On this episode of Inside the Media Minds, my co-host Christine Blake and I chat with Maria Korolov, freelance technology reporter. Maria shares her unique career path from computer engineering in college, to war correspondence across Russia and Afghanistan, to eventually becoming a freelance journalist. Today, Maria shares her perspective on what it’s been like to cover “the biggest news story at the time,” how artificial intelligence (AI) is influencing the cybersecurity and journalism industries alike, and her advice for how fellow writers can adapt to this new age of journalism.
Exploring industry paradigm shifts from the source
As a freelancer for IDG, now owned by Foundry, Maria focuses on getting behind-the-scenes insights on the user experience and notes that this is the most difficult but rewarding perspective to get. “Vendors have tons of motivation to talk. Analysts have tons of motivation to talk. All the investment advisors have tons of motivation to talk,” she says. “But enterprise users… They don’t really have any need or time to talk to journalists, so getting their perspectives on what’s actually happening on the ground is the most interesting part of technology coverage.”
Maria shares that the most interesting topic to her right now is exploring what it means to be an “AI-first” company. As companies transition into being AI-augmented and AI-automated, the next phase of being AI-first will result in many companies reinventing themselves, which will require all new business models. But amid the uncertainty of what that paradigm shift will look like, Maria remains an optimist for how AI will impact our lives as a whole.
“In the long term, efficiency is always good because there’s plenty of stuff for humans to do that we want to do,” she concludes. “Automation is going to help. In the long run, automation is going to increase everyone’s standard of living.”
AI’s influence on commodity journalism and professional stigmas
During the podcast, we explore how AI and automation will help commodity journalism become more efficient and, in turn, require different publishing models that prioritize the human element. Maria even notes her observations that publishers are no longer making all their money from ads and subscriptions, but from events. This trend represents the innate need for something beyond commodity reporting and builds upon what people really desire: building relationships and connecting to what other individuals and groups might be thinking.
Maria’s advice to writers in her space is to not buy into the stigma that AI makes you less of a professional. She points back to the initial stigma around bloggers who were told their work wasn’t real journalism, but then went on to build media empires. This could be the case in the future for those who truly maximize what AI can help them achieve from a creativity and efficiency perspective.
“That’s the biggest thing that journalists should worry about right now. Not that AI will take their job, but that they will miss the opportunities that AI affords them.”
Tune in to the full episode or read the transcript to hear more from Maria on the stories she’s currently working on, other AI trends impacting the publishing and journalism world, and how she prefers to be pitched by PR pros!
Timestamps
0:21 – Christine and Madison preview the discussion
2:28 – From Computer Engineering to AI Journalism
7:17 – Maria’s Focus at Foundry (Formerly IDG)
9:14 – What Does It Mean to be “AI-First”?
15:59 – AI Will Not Cause Brain Rot
17:31 – How AI Impacts Commodity Journalism
30:06 – Maria’s Advice for Other Writers: Deny the AI Stigma
36:49 – Maria’s Preferences on Finding Sources
44:46 – The Perfect Pitch Formula
Transcript
Christine Blake (CB): Welcome to Inside the Media Minds, this is your host, Christine Blake. This show features in depth interviews with tech reporters who share everything from their biggest pet peeves to their favorite stories from our studio at W2 Communications. Let’s go inside the media minds.
Hey everyone, we’re so excited for you all to hear this interview with Maria Korolov today. Maria is an award-winning freelance technology journalist covering this industry for decades now. She shared such a good perspective on AI. She gave us her takes on everything from how companies approach AI to how it’s changing the journalism industry. Madison, what were some of your takeaways?
Madison Farabaugh (MF): Yeah, I think my favorite part was when Maria dove into just how her fellow journalists, reporters, writers can all adapt to this new landscape where AI is so heavily incorporated into the journalism process. And I think her main advice was that it’s not something to avoid. It’s not something that we should be afraid of, but it’s something that we should learn how to work with effectively moving forward.
CB: Exactly. She also gave us some really good tips on how to pitch her and her approach to
getting new resources. So we hope you guys love this episode. We definitely did.
Enjoy this talk with Maria.
Right. Hey everyone. This is Christine Blake, one of the co-hosts of inside the Media Minds.
MF: And this is Madison Farabaugh, the other co-host.
CB: And we are super excited today. We have a great guest. Maria Korolov is joining us. Maria is an award winning freelance technology journalist specializing in AI cyber security and quantum computing. So hey Maria, thanks for joining us today.
Maria Korolov (MK): Hi, Christine and hi, Madison. Thank you so much for having me.
