A New Year’s look at how journalism changed, who paid the price, and what readers should watch next.
I started in newspapers in 1987, at a daily in California, back when journalism was a physical activity. My first assignment was writing obituaries, which is about as classic a newspaper apprenticeship as you can get and sounds like the opening chapter of a Carl Hiaasen novel. You learned fast. Names had to be right. Dates had to be right. Survivors noticed mistakes immediately. The dead were forgiving; the living were not.
Two obituaries from that time still stick with me.
One was for a Navy captain who had flown with George H. W. Bush in WWII. I wrote it, filed it, and moved on. A day later, the White House called. They had read the obituary and reached out to the captain’s widow. That’s when it hits you that even a small-town paper can land on very large desks—and that accuracy is not an abstract virtue.
The other was for a man killed in a motorcycle crash. His sister told me he was a carpenter. Then she paused and said, “Well… that’s not really what he did.” It turned out his real line of work was as a gigolo in Palm Springs. She looked at me, waiting to see what I’d do with that.
I wrote that he was a carpenter. And that he would be missed by many.
That was my second lesson in journalism: knowing when the truth serves the reader, and when it serves no one at all.
It was a good way to learn humility and accuracy at the same time.
The presses were next door. You could hear them rumbling like weather. When they started rolling, that was it. No updates. No quiet fixes. If you missed it, the mistake sat on someone’s breakfast table the next morning.
That’s where I got ink in my blood.
It was also where I learned how change really enters a newsroom.
That paper was introducing computer pagination, which at the time felt less like innovation and more like an approaching storm. The paste-up department — mostly women who had spent years laying out pages by hand, trimming copy with X-Acto knives and wax — was suddenly told that they would either learn to use computers or lose their jobs.
Some adapted. Some didn’t. None of it was abstract.
Those women were replaced by a machine that still required skill, judgment, and someone willing to learn it. It was painful, human, and unavoidable. But it was honest.
Around the same time, the publisher handed me another lesson in unintended consequences. I was tasked with counting how many stories each reporter wrote. They were given weekly quotas. On paper, it sounded orderly. Accountable. Modern.
In practice, it turned the newsroom upside down.
Reporters began scrambling for anything that could be counted as a story. The smallest tidbit. A thin press release. A meeting notice that should have stayed on a bulletin board. Judgment took a back seat to volume. Anything to get a byline. Nobody set out to lower standards. The system did it for them.
It was my first real lesson that you don’t get better journalism by counting stories any more than you get better cooking by counting plates. You get more output. Not better work.
The presses didn’t care about quotas. They only cared about deadlines.
When I later moved to Florida, it wasn’t for one grand title. I took a job as an assistant managing editor at one paper and worked as a copy editor at another. Two newsrooms. Two sets of deadlines. Same trade.
The presses were across town, which felt a little like moving the engine room off the ship. But every once in a while, the smell of ink would drift through the building—on a jacket, on a bundle of fresh copies—and I knew I was still home.
Ink sticks with you.
In the mid-1990s, newspapers collectively decided the World Wide Web was either a fad or a toy. Editors scoffed. Publishers smiled indulgently and kept doing what they’d always done, which is usually the moment right before gravity reasserts itself.
I didn’t scoff. In 1994, I was pushing newspapers online. Not because I wanted to kill print—far from it—but because I could count. Distribution was changing, and pretending otherwise was not going to save anyone’s job.
There were no content management systems then. No templates. No dashboards. I was hand-coding the entire newspaper in HTML, which is about as glamorous as it sounds. If a link broke, you fixed it yourself. If a page didn’t load, that was on you. The web had no romance. It was just another production system—faster, cheaper, and unforgiving.
In 1998, I created the first daily online news site written in English for Latinos whose first language was English.
Not a newspaper. A news site. That distinction matters.
