Journalistic Quality
how you create high-quality journalism
Journalistic Quality is how a newsroom produces work it can stand behind: accurate, fair, clear, and worth the audience's time. For a media organization, quality is what separates reporting from noise. A team might pause here to agree on what good actually means for them and how they know when they have reached it.
Questions to explore
- What does a high-quality piece look like for us, in concrete terms?
- How do we check accuracy before something is published?
- Where do deadlines push us to lower our standards?
- How do we know when our work has met the bar we set?
- If AI helped draft or edit, how would we keep quality from slipping?
Expert voices
“There is a real tension between using AI for efficiency and maintaining authentic, distinctive journalism. Use AI assistance without producing generic, homogenized content.”
“AI makes it easy to produce more content, faster, but journalism's value has never come from volume. Newsrooms must decide whether AI is for publishing more, or publishing better.”
“Set explicit quality criteria for verification: when is good enough to know? Without a defined threshold, the team cannot agree on when a check is done.”
Things to consider
- Quality is hard to defend if no one has defined what it means here.
- Speed and care pull against each other, so the trade is worth naming.
- A tool can help produce a draft, but someone still has to stand behind it.
Pull Journalistic Quality when it is relevant and set it aside when it is not. Pair it with the other Organisation cards, lay them out on a table, and use the questions above to get everyone on the same page. Capture what you discuss on sticky notes or in a shared doc.
More Organisation cards