CB: Thank you. We’ve known you for a while, and we’re so excited to chat with you. I know you’ve been in the journalism industry for, what, over 20 years now?
MK: A bit longer than that, but that’ll give away my age. I’m gonna say no comment.
CB: Fair, fair, fair. Well, yeah, we’ve known you for a while, and we always love reading your reporting, and we’re happy to to get to know a little bit more about you today. So you have a very interesting background and journey within the journalism space. Can you share a little bit about how you got into the industry, what keeps you engaged, and kind of where you’re at right now?
MK: All right, so my background is in computer programming. So I was running databases and writing computer code for my school district since I was 14. Went to college for computer engineering, then switched to Applied Engineering Physics, took some quantum, quantum physics courses, switched to mathematics. Always wanted to be a writer, but as the daughter of immigrants, I had to have a technical degree, or my parents would kill me. So you know math, it was as a compromise, and as soon as I graduated. Before I graduated, I was writing for the local newspaper, and then worked for a suburban paper in Chicago, and then covered the northern suburbs for the Chicago Tribune. Wanted to be a novelist, started working my novel, it was super boring, realized I needed to have something to write about, so I went off to Russia and Chechnya and Afghanistan. Was a war correspondent, got taken prisoner a couple of times, got shot at a lot of times, good times.
CB: Oh gosh.
MK: And the same thing happens. It happens to everybody. You get kids, you have kids, you can’t keep getting shot at anymore.
CB: Nope.
MK: And I switched to Business and Technology journalism because that was the big story of the time.
CB: The big story and and a little safer.
MK: A little safer, yes, but still as much travel, yeah. Um, so I was covering all the .com stuff for ComputerWorld as a staffer and quit to go freelance just before the bottom fell out of the technology journalism industry, and everyone started being laid off everywhere and because I went freelance, like literally a couple of months before that, I scooped up some really good gigs that were like long term technology columnist, covering the financial services for security and interviews, and a couple of other publications. Wound up going to Asia for them, running their Asia Bureau for five years based in Shanghai, biggest news bureau in Shanghai, when I was there and covered the all the Chinese transformation of the economy, which was the biggest news story of the time.
So I love covering the biggest news story of the time. So that was the biggest news story of the time. Then Asia financial crisis hit. My kids were old enough for high school, and we came back here, and I started covering the biggest technology story of that time, which was cybersecurity. And that was a lot of fun. I speak Russian, so I got to call Russia and check out the Russian bulletin boards and, you know, all that good stuff. That was a lot of fun. And then a few years ago, I’m like, “You know what, the biggest story is now AI,” and as a freelancer, I get to just rebrand myself, just by saying, “Oh, I’m now an AI journalist.” And I started covering AI, and it does definitely feel like the.com days, but on steroids.
CB: Yep, that’s a great comparison. I think we are definitely seeing that every company is talking about AI. It is the absolute buzzword, whether they can do it or not, they’re everyone’s talking about it. So I’m sure you have an interesting perspective covering that, which we’ll get into.
MK: Yeah, I think all the people who are young during the.com period and just getting starting their technology careers, we’re seeing their bosses mess it up and ignore it and miss opportunities. And now that they are in charge, now that they’re the CIO, CTO, CEOs, they have enough experience under the belt to know what’s real and what isn’t. You know what’s a fad and what’s a real transition. They don’t want to miss it. They know it’s real. They’re investing everything in it. And everybody I talk to, no matter what industry vertical, no matter what job title, AI, is their number one priority right now.
MF: Gosh, yeah. And it’s thank you so much too, for just sharing all of your background there. I have met very few who have as wide and diverse of a background as you when it comes to journalism and even having the firsthand experience sometimes working with technology in your background and then coming into the journalism space. I’m sure that was something that really benefited you when you’re talking about all of these different super niche technologies. Could you share a little bit about your current role now, and what, what types of projects you work on? Because we know you write for several different publications currently. So can you talk a little bit about how you balance them all, how you kind of work on all of these different projects at once?
MK: So I’ve worked for all the major business tech publishers over the course of my career, because I’ve been around and I really, really like IDG, not because it’s just a place where I started out, but because we don’t focus on the vendors. We focus on the user side. We focus on what’s actually happening in enterprises, not what the vendors want us to want to see happen, or what the investor markets want us to invest in. Because those are kind of like really, they’re not the real story. Those are hype. Those are marketing.