This wasn’t translated copy or a side project. It was daily coverage—politics, education, labor, culture, power—for a community that lived in English but saw America through a Latino lens. At the time, that audience was largely invisible to legacy media. Too Latino for mainstream newsrooms. Not Latino enough for Spanish-language outlets.
The web made it possible. No presses. No trucks. No one was deciding whether that audience was “worth” the cost of ink.
Meanwhile, much of the industry was busy missing the point.
Newspapers laughed at the web. They laughed especially hard at Craigslist, which they should not have done, because Craigslist was quietly eating their lunch. Classifieds weren’t filler; they paid for reporting. When those ads vanished, so did the money.
Craigslist took the classifieds. Google took the ads. Facebook took the audience. Newspapers were left with the expenses of the old world and the revenues of a lemonade stand.
I kept saying the same thing, over and over: don’t give it away.
Don’t give away your articles. Don’t teach readers that journalism costs nothing. Once you decide your work has no value, you shouldn’t be surprised when everyone else agrees.
They gave it away anyway.
Somewhere along the way, the titles changed, too. Reporters became “content creators,” which told you exactly how management now thought about the work. Editors were renamed so often it’s hard to remember what they were supposed to be—producers, platform editors, production staff.
Copy editors got the clearest message. They became “paginators.”
Once you rename the job after the software, you’ve already decided what matters—and what doesn’t.
And when papers finally went online, the next mantra arrived: digital first.
In theory, it sounded forward-thinking. In practice, it meant this: write the story, take the photo, post it the moment you’re done. No editor in between. No second set of eyes. Speed over sequence.
The reporter wasn’t just a reporter anymore. They were the photographer, the web producer, the copy editor, and the publisher—often from the front seat of a car, racing to beat competitors doing the exact same thing.
Nothing about that made the journalism better. It just made it faster.
What disappeared wasn’t effort—people worked harder than ever. What disappeared was friction. The useful kind. The pause where an editor asks, “Are we sure?” The moment when someone notices a name spelled wrong, a claim that needs another call, a sentence that doesn’t quite pass the smell test.
Digital first didn’t mean digital smarter. It meant digital faster, and faster was easier to measure.
Then, in the mid-2000s, newspapers discovered another cost-saving miracle: consolidation.
Chains began shuttering local copy desks and replacing them with regional “editing hubs.” One location would copy edit and format pages for papers hundreds of miles away. An editing hub in Kentucky, for example, was supposed to know the neighborhoods, shorthand, and cultural fault lines of newspapers in Florida.
Copy editing, it turns out, is not just grammar. It’s geography.
It’s knowing when a word is technically correct but culturally wrong. It’s knowing which neighborhood names still carry weight and which ones are used only by real estate brochures. So newspapers saved money—and lost texture.
Around the same time, ownership tried another bright idea: outsourcing reporting itself.
Routine coverage was sent overseas—rewriting press releases, summarizing meetings, watching hearings on video. On spreadsheets, it looked efficient. In practice, it was journalism by remote control.
It didn’t work. It couldn’t work.
You cannot cover a zoning fight, a school board meltdown, or a city council grudge match without understanding the language inside the language. That knowledge comes from proximity.
So newspapers saved money—and lost credibility.
And now here we are again.
A new article says AI is replacing reporting and editing jobs. Executives say this the way people talk about bad weather, as if it just happened to them. I can see it already. Fewer reporters. Fewer editors. More “content.” Less reporting.
AI can write. It cannot report.
It does not knock on doors. It does not sit through zoning meetings. It does not know neighborhoods. It does not notice when something smells wrong. It has never had an editor lean back in a chair and say, “This isn’t ready.” It has never felt a deadline you can hear.
AI can be a tool. It can also be an excuse. We’ve seen this movie before, and it does not have a surprise ending.
I don’t regret pushing newspapers online. It was necessary. I don’t regret learning new tools or adapting when the ground shifted.
But I do regret how easily we confused cutting costs with preserving the craft.
Readers will decide, as they always have, whether what remains is still journalism.
But boy, do I miss the smell of ink.