Not long ago, I interviewed an academic whose field is AI in literacy. Before I began my questions, she started with her own: Are you afraid of what AI might do to your job?
I began working in a London newsroom in 2007. Two phones bleated and flashed all day long, banks of TV screens showed 24-hour news channels and I occasionally took copy over the phone, typing stories for reporters on the move. There were four daily editions of the newspaper. Inevitably, as cortisol levels screeched into the red, I watched nose-to-nose shouting matches between editors on the backbench.
To the side, tucked away and largely silent, was a single online editor, brought into the fold shortly after I began. He knew, of course, what nobody else wanted to admit: three years after the launch of Facebook and nearly a decade after Google’s arrival, print media was in deep and unchartered turmoil. Job losses, oligarch schmoozing and expenses tightening followed.
We lost a quarter of the newsroom in 2009. In Sydney, we lost a third around 2013. We lost another third in 2017 and there was a cull in the middle somewhere, too. In the last few weeks, rounds of losses at the ABC and SBS. 15 years since my first day on a newsdesk and no-one knows, still, how to reconcile news journalism with the braying realities of the unchecked internet.
If there’s a status quo that sums up my time in newsrooms, it is this: redundancy rounds. This, I should add, before generative AI – another, uglier beast yet – really bites.
So, my answer to that sharp-thinking, wise scholar is a little lazily reached, but borne from experience. I’m not worried, I’m curious. I’m used to instability. Or, as one editor quipped, if you haven’t been made redundant three times, you’re not trying hard enough. Bigger than that, though, is this: we’re surrounded by living, breathing stories that are waiting to be told.
My last two pieces for the now-defunct SBS Voices focus on Muslim integration and sexual violence. They’re raw and they’re hopeful and they speak to and for those whose voices have for so long been ignored by the conversation in Australian media.
They were told by humans, to humans. They are stories with roots that reach back many generations and their essence cannot be dug from a corpus or ploughed by bots.
Here they are. And, thank you to the outgoing team at SBS Voices for their support and commitment over the years.
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