What the users are actually doing in the enterprise, that’s like the real story. What’s happening. It’s the hardest story to get because users don’t have any motivation to talk to you. Vendors have tons of motivation to talk. Analysts have tons of motivation to talk. All the investment advisors have tons of motivation to talk, but enterprise users, you know, have real jobs. They’re doing real things. They don’t really have any need or time to talk to journalists. So getting their perspectives on what’s actually happening on the ground is, I think, the most interesting part of technology coverage, and we don’t get any interference at all from vendors at IDG, if there is any, somebody way above my pay grade handles it. We never see it. It’s a really, really nice place to work. And I’ve, I’ve loved writing for them for, like to set for more than 20 years.
MF: Now, that’s great to hear. So do you have right now a specific project or topic? I know we’ve talked a lot about AI, and we’ll definitely get into that theme a little bit more. Is there a specific area that you’re currently focused on or that you find the most interesting.
MK: So right now, the story I’m working on that I find the most interesting is what it means to be an AI first company, and I’m filing that at the end of next week. I don’t know when this is going to air, but it’s going to run probably a couple of weeks after that. So maybe in maybe, like, run in September sometime. So the idea is, we know what a digital first company is, or the older ones of us do. So traditional companies had traditional supply chains, traditional distribution chains. You know, they use paper and pencil for their workflows. They use telephones and fax machines, you know, old stuff, and the digital first company, especially, like for newspapers, they put stuff online first, and then maybe they’ll have a print edition, or maybe not. Their, their cost basis is very different, because they don’t have to pay for the all the supply chain and distribution stuff. They can do a lot more. They can do video, they can do audio, they can do all these things on their websites that they couldn’t do in print. They could cover a lot more stories than they could before, when you had to physically run around talking to people. So digital first publication is a different kind of animal than a traditional print publication, and it created a lot of opportunities, but also a lot of industry disruption.
And the same thing happened in every other not every other industry, but a lot of other industries — the financial services, the consulting the technology companies, many blockbuster right, and Netflix. So it happened to a lot of different companies, different vertical industries, and the companies that came out of it, like the Googles, the Facebooks, the Amazons, many of them were digital natives that had brand new business models that didn’t even exist before. And the same thing’s going to happen with AI. But we don’t know yet what AI first looks like.
We know what AI augmented looks like. You take your traditional company and you sprinkle a little bit of AI over it to make it a little bit more productive here and there, to increase people’s output or reduce headcount or make it slightly more efficient. That’s the general AI augmentation process. And we’re starting to move into the AI automation process, where pieces of the business process are replaced by automation power, maybe by traditional scripts combined with LLMs, or maybe agentic systems and but the next thing after that is kind of a company reinvention, and we’re going to see some major companies coming out of it that didn’t exist before, and some brand new business models coming out of it that weren’t possible before.
And it’s very, very difficult to become one of these new paradigm shifting companies, because you have your old cost basis, your old customers, your old employees, your old workflows, and your customers like the old way of doing things. That’s why they’re your customers, and they never tell you that they want the new way, because if they want the new way, they would already have left and be getting their stuff from somebody else, though they say, “Oh, I don’t want the new, cheap AI slop. I want the gold, old, reliable stuff.” Until the day they no longer do, which is what happened with the internet. People were like, No, I want paper. I want the feel of it. And then one day, none of them did anymore. And it’s like, you were telling us you wanted it the old way. You wanted the expensive thing. And they’re like, oh, sorry, you know, changed my mind, right? And you never get any warning ahead of time. And so the same thing is going to happen with AI.
As AI improves, people are going to just start making the switch over to the AI doing way of doing things. And it’s happening in some areas already. It’s happening faster than we’ve ever seen it with any other technology. And a certain group of people, including customers, are going to say, “Oh, I’m never going to switch. I’m never going to switch. I’ll always hate AI, because of ethics, because of costs, because of quality, because of all these things.” But all those things get resolved and then they switch, yeah, because it’s a more efficient way of doing things. And I think in the long term, efficiency is always good because it means because there’s plenty of stuff for humans to do that we want to do. We want to clean up the environment. We want to mine the asteroids. We want to, you know, switch to clean energy. We want to cure cancer.
There’s more work to be done than people to do it. And so in the long run, automation is going to help. In the long run, automation is going to increase everyone’s standard of living. In the long run, it’s going to cure cancer and all these other things, but it’s going to be really disruptive in the short term.
