It has been a difficult year for journalism: Funding cuts, a shift from traditional advertising to social media revenue streams, burnt out newsrooms and declining public trust in the news media.
You like to write and report and tell important stories, but is that a viable career path?
How can journalists compete against artificial intelligence, which has fundamentally changed how people search for stories and information and engage with it?
Most people won’t read past the AI summary section in a Google search. Others simply use AI chatbots like ChatGPT to find what they need. Publishers expect traffic from search engines to decline by more than 40% over the next three years.
But that doesn’t mean that the skills journalists master are wasted. There are still jobs for people who like to write and interview and tell important stories. The same skills that make someone a gifted storyteller transfer to other career paths.
Storytelling as a sellable skill
Consider the field of marketing. In journalism, we learn how to tell stories using in-depth research. Reporters often become subject matter experts in everything from oil spills to pop music.
They also write in different styles and tones. We adapt to changing deadlines and breaking news. All of these skills are essential in marketing.
Content marketing writers or content strategists create articles, blog posts, social media posts and content for websites in a brand’s “voice” — a set of key messages that align with an organization’s mission. Digital marketing copywriters and social media content specialists are creative storytellers who package the story into a sentence or even a word.
There are more and more jobs in this industry as global spending on content marketing is expected to almost double between 2022 and 2026, reaching about $107 billion this year.
Many journalists also understand and utilize search engine optimization or SEO and increasingly, answer engine optimization or AEO so that AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity, and voice assistants like Siri can easily understand and cite brands in search results.
Educating the public
Then there are careers in the nonprofit sector. As in the marketing field, writers working for nonprofit organizations create content written in the “voice” of the organization. That’s what news writers do. When they write for a publication, it is often in a particular style of that publication.
A charity that advocates for girls’ equality might feature stories about girls around the world who are determined to go to school or make their communities safer for themselves and others.
The stories help educate and attract people who can provide needed money for their programs, both “mass donors” who give anywhere from $1 to $500, every month and “major donors” who can give $10,000 and above.
Journalism sets us up to do this kind of work because it requires “finding the story” — the most compelling angle or character that draws attention to a specific issue.
For example, consider an organization that advocates for children. Some 12 million girls are forced into child marriage each year. To get people to care and take action or donate money, the organization needs to educate people.
Getting people to care
Journalists know that to do that effectively they must synthesize dense, technical information into bite-sized pieces, perhaps by telling a compelling story about one person.
People will understand and care, for example, if you tell them a story about a 19-year-old young woman working to stop child marriage in her community because she herself was almost married off at 13 but she resisted and stayed in school.
Nonprofit organizations need people who can tell these stories and often look for people who have a news writing background. When potential donors read these stories, they feel more driven to fund the organization.
Not everyone can tell stories that involve people who have been through traumatic circumstances.
This kind of storytelling requires a strong moral and ethical anchor, something most journalists are trained for.
Helping people process information
In the corporate sector, there’s a great demand for turning complex processes into simple language. This is a journalist’s best skill and something valued in a marketing, social media or public relations team.
Technology companies need writers who can transform technical jargon into user guides, instruction manuals, brochures and marketing materials. To do that the writers need to be able to gather information from engineers and experts. That requires the research and interviewing skills journalists master.
Similarly in medical research and the healthcare professions, it is writers who can turn dense scientific information into language understandable to the public.
Ghostwriters are also becoming increasingly popular. They write content that is officially credited to someone else. As execs become busier, their social media posts, emails, public statements, speeches and even memoirs are written by writers who can switch between different kinds of content.
This niche can be lucrative: experienced ghostwriters can earn tens of thousands of dollars per project (anywhere from $0.01 to $1 per word.)
There are still jobs in journalism.
There is abundant opportunity now for journalism students and journalists to use their strong news writing, interviewing, researching and analyzing skills in other industries.
These skills are especially important in cutting through the AI slop that is pervasive across content. In the next five years, demand will only grow more.
But maybe you are the type of person committed to telling news stories. How do you persevere in a struggling industry?
One way is to create human stories that can’t be replicated by AI. Publishers are already pivoting their strategies toward high-value, exclusive reporting.
And don’t be afraid to use AI to find sources and ideas and help with research.
Journalism students and working journalists have a strong set of transferable skills. In an era of AI-generated content and online noise, those skills are more valuable than ever.
If you can report well, adapt quickly and bring a human voice to your work, you don’t have to be afraid of the future.
Questions to consider:
1. What is a skill that’s important for every writer to have?
2. What is AEO? Why is it an important consideration when writing content for online platforms like websites?
3. When and why does writing in the nonprofit sector need strong moral and ethical consideration?
