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Happy New Year

I’m going to be honest–I haven’t looked at job listings or freelance work in two weeks, and it's been pretty glorious to get a break.

Like many of you, I’m sure, I didn’t realize just how fried I was by the time the end of the year came around. The time off was a welcome break, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t struggling to be back at it already.

I hope you had a great holiday and got some rest. Let’s dive in.

How AI is Quietly Reshaping Who Gets to Work In Journalism (and other Jobs)

A couple of years ago, I reported and wrote a story on how AI was (at the time) impacting the job search. The interplay of AI disruption, work, culture, and the economy has fascinated me for years, and I regularly read a lot of wonky economic content. It’s essentially the backward-looking canary in the coal mine for both the macro and my own micro-economic world. 

During my reporting, I interviewed the Chief Economist at Revelio Labs, a workforce database company. I landed on their regular newsletter list after that interview, and this week they sent a newsletter detailing how older workers are staying in their jobs longer (and getting more opportunities than younger workers).

This piece underlines something that I’ve been thinking about for a while. According to their data, workers over 65 are not just delaying retirement. They are increasingly competitive in hiring pipelines and internal mobility. Employers appear to value experience, institutional knowledge, and immediate productivity over the perceived risk and cost of training younger workers. That shift matters far beyond individual career trajectories and it matters to journalists and writers like us. 

I was reminded of this recently while applying for a fellowship that asked me to identify three AI stories that had profoundly shaped how I think about the technology.  One I shared was the story from New York Magazine that I wrote about in this newsletter late last year. The thing that stood out to me was just how AI is exacerbating current power dynamics inside labor markets. It’s not making it more egalitarian, or accessible to everyone–it’s driving a bigger wedge between the “haves” with experience and the “have nots” without it. It’s already shaping how we work, and what jobs are available to us both collectively and individually. 

For journalism, this is even more acute. Newsrooms already operate with fewer full-time roles, flatter hierarchies, and shrinking budgets. When older, highly experienced journalists remain in staff positions longer, competition for the limited number of stable jobs intensifies. Entry-level and midcareer reporters face fewer pathways into salaried roles, while freelance markets become more crowded and price-sensitive.

At the same time, AI-driven efficiency pressures push editors and publishers to favor journalists who can ramp up quickly. Institutional knowledge, source networks, and the ability to deliver quickly across formats increasingly outweigh the long-term investment required to develop new talent or even recruit it. That makes journalism more competitive at the top and more precarious at the bottom, especially for younger reporters trying to build clips, beats, and financial stability simultaneously.

This creates a feedback loop. Fewer early-career opportunities mean fewer journalists gain the experience required to move into senior roles later. As older journalists delay retirement, the pipeline constricts further. The future of journalism is at risk, directly resulting from structural labor market outcomes shaped by technology, incentives, and the erosion of safety nets that once made career transitions less risky.

Without younger workers moving through journalism, the long-term talent pipelines will break down–companies won’t have experienced employees to promote because the on-ramp to the job world has been completely upended. Older workers will stay in jobs (and, boy, do I know many journalists who should have retired long ago to make space for younger workers) much longer, as social safety nets like food assistance and medical care erode and institutional knowledge becomes increasingly concentrated at the top. If you thought journalism had an “ivory tower” problem before, just wait until these changes become cemented in the industry.

Why do I think about this so much? Because I’ve been through these kinds of massive technological and cultural shifts before. I am an Xennial. Which means that I began college as the internet became ubiquitous, I graduated just a few short months before 9/11 upended the global order, I was a senior producer at CNN when social media took off and rewrote distribution and incentives, and I extensively covered the 2008 economic collapse in real time.  I’m now (at least according to traditional economic models) supposed to be in my “highest earning” years, just as AI is wreaking havoc on creative and knowledge work.

This impeccable timing, unfortunately, means that, like the rest of my cohort, I have been repeatedly traumatized by insane and “unprecdiented” technological and global upheaval, and have internalized the idea that nothing is going to go the way it's “supposed to” for me or my tiny generational cohort. 

It has made me very wary of tidy narratives about technological “democratization” and innovation, and pushed me to study things like labor data, AI systems, and their cultural and economic implications more closely to see if I can discern patterns that will have implications for people like us looking to continue to make a real, living wage, in a world that is increasingly hostile to journalists.

This Week in Six-Figure Journalism Jobs

This week, there are a solid number of opportunities across both freelance and full-time work. As an interesting note, the New York Times is on a huge hiring spree, with most roles being hybrid in NY and paying well above the $100k mark for this newsletter. I didn’t include these roles because there are just so many, so feel free to check them out yourself. 

Freelance work includes:

✍️ Pitches for a new magazine on tech, ideas and policies improving global wellbeing that pay $2000+

🎤  A two-year, temporary radio job that pays up to $108k per year. 

🥙 A new magazine looking for food pitches that pays $1 per word

✈️ Pitch calls for a top-tier travel pub 

Full-time includes work: 

💵 At a well-known digital outlet that pays more than $200k per year and is fully remote

📖 A non-profit that pays six figures and does good in the world

📢 Two tech outfits looking for journalists/content folks that pay above $200k

If you’re a paid subscriber, you can jump right into the Freelance, Full-Time, Dishonorable Mentions, and Passion Projects after signing in.

Otherwise, you’ll need to become a $5 per month subscriber to get access to these jobs, pitch guides, editor email addresses, and more.

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