And so this is a huge thing, and a core part of it is, what is the end game look like? What is that new, disruptive company? How is it organized? How is it working? How is it different from the traditional company we have now? And what new opportunities does it afford? What does it offer to to founders and to invest with employees, but most importantly, to customers? What can it do that companies couldn’t do before? And I think that’s the question everybody’s asking themselves right now. What is the new thing going to look like? What opportunities become available like after the internet?
Anybody could now have a television channel with a global audience, which was unimaginable before. I mean, people were complaining about the deaths of the traditional journalism industry, but we also got the ability for anyone to become a global television journalist for free by launching a YouTube channel or by launching a podcast or launching a blog. These things were impossible before it became possible afterwards. What is AI going to make possible now? And we don’t know yet. So there’s this gap of the old ways are dying, we don’t know what the new ways are going to be yet, and it’s going to be a very, very disruptive, traumatic period. Great opportunity for journalists.
CB: No, it really is. I love that take because people get uncomfortable with new things that really shift the paradigm, like that, like the internet, like online banking, right? Like people, this is uncomfortable, but then that’s all we do now, right? So I, like, I love that take of yours, that AI is going to become almost normal, and like, it’s going to open up a whole new world of opportunities. Humans are still involved. But how can it make us more efficient?
MK: Yeah, and we are already getting the brain rot stuff. Oh, AI makes you dumb. We got the same thing when television was invented. Oh, television rots your brain. It’s going to make you dumb. I mean, like, when writing was invented, people were like, oh yeah, you’re gonna write things down now, instead of memorizing them, this is the decline of civilization. We’re all going to be dumb now and so, so technically, I guess it was kind of true, because we used to be able to memorize entire like and those like poetic sagas, and now very few of us do, but I mean writing helped civilization. Television, I believe helped civilization. The internet, I believe helped civilization a lot. It made us be able to do a lot of things that we could not do before, which I think is awesome if we do good things with it. Not so awesome if we do bad things with it, um, and like, knowing the difference is kind of like part of being wise or whatever. And I don’t know how well we’re going to navigate that. I don’t think anybody knows. But again, as a journalist, definitely, very interesting time to be covering this,
CB: Definitely. And I’m curious too, like, what or how do you think AI will impact the journalism industry? I know we’re, sometimes we see AI writing articles, right? Like doing some of that writing. We’re seeing the impact on website traffic depending on AI searches. So what is, what do you think about that?
MK: So I think that AI will, first of all, impact commodity journalism, which has been happening all along. If your journalism is a rewrite of a press release, summary what happened at a board meeting, a summary of what happened in an earnings call, that stuff has been automated for a long time. I mean, Reuters has been doing that, the AP has been doing that. That’s going to become accelerated. So what automation can do will expand. So a lot of the stuff that is commodity journalism, you know, feed information into a press release writing bot and it writes you a press release, those kinds of things where we’re not looking for a unique human point of view. We’re looking for basic information or a basic analysis of what’s happening. I definitely think AI is capable of doing that, anything that’s based on getting factual information from people can be replaced with AI as soon as the fact checking tools become better.
So for example, what was the most important thing happening at this upcoming conference? I have AI analyze the presentations and the recordings of the speeches. I have AI send emails to a bunch of analysts. I know the analysts have their AIs write responses, and my AI assembles this, prioritizes it and turns it into a story. Why am I even there? It would take just as little time for an editor to give those instructions to an AI as it would for them to give me the instructions for me to pass on to my AI. So and then you have the question of, you know, why is an editor needed in the loop when an AI can prioritize the the story assignments and decide what should run in the publication, especially when we can run a lot of stuff, see what people read, and adjust the production schedule accordingly.
So a lot of this commodity journalism is going to become automated, which means we’re going to have a lot more news product coming out. People still only have two eyeballs, so humans are still only going to read the same amount of content, because I’m going to have AI summarize the rest of it, which means we’re not going to see those ads, so and we’re going to have AI summarize a lot of stuff that we’re currently reading by hand. Because, I mean, not by hand by eyeball, because it’s easier for us to have AI summarize for them. So advertising traffic will drop.
I’m already seeing some data that traffic from search engines and advertising revenues might already be falling, and I was in a B2B publishing seminar that I think as we ran a couple months ago, and the business publisher that was there said they don’t make their money from ads anymore. And the moderator asked, “Oh, you make it from subscriptions? “And they were like, “No, we make it from events.” Which I thought was very interesting. Because an event is not a commodity information thing. So they’re not making the money from ads or subscriptions. They’re making the money from events. That is a very, very different business model for publication. And because it leverages on something that cannot be automated, being physically present in a room with other people, and interacting with those other people, is something that humans find very, very valuable.
