"In 2026, a new type of journalism will emerge: one tailored explicitly to machine compilers of language and information. This journalism will not be directed at people, but rather at chatbots and AI information summarizers. A journalism for the "agentic web": a web populated by automated agents that serve us, retrieving information, sharing our data, making our appointments, answering our emails. The agentic journalism."
"Agentic journalism would break from our traditional article format. AI systems do not need ledes, nut-graphs, or narrative flows; they need user-relevant, novel, and machine-readable content. Maybe the format for agentic journalism will be a bulleted list or a JSON file - whatever it takes for that machine to ingest and reformat the content. The role of the journalist in agentic journalism would be to add information about an event: the five Ws, quotes, context, and links to multimedia content."
"The writing itself, that fun exercise of putting together the puzzle pieces into a cogent reportage, wouldn't even need to be automated by the news organization. It would be automated at the destination, pieced together by whatever format the end-user can extract from the machine they are using. In this type of journalism, editors focus on the accuracy and machine-readability of the information supplied by the reporter."
Agentic journalism targets automated agents and AI summarizers instead of human readers, supplying user-relevant, novel, machine-readable content. Formats will shift from ledes and narrative flow toward structured outputs like bulleted lists or JSON to enable machine ingestion and reformatting. Reporters will provide factual elements — the five Ws, quotes, context, and multimedia links — while destination systems assemble narrative reportage. Editors will prioritize factual accuracy and machine-readability, further reducing roles like traditional copy-editing. The practice reflects ongoing technological reshaping of news production, distribution, and consumption driven by innovations such as the telegraph, radio, and television.
Read at Nieman Lab
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