Adapting to AI in News Media from Jim VandeHei's View

Explore AI's future impact on the media industry from the lens of Jim VandeHei, a digital journalism pioneer. Learn about anticipated changes, the value of human expertise in reporting, and the shift towards smart brevity in news delivery. Adapting to AI is not an option, but an essential path forward.
Wide, Deep Learning of Your Client's Business

Lesson Nineteen: Wide, Deep Learning of Your Client’s Business

I keep finding you’ve got to become borderline obsessed with understanding your clients’ businesses to really make a splash. Not just the surface-level stuff they throw at you in meetings, but the nitty-gritty details that make their world tick. Developing this deep sense of how things work helps the next client as well. It also makes you likely the most valuable person on a bar trivia contest as well as above-average-proficient in Jeopardy; neither of which I find objectionable. I stumbled across what has become of my favorite reads, Joshua Foer’s “Moonwalking with Einstein” a while back, and while

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Don't Let Your Clients Skip Planning

Lesson Eighteen: Don’t Let Your Clients Skip Planning

Projects with planning always, and I mean always, turn out better. No other way of saying that. Include planning in your budgets, include planning in your calendar, and don’t fuss if you agency wants time to plan. Yes, you should pay them too. Even if you outsource this to AI, guess what? Crafting a prompt worthy of a publishable outcome still takes time and still means you sat, even for a nanosecond, and applied conscious thought to your idea. That, if nothing else, is worth vastly more than skipping this. Look, as someone who’s watched more projects crash and

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Balancing the Digital Tightrope

Lesson Seventeen: Balancing the Digital Tightrope

Here’s the thing about being working in tech – you end up living and breathing digital media whether you want to or not. I’ve watched this whole circus evolve from the early internet days, and let me tell you, it’s a wild ride. Sure, we’ve got all these amazing tools now – social media that can reach millions, phones that are basically supercomputers, and enough apps to make your head spin. Let’s be real for a second – this digital revolution has been pretty spectacular in many ways. It’s democratized everything from starting a business to sharing cat videos.

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Leaning In on the Power of Doing Hard Things

Lesson Sixteen: Leaning In on the Power of Doing Hard Things

I am a big quote guy. Not sure why but I absolutely love collecting quotes. They give me a snapshot into someone’s mind and I appreciate that quite a lot. At times though, the reason I like quotes is because they perfectly summarize how I feel about something. So much so that I couldn’t possibly word it any better. Mark Twain gets credit for this one – If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it fir dst thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat

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