It’s part of our genetic kind of evolutionary process. We want to be part of a group and understand what the group thinks, because that’s core to our survival. If we’re alone in the woods, we die quickly. And so for us, being part of a group and understanding what other humans think and how we relate to them is fundamentally core to all of our survival instincts. And so anything that leverages that I think is going to do very well in the post AI era, because until we like edit that out of our genes, which I don’t think is going to happen in the future, that’s going to be a very core driver of human behavior, we will rush to save someone else’s life before our own. I mean, we are ordered to put a mask onto the kid before we put it on us, because our instinct is to put it on the kid first, like people will jump into icy waters to save an animal, because we have that sense of group connection with them.
This is something that’s kind of hard coded in. And so we care very, very much what other people think of us. We care very much about being helpful to other people, being part of a group with other people. We want to buy Taylor Swift’s albums and go to her concerts and be part of her fan base, not because her songs are so great, because we might not be able to tell a Taylor Swift song from an AI generated song, but because we feel a personal connection with her personal struggles, with her personal story, and when we buy something from her, that exchange of value that happens when we give her money and she gives us an album, is a relationship building exchange of value that’s hard coded into us. Animals and primates will exchange things with each other in order to cement relationships, and we do that too.
So business relationship that’s based on that kind of exchange of value, those kind of human relationships, I think, has a better chance of being AI proof than things that are based on kind of a commodity or information or, like, a basic kind of functionality, because we don’t care about that as much. Yeah, we don’t care what an AI chat bot thinks of us, unless we have psychological issues, and we might pretend to care for fun, like we cared about our Tamagotchis for fun, but then we got bored with them and we turned them off. We cared about our Farmville crops for fun, but then we got bored with it and turned it off, versus if those were real pets or real farm crops or real farmers, we would have a harder time with that. I mean, some of us are psychopaths that would like kill them anyway, but most of us would have a really, really hard time shutting down a farm with actual people working on it.
And so I think that we have a lot of panic right now about like the AI box, but we had the same thing when writing was invented. Don Quixote was somebody who couldn’t tell a real windmill from a dragon because he read so many books, books rotted his brain, and he could no longer tell a dragon from a windmill. So it’s a story as old as time, we can tell fiction from reality. So, and that’s going to happen, that’s happening already with AI, we’re seeing all the stories, yeah, but people learn to tell the difference very, very quickly, and unless, like, like I said, they have some kind of underlying psychological issues. So I think that, that part’s going to resolve on its own.
Some vendors are going to take advantage of this, like Facebook does and so on, and we’re going to have to deal with that as a society. But overall, I don’t think that’s going to be as big an issue as people worried like Dungeons and Dragons did not turn the whole generation of kids into psychopaths. You know, Gilligan’s Island did not rot all of our brains. So I think most of that is a little overblown, but for media companies, because so much of what we do right now is commodity news and commodity analysis. That is totally something that AI can do, that we’re going to have to work really, really hard to figure out what’s coming that’s new.
And the new thing, I’m guessing, is going to be related to human relationships, trust in human authority, need for validation from other humans, need for relationships with other humans, including parasocial relationships and that AI, like internet before us, would give us the opportunity to create and build and scale new platforms to do this, and I don’t know how, and I’m very interested in finding out, for, you know, selfish personal reasons, but also because I’m interested in what’s going to happen. Yeah, and I’m definitely keeping my eye out to see what’s what’s happening in the space.
CB: I’m obsessed with everything you said. I know Madison wants to jump in too, but I just, you connected a lot of dots there, because there are so many ways AI can make journalism more efficient. And I love the thing you said about events that cannot be automated, that cannot be replaced. So it’s interesting that publications are turning to events and then, yeah, you can’t replace human emotion. Um, call it Taylor Swift, last night on the New Heights podcast, you know I listened, and she said she’s in the business of human emotion, and like you said, you can’t replace that connection. You can’t replace that that need for community. So that’s, I love your touch on that, Maria, that’s a really smart take.
MK: The hard thing is, do people really need that connection as much as we think they do? I mean, Blockbuster thought that we needed human advice when choosing movies, and it turned out that we really didn’t care what a minimum wage clerk thought.
What we really cared about was the convenience and no late fees. So we might, I think a lot of people are overestimating what their relationship is worth to their customer, because often the customer, there’s only so many relationships you can have in your life, and the relationships with that particular vendor or that particular publication is really low on the priority scale, and that can be very painful to find out that yours is not the key relationship in your customer’s life. Yours is a relationship that’s annoying to them that they’re going to love getting rid of. And that’s going to be true for some publications as well. People read us because they have to for their job, not because they really want to, and especially in the trade press, like how many people actually read my articles because they want to versus because they have to to keep up with their job? So that’s going to be very interesting to find out, and I’m sure very, very painful to a lot of people.
