Leadership & Culture
how you manage change and create a collaborative culture
How AI lands in a newsroom depends a lot on tone from the top and how change is handled. This card looks at the way decisions are made, how concerns are heard, and whether people feel safe to question AI use. A team pauses here when adoption feels rushed or one-sided.
Questions to explore
- How are decisions about AI made in your newsroom, and who gets a say?
- What happens when a staff member raises a concern about an AI tool?
- How do you handle the gap between people who are eager and people who are wary?
- What signals does leadership send, on purpose or not, about how AI should be used?
- How do you make space for honest feedback without it feeling risky for staff?
Expert voices
“If editors and middle managers do not buy in, change will not scale. Train them early and often.”
“People before tools: no AI tool will work if staff think AI is coming to replace their jobs. The team has to be on board first.”
“Include voices from different roles, generations, genders, and contexts in AI decisions. Concentrating technology choices among homogeneous profiles leads to partial solutions and perpetuates existing inequalities.”
“Many journalists already use AI privately but hide it at work because of peer judgment. That stigma is a culture problem before it is a technology problem.”
Things to consider
- People watch what leaders do with AI more than what they say about it.
- Quiet resistance is often a sign that concerns have nowhere to go.
- Change that is discussed openly tends to hold up better than change that is imposed.
Pull Leadership & Culture when it is relevant and set it aside when it is not. Pair it with the other AI Conversations 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 AI Conversations cards
