Nieman Journalism Lab: Meet the tech reporters using AI to help write and edit their stories

Published in March 2026, Laura Hazard Owen’s piece in Nieman Journalism Lab is a practitioner profile rather than a trend overview. Rather than asking whether journalists are using AI, it goes to reporters who have already built it into their daily work and asks them to describe what that actually looks like.

What reporters are doing

One notable example is Alex Heath, a tech journalist who uses Claude to spend more time with sources. The logic is direct: if AI can handle portions of the drafting and editing process, the reporter has more hours to develop relationships and break news. Heath’s value as a journalist is access and judgment, and he treats AI as a way to protect the time he spends on those things.

The article also cites the Fortune case as a data point on scale. Journalist Nick Lichtenberg wrote more AI-assisted stories in six months than any of his colleagues delivered in a year. AI-assisted stories from Fortune accounted for nearly 20 percent of web traffic in the second half of 2025. The article is careful not to frame this as straightforwardly good — it is a business metric, not a quality measure — but it illustrates the production dynamic that AI tools create when applied at publication scale.

What the examples show

Owen’s piece makes an implicit argument that the adoption pattern differs by role and beat. For reporters whose primary value is source access and scoops — fast-moving tech coverage, breaking news — AI can accelerate publication without displacing the core activity. For journalists whose work requires slower, more deliberate engagement with complex sources or long-form structure, the calculus is less clear.

The common thread across the examples is that reporters who use AI well are clear about where they retain decision-making authority. They are not submitting AI drafts unchanged; they are using AI output as raw material that still requires judgment, selection, and editing before it becomes journalism.

Who it is useful for

Journalists and editors who want to think through where AI tools fit in their specific workflow, rather than adopting them wholesale. The article is particularly useful for those working in fast-moving digital environments where publication speed matters, and where understanding how peer reporters at other outlets have handled the same question is informative.