MF: Yeah, that that actually ties into what my follow up question was going to be, because I’ve loved this whole theme of the human element, and you were talking a little bit about how automation is going to change kind of what types of stories journalists might be focusing on versus which ones AI might be able to just cover off for them. So I guess my question is, what would your advice be to other journalists, other reporters, who might be seeing some of these trends in the industry, whether it’s you know, publication consolidation, whether it’s you know, changing the numbers of staffers, things like that. What advice would you give to your your fellow writers or journalists on how they can adapt to this, this next wave of journalism, when we consider AI’s role in it?
MK: So based on my experience with a.com situation, it’s never been a worse time to be a journalist. But that has been true for every single period of history. It’s always been the worst time to get into journalism. When I got into journalism, people who are graduating with a math degree had an entry-level salary that was, on average, twice as high as those who are graduating with a journalism degree. The math graduates were getting the highest salaries, and the communication and journalism majors were getting the lowest salaries in the rankings. So and at the time, I was like, “Oh, this is a horrible time to get into journalism, because all this consolidation, newspapers are buying each other up and cutting jobs.”
You know, that’s always been the case. I think it’s always going to be the case because people can see the layoffs, especially the mass layoffs. Those are very visible. Those make all the headlines. People do not see the job creation, the jobs that are created, how often, it’s dispersed. They’re often small, especially to start with, and they’re often denigrated quite a bit by society. A lot of early bloggers blogged under pseudonyms because they were embarrassed to admit to their friends, family and colleagues that they had a blog because it was an embarrassing thing, because blogs were for teenage girls, and this wasn’t something that a real adult journal, professional journalist would do. And this was obviously, in retrospect, a huge mistake, because the people who went all in on the blogs, went all in on the podcast, went all in on the YouTube channels, some of them built like media empires on top of it, like the Huffington Post and, you know, so on.
I mean, a lot of the big tech publications that I recognize off top my head did not exist before the internet: the Mashables, the Gizmodos, you know, all the, all those, all those websites did not exist before, and they started out as small blogs that people dismissed as not being real journalism. Literally, people said that this is not real journalism. They don’t have real editors. Well, they hired editors once they got some traction. And the same thing is going to happen with AI, and people are going to be very, very embarrassed to use it.
There’s going to be social stigma about using it. We’re already seeing it. There’s a stigma about using AI in your job. I just saw some research results that showed that employees who use AI are less respected by their peers because using AI is like cheating, and it’s not like doing it for real, and it rots your brain, right? And in journalism in particular, we have all these lawsuits about copyright infringement, about AI taking jobs and stealing content and all these and wasting energy and all these other things. So the big journalism organizations are investing in AI on the back end, like the New York Times and The Associated Press and the Washington Post and Reuters and all these organizations have big, big, big projects underway to figure out how to use AI. But some of them are also suing the AI companies, and for the journalists working there, it is a huge, big, big moral and ethical issue, and it’s embarrassing when you’re caught using AI to generate an article, because, oh my God, you’re publishing AI slop. It’s only going to be slop for so long.
After a certain point, it becomes more accurate than humans. Wikipedia used to be considered slop because it was user-generated content, and that was a bad thing, but after a couple years, it was more accurate than the Britannica because of many eyes fixing the issues, and it became more comprehensive, more reliable, and on average, more factual than traditional encyclopedias. And we missed that point of inflection, but we still remember that feeling, oh, Wikipedia is bad, and you can’t trust it, but you can trust Britannica. But that’s no longer true, and that hasn’t been true for quite a while. And the same thing is going to happen with AI, but that feeling of distrust that the AI lies, that the AI makes stuff up, that you can’t trust AI, that it steals its training data, that it wastes energy, all those things are true, but they’re not the big story.
The big story is that the AI is improving faster than any technology that I’ve seen. It’s moving so much faster than Moore’s law. I’ve never seen anything move this fast as I’ve seen AI move. And so a lot of the complaints that people have will be moot very, very quickly, and we will, we will miss that. And journalists, in particular, creative types of all kinds, a lot of them will miss that transition and the social stigma will continue for quite a bit longer, and it’s going to keep us from embracing new opportunities, because we will dismiss them out of hand as being stupid, trivial slop, and we will miss the opportunity to be the next big YouTuber, the next big podcaster, the next big technology blogger, because we will just dismiss it out of hand, and I think that’s the biggest thing that journalists should worry about right now, not that AI will take their job, but that they will miss the opportunities that AI affords them.
