toast title
A Journalist's Guide To AI
A Journalist’s Guide to AI helps journalists, PR pros and media creators use AI without losing their voice.
Hosted by professor and coach Yumi Wilson, each episode offers practical tips, real prompts, and ethical strategies using tools like ChatGPT, Otter.ai, and Perplexity.
Learn how to write smarter, research faster, and stay human in a tech-driven world.
Produced in partnership with Saspod. Subscribe for weekly insights that keep you sharp, creative, and ahead of the curve.
Local News, AI and the Fight for Trust | Eric Johnston
AI isn’t just a technology story for journalism. It’s a leadership story, a business story and increasingly, a question of whether local news organizations can remain sustainable.
In this episode of A Journalist’s Guide to AI, Yumi Wilson talks with Eric Johnston, former CEO of Sonoma Media Investments, about what happens when AI enters an industry already dealing with shrinking margins, changing audience behavior, declining website traffic and growing challenges to public trust.
Eric has spent decades working through technological change in journalism, beginning as a photojournalist and eventually leading media organizations through digital transformation and acquisition.
He and Yumi discuss the rise of zero-click news, media literacy in an age of convincing AI-generated content, the economics of community journalism and why journalists should remain skeptical of AI without refusing to learn how to use it.
Eric also introduces LiquidAmber, an AI-powered platform that lets journalists search and interact with their publication’s archives, helping reporters uncover history, sources and context while keeping publishers in control of their content.
Topics include:
• AI and the economics of local journalism
• Zero-click search and declining referral traffic
• Trust, misinformation and media literacy
• Sustainable models for community news
• Using newsroom archives as a reporting resource
• LiquidAmber and AI-assisted research
• Privacy, hallucinations and human oversight
• Ethical boundaries for AI-generated journalism
• Why skepticism remains one of journalism’s greatest strengths
• Adaptability, curiosity and the next generation of journalists
Learn more
LiquidAmber
California Press Foundation
Follow A Journalist’s Guide to AI wherever you listen to podcasts and share this episode with someone thinking about the future of journalism, local news and AI.
NOTE: AI tools, including Riverside and ChatGPT, were used for transcription and to help draft and edit these show notes. Final content was reviewed by Yumi Wilson.
00:00:00
|
00:00:00