The Senior Director of Local News at Lee Enterprises, Chris Coates, has said that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will replace some tasks performed by journalists but will not replace journalists.
Coates made the remarks while speaking on “AI for Journalists: U.S. Technologies Transforming News Production” during a virtual programme organised by the U.S. Mission Nigeria on Monday, August 24, 2026. His presentation was titled “AI and Journalism: Tools, Trust and the Human Advantage”.
The programme brought together participants from across Nigeria to examine the opportunities, limitations, and responsible use of AI in news production.
Coates noted that concerns about accuracy, trust, and the possibility of AI replacing journalists were understandable.
He, however, said AI could be useful in helping journalists work faster and get to stories more efficiently, particularly by handling time-consuming tasks.
Coates pointed out that AI can assist journalists with transcribing interviews, breaking down lengthy documents such as budgets, reports and court filings, generating ideas for summaries and sidebars, and identifying changes in budgets, legislation and datasets.
He stated that AI could also help journalists find information buried in large volumes of documents and records, thereby allowing them to devote more time to actual reporting.
Coates argued that AI could not provide the essential qualities that make journalism valuable, including reporting judgment, knowledge of local communities, ethics, trust, source relationships, investigative instinct and exclusivity.
“AI handles friction. Journalists do journalism,” he said, highlighting the distinction between using technology to perform routine tasks and carrying out the core responsibilities of journalism.
He explained that AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Otter.ai could serve different purposes, depending on the needs of a newsroom.
While ChatGPT could be used as a general-purpose AI workbench for documents, data, brainstorming, analysis and research workflows, he explained that Gemini was useful for research, analysis, multimodal tasks, and work within the Google ecosystem.
He described Claude as particularly strong in handling long documents, analysis, synthesis, writing and editing, while Otter.ai could assist with recording interviews and creating searchable transcripts.
Coates advised journalists seeking to adopt AI to start with the problem rather than the technology.
He recommended identifying tasks that consume excessive time or involve difficult-to-navigate information, then testing AI on low-risk assignments using public and non-sensitive information.
He stressed the importance of verifying AI-generated information by checking facts, sources, and context before publication.
“Always verify before publishing,” he advised, adding that journalists should not treat AI as a source or assume that its output was correct.
Coates also urged news organisations to establish clear AI policies, use approved and secure tools, understand how their data was stored and used, and protect sensitive or confidential information.
He identified several areas where AI could assist newsrooms, including the analysis of government budgets, election and campaign records, public safety data, government meetings, public health reports, contracts, procurement records, infrastructure projects, court filings, election results, audits and other public records.
According to him, AI could help journalists identify unusual patterns, changes in spending priorities, emerging trends and issues that might otherwise remain buried in large volumes of information.
He equally encouraged newsrooms to explore AI-assisted tools for finding stories, analysing interviews, generating timelines, localising content, creating reader FAQs, tracking sources, and organising newsroom knowledge.
However, Coates cautioned journalists against relying on AI to write news stories, add facts or context, handle quotations and attribution, or deal independently with sensitive and nuanced subjects.
“You are responsible for every word you publish,” he remarked.
On disclosure, Coates mentioned that whether journalists needed to tell audiences about their use of AI depended on how the technology was used.
He reiterated that the need for transparency became stronger when AI-generated material was presented directly to audiences, adding that disclosure should be the default when AI was used to create or substantially alter images, audio or video.
Coates further noted that AI adoption would vary across newsrooms, with smaller and rural news organisations able to use it for tasks such as interview transcription, navigating government documents, and finding local angles, while larger urban newsrooms could deploy it to analyse document collections, compare datasets, and identify patterns across different beats.
He urged journalists to view AI as a tool for reducing routine work rather than as a replacement for journalism.
“The difference is how you ask,” he asserted, encouraging journalists to provide AI systems with clear context, goals, and focus when giving instructions.
Coates challenged journalists to use AI to find at least one story, while maintaining scepticism and ensuring that every AI-assisted output was reviewed and verified.
He emphasised that training and literacy were more important than the particular AI tools journalists used, stressing that scepticism remained an important asset in the responsible adoption of the technology.