CB: Yeah, that’s a great, that’s a great take too. Interesting perspective, and hopefully they’re paying attention to it, because it’s changing every day.
MK: No, nobody’s paying attention.
CB: Maria, before we wrap up, we have a listener question we want to ask you. So kind of more for our PR folks listening to this, this podcast, we know when you’re looking for sources, every journalist does it differently. You often send emails to your trusted contacts that may have sources for you. How do you approach gathering resources this way? Is that your preferred way of, kind of getting new resources, or do you look to other avenues for that? And then, how do you prefer to be pitched through that?
MK: So this has changed quite a bit. So it used to be that when I’m entering a new beat, like I haven’t covered this topic before, I would go to HARO, or I would go to prop, PRProfnet, or one of those places, and say, “So I’m doing a story in a new topic. I’m looking for experts and customers in this area.” And I have not done that in years because of so many automated responses that it’s not something that is practical at this point. I literally could not read all the emails that come through.
So I have, like winnowed, my list of people I reach out to, to a small list of people who I know and trust, so that I know that the response comes back from a credible source, and the response is authoritative. And recently, like in the last couple of months, I have, I mean, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve never liked using email responses because the emails sound like they were my committee. Lately, the emails sound like they were written by ChatGPT. And if I wanted ChatGPT opinion, I would just ask ChatGPT. I would not need to ask this expert.
So now, at a certain point, that’s going to change, because, you know, the expert would feed their own opinion into ChatGPT and get like something that sounds like their voice, but just slightly more organized, and that sounds like their opinion, just slightly more organized, which is fine. I have no problem with that. But right now, too often is somebody asked ChatGPT, “What is an AI first company? Oh, yeah, that sounds good.” Copy and paste and send it to me. I can’t use that, and so, like, right now I’m asking for Zoom calls or Teams or Meet or whatever for all my interviews.
MK: And the thing is, couple weeks ago, I got a reply back from one of the top, top experts in my field on a story, and the answer was formatted exactly like a ChatGPT answer, and it cited a statistic from a cybersecurity firm’s website that I had literally seen the day before from a research report that they produced, and the research report was all made up numbers, and the research report cited Gartner and cited a whole bunch of other organizations with fully made up statistics. But the research report was fully on target, so it was coming up at the top of all my search engine queries for that question, and it went into the search engine data, and it became part of the AI generated responses. And I contacted Gartner, and the sources, and I was like, “Did you have this report come out that just wasn’t published anywhere, but was like, internal?” And they were like, no.
CB: Wow.
MK: Contacted the company directly by their emails, via their LinkedIn, they didn’t say anything, but they did take the report down, like three or four days later. The entire report was made up. It was fully on point. It answered my question exactly. It was perfectly SEO optimized. It was at the top of all the results. It had perfect statistics. The statistics were perfect. It was just, and this top source in the field quoted this report in their email response to me. So and I sent, I forwarded this to all my editors. I’m like, listen, you know, demand original source links for original reports for everything in your articles. From now on, you cannot just say, “Oh, according to Gartner, such and such,” without linking to that original Gartner report and double checking the information in that Gartner report. If you can’t link to that report and get that statistic, it does not exist, because this is, this, this is already happening, and AI is very good at SEO, yes, which means that I am now looking for original reports from trusted sources.
So if you’re a source I haven’t heard of, you’re going to have a really, really hard time making it into one of my articles, and I want a video call with somebody I know, or somebody who, somebody I know knows, which is why I’m reaching out to PR people I know, at PR companies I know, and I know this is unfair. I know that there’s plenty of great people out there who have great opinions and great backgrounds, and what I’m going to do tell them is what I just told to another guy: hire a PR firm. I mean literally, if you want to, like because I am getting so many requests to give people my give from people wanting to give their opinion to me or contribute to an article.
Anything that says contributed content or contributed anything from a name I don’t recognize immediately gets flagged as spam. I’m not, I’m not even deleting it. I’m flagging it as spam automatically because I don’t want to see anything else from anybody at that, from that source, because I get, like, hundreds of these, yeah, and I cannot deal with my inbox if I don’t have a way to process those out. And so, yes, so human authenticity is becoming really important for the kind of features that I write. Because I write features about what humans actually experience with the technology they’re deploying at their actual companies, stuff that is not being talked about in press releases. I’m not rewriting press releases or what a vendor is putting on their website. I’m talking about user opinions that they’re not sharing in public on a routine basis.
