By Our Reporter
Imagine spending hours investigating a story, speaking to sources, verifying facts and writing a report—only for an artificial intelligence system to learn from that work, reproduce the knowledge and deliver it to millions of people without the newsroom necessarily receiving traffic, recognition or revenue.
That was at the heart of a recent conversation on AI Platform Accountability and the Future of Journalism, where media professionals examined a question that is becoming increasingly difficult for newsrooms to ignore: What happens to journalism when AI becomes one of the biggest distributors of information?
The engagement, organised around the evolving relationship between artificial intelligence and journalism, brought together voices from the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID), including Executive Director Akintunde Babatunde, CEO Dapo Olorunyomi, and Innovation Lead Monsur Hussain.
Olorunyomi highlighted the changing information ecosystem and the growing concerns surrounding generative AI. For Nigerian newsrooms, he argued, the conversation must go beyond simply asking whether journalists should use AI.
The bigger question is: How should the value of journalism be recognised when one industry produces the content and another distributes it?
That question touches everything from revenue and commercial agreements to licensing, attribution and the ethical use of AI.
Monsur Hussain took participants deeper into the issue by explaining how artificial intelligence and large language models learn from and access journalism content.
And this is where the conversation becomes personal for journalists and publishers.
Every article published online is more than a collection of words. It represents someone’s investigation, someone’s time, someone’s expertise and, in many cases, someone’s risk.
If AI systems can absorb that knowledge while newsrooms lose traffic, attribution and bargaining power, what happens to the future of journalism?
The irony is striking.
AI was built from knowledge—and journalism has contributed enormously to that knowledge.
So perhaps newsrooms should no longer remain passive observers of the AI revolution.
They need to ask harder questions.
Who is using our content?
How is it being accessed?
Are journalists being properly attributed?
Who benefits financially?
What should licensing agreements look like?
And most importantly, how can newsrooms use AI to strengthen journalism without allowing journalism itself to lose its value?
The future of journalism may not be about choosing between humans and AI.
It may be about ensuring that the humans who create the knowledge powering AI are not forgotten, exploited or left behind.
The news may be changing. But the value of the people who produce it must not disappear with it.
