generously. Worth knowing.
What's the best pitch you ever got?
The best pitches I get aren't dramatic; they're patient. Someone who's read what I write, who has a specific reason to think a particular story will interest me, and who's done the work of preparing a source or research finding worth my time. Recently I had a PR contact send me a single paragraph about a researcher's unpublished work, with a one-line "I think this connects to what you wrote about X." That's the whole template. The story landed.
What's the worst pitch you ever got?
The worst pitches share a pattern rather than a single incident: a generic announcement copy-pasted to a list, a "Hi {firstname}" header, a paragraph of corporate adjectives where the actual story should be, and a closing line asking for "fifteen minutes to discuss synergies." None of the components is unforgivable on its own. The combination tells you nobody read anything I've written before pressing send.
What's your favorite drink?
Coffee. A black pourover with patience is the morning version.
When you're not at a computer, where are you most likely to be?
Walking outdoors, usually with my wife Amanda. London has surprisingly good rambling country within an hour by train. The keyboard part of writing is mostly transcription of what gets worked out on a footpath.
Aside from your own, what's your favorite publication to read?
Aeon and Psyche for long-form essays on consciousness and attention, which is the territory underneath a lot of my AI writing. MIT Technology Review for the technical side. The LRB for the reminder that some ideas need more space than the news cycle gives them.
What's the most common misperception about your beat?
That AI is primarily a technology story. It isn't, or at least not only. It's also a social and perceptual phenomenon, a question about collective attention and judgment as much as about model architecture. Most coverage treats the technology as the protagonist and the humans as either users or victims. The more interesting story is what happens to the human capacity to notice, discern, and stay grounded when most of the signal arriving is being produced by something that doesn't care whether you do.
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