And I want real, actual users to talk about this, and this is critical for all the stories that I write. And this is not currently something that AI can do. Not bottom wood, because these people do not want to talk. They will talk to me because they trust me, because they see the kind of articles I write, because the PR company vouches for me. Or, you know, there, there’s some other kind of like trusted relationship happening, and the readers have a trusted relationship, not simply with me, because who recognizes my name and nobody can spell it, but with the publications that I write for.
So because we have that insider view, that enterprise user focus to our articles and we give them stuff that they can’t get somewhere else, except conferences. You go to conferences and you have users on stage talking about their own experiences. So, so yeah, I’m going to a conference later this month, the VMware conference, and so that I can talk to people face to face.
MF: No, that all makes so much sense. Gosh. Thank you so much, Maria. Just for diving into that with us. I think it’ll be super helpful for our listeners just to kind of understand where you’re coming from when you’re reviewing pitches and what you look for more.
MK: So if a pitch comes to me, what I want to see in the headline is, “This user source is is willing to talk about this topic and has this unique angle on it.” So for example, this packaging company is willing to talk about their agentic automation platform and how they’re using it to enter new lines of business, or, you know, whatever it is that that the different thing is that they couldn’t do before. So what are they doing now that they couldn’t do before, and what technology platform type they’re using, I don’t really care about what specific vendor they’re using, because I don’t worry about, I don’t worry about the vendor side.
So I do care about what, who the customer is. I do care about the general category of technology that they’re using and what they’re doing with it that’s new. So I don’t want to know about your customer service chatbot that’s the same as the customer service chatbot, yeah, three years ago, just maybe slightly more efficient, because I’ve done that story, you know. I’m looking for a new angle to it. So if something like that is in the subject line, yes. And then I open that email, and then if it says, custom, the CTO or CIO or CSO at ABC company is willing to talk about how they’re deploying this new technology and how it’s enabling them to do X, Y and Z that they couldn’t do before. That is a story I will pitch to my editor.
MF: Got it.
MK: And then, there’s a 10% chance that the editor will say yes. So I have to do a lot of pitches, so I’m always looking for story ideas. And the other thing that would help this pitch, if there’s credible statistics saying that this is a trend, a lot of companies are doing this. According to a Gartner report released last month, 80% of companies plan to invest in this particular type of agenda framework. For example, I don’t need a statistic from six months ago, because it is no longer relevant. It has to be a recent statistic from a company whose name I recognize.
MF: Yes, we love a formula.
MK: I need a link to that research report in the email.
MF: Absolutely. Especially.
MK: I need that link. If I don’t have the link, I will email back and say, “Where’s the link to that research report.”
MF: Especially with the example you just gave us too, about things potentially not not even being real. So that’s, all of this, so great.
MK: And then the other thing that happens is Gartner statistics tend to have, take on a life of it their own. And when you track it back, which I did that last week for government, everybody says that 84% of AI projects fail, or something like that, right? And I tracked it back, and it was about things going from POC to pilot projects for machine learning, things in 2017. This is no way relevant or useful or applicable to anything today, but a statistic that’s become recycled so many times in a broken telephone kind of way that it has nothing to do with that the original source report.
So yeah, I need a new research report, a new survey that’s more than just like five people surveyed, and I need it to be recent, and I need itto be from a credible organization, and I need to the point. And that’s kind of like proof that this trend is real. So I have a customer to talk to and a real trend, and I can package that up and take that to my editors,
MF: Quick and easy checklist. Well, thank you so much, Maria for taking the time to talk with us today. We, we have just so enjoyed this conversation, and I think our listeners will get a lot out of it as well. So thank you for your time. Thank you to our listeners, and we will catch you all on the next episode.
MK: Well, thank you so much for having me. I love talking about this stuff. I usually have to listen to people instead of doing all the talking, and I really like this little change of pace.
CB: Yeah, you have so many valuable insights, and we learned a lot, and we’re excited to share this with everyone. So thank you so much.
MK: No thank you for having me. Have a great rest of the week, everybody.
CB: You too, Maria.
MF: You too, see ya.
MK: Bye, bye.
CB: Thank you for joining us on today’s episode of Inside the Media Minds to learn more about our podcast and hear all of our episodes. Please visit us at w2comm.com/podcast and follow us on Twitter @MediaMindsShow, and you can subscribe anywhere podcasts are found.