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How AI agents are changing journalism

Fast Company Techby Pete PachalApril 2, 20266 min read0 views

I ve been using Claude Cowork extensively over the past month and a half. And not coincidentally, I ve been more productive than I ever have in that same period. The shift to working agentically is something so profound, you really can t understand it until you experience it for yourself. Just one example: As the operator of a business selling AI training courses online, email marketing is an important component of getting the word out about them. But much of the work is rote: segmenting my email list, creating templates, writing largely similar drafts, and scheduling them in my email provider—a piece of software I look forward to using about as much as a visit to the dentist. Now I hardly ever touch that software; Claude Cowork does it for me. When you have access to agents, you can loop

BY Pete Pachal

Pete Pachal is a journalist and the creator of Media Copilot, a newsletter and podcast that examines how AI is changing media, journalism, and the news.

I’ve been using Claude Cowork extensively over the past month and a half. And not coincidentally, I’ve been more productive than I ever have in that same period. The shift to working agentically is something so profound, you really can’t understand it until you experience it for yourself.

Just one example: As the operator of a business selling AI training courses online, email marketing is an important component of getting the word out about them. But much of the work is rote: segmenting my email list, creating templates, writing largely similar drafts, and scheduling them in my email provider—a piece of software I look forward to using about as much as a visit to the dentist.

Now I hardly ever touch that software; Claude Cowork does it for me. When you have access to agents, you can loop them in on any computer task with three beautiful words: “You do it.” Now AI doesn’t just draft emails for me—it puts them in the campaign builder, targets the right audience, gets all the settings right, and then taps me on the shoulder (via a notification) so I can approve the work before it schedules the emails to go out. Once you start working with agents, you quickly start crossing things off your to-do list faster than ever before.

Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for The Media Copilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com

From doing to directing

This is not just faster work. It is different work. It shifts the focus from slogging through individual tasks to focusing on outcomes, assigning the actual execution to an army of digital workers, then reviewing what they’ve done. You essentially become the CEO of your job.

So what happens to a newsroom when everyone starts working agentically? Over the past 30 years, reporters and editors have needed to become skilled at many different systems: project-management software for tracking stories, content management systems for publishing them, SEO plug-ins, social media management platforms—the list goes on. Working alongside agents, journalists can theoretically assign agents to deal with all of that while they go and do the important, human-centered work of reporting and editing.

Where this gets uncomfortable is when this paradigm is applied to the writing itself. This came to a head recently with the uproar over what The Plain Dealer, Cleveland’s primary newspaper, is doing: leveraging an AI writing agent so reporters can simply feed notes and context to create stories. To be clear, all the stories are then edited, and the reporter has final say over the copy. But applying agents this way brings up hard questions about jobs, skill-building, and career paths.