Data Driven

(Photo credit: Unsplash/Kane Reinholdtsen )

Broadcast journalists will make the best writers in the age of AI because so many of the writing conventions of the craft overlap with best practices in the new digital age of AI. Few could have guessed that the lessons we learned in j-school years ago would become standard practice now. The explosive adoption of artificial intelligence in writing has forced content creators to shift the way they put thoughts to words online. The goal now is to optimize copy for algorithm visibility so that platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini see and serve up your written content—and its brand associations—as answers to AI queries from the public.

This is known as “ask engine optimization,” or AEO—similar to its predecessor “search engine optimization” (SEO)—it helps ensure your writing gets noticed by the digital gatekeepers with the power to share it more broadly online. For many of us who learned the conventions of broadcast writing in j-school, much of this “new” style rings familiar and positions those who have mastered it as uniquely qualified in this new digital age.

How is Writing for Journalism and AI Similar?

Writing for journalism and artificial intelligence are similar in a number of important ways:

• Never bury the lead: When writing for broadcast news, you always lead with the punchline and give away the story—and it’s most important points—in the first paragraph. Context, background, and chronology come after. You lead with the ending of the movie rather than building up to it, and this structure is the opposite of what we’re often taught in school, where setting the scene and introducing key characters crescendos to a climax, conflict, and resolution. In broadcast news, the conflict and climax begin the story. In similar fashion, writing for AI should frontload key information rather than burying it halfway down the page—a format known as BLUF (“bottom line up front”). If your blog post is about the best places to eat in Vancouver, the first paragraph should be about the #1 spot, rather than a drawn-out exposition of Vancouver’s food scene. AI algorithms favor the BLUF structure and conforming to it will increase the changes that your writing will be seen and cited.
• Conversational writing: One of the most important rules of broadcast writing is ensuring it’s conversational. Write how you speak because the listener or viewer has only one shot at absorbing the information (this was back in the days of television and radio where scrubbing a timeline to rewind wasn’t a luxury and people often listened to the radio in their cars). Skip the fancy words. Conversational writing structurally resembles the kind of content AI systems are optimized to retrieve, understand, and cite. It’s also almost always more clear, and AI algorithms love clarity.
• Putting the question in the answer: When searching for a soundbite, journalists and producers love when the question is included in the answer because it allows them to more easily include the clip in the story without the need for a clarifying voiceover or added context. This post demonstrates that above with, “writing for journalism and artificial intelligence are the same…” appearing immediately after the headline that ask, “How is writing for journalism and AI the same?” Similarly, starting a paragraph by immediately echoing the headline that precedes it allows AI systems to directly connect an answer to a question because of the similarity in structure and words. If your headline reads: “The best places to vacation in 2026.” The next sentence should be: “The best places to vacation in 2026 are…”
• Short sentences with simple format in active voice: One of the hardest transitions from university to journalism school writing was shifting from long, multi-clause sentences to short, simple ones containing a single idea and in the format: subject, verb, object. (The previous sentence, for example, is a poor example of this.) Web writing in the age of AI also favors simple, short sentences in active voice because their logic is easier to breakdown and understand, which increases the likelihood they will be cited. Figurative, poetic language with long, complex, and ambiguous words often obfuscate and confuse AI system. (Also, never use the word “obfuscate.”)

But the most valuable skill broadcast journalism teaches is one that AEO, with its obsession for hyper optimization, seems to ignore: storytelling. And that skill is what sets journalists apart in the digital age, and one that cannot be learned through a two-minute YouTube tutorial or webinar. Good storytelling emerges from years of practice, hours of interviews, and hundreds of deadlines met—the lived reality of nearly every journalist.

Stories should be written for humans, not algorithms, and that foundation is what distinguishes reach from impact. The former is now just a vanity metric because of the firehose of content hitting audiences every hour and forgotten the next. To really break through the noise and leave a lasting impression, authentic, human-centered storytelling that makes the reader feel, will always be more valuable and effective than chasing formatting tweaks for clicks and visibility.