Media organisations using AI should set clear newsgathering and production guidelines to protect journalistic integrity and maintain audience trust.
At Media Helping Media (MHM) our use of generative AI began in February 2025. Up to that point, the site – which launched 20 years earlier – had been a random collection of articles about journalism best practice, which had been written and donated to the site by professional journalists in the MHM network.
Tools used
Since then we have found ways to harness the power and benefits of AI to make our material more accessible. And our use of AI is developing all the time.
We are currently using a variety of generative AI tools including Anthropic’s Claude AI, Google Gemini, and Perplexity AI, to build on that original content.
In doing so, our free resources, which are available to journalists, educators, and managers – as well as anyone else who might stumble upon the site – have grown to 500 items (as of October 2026). All are free to download, adapt for local circumstances, and use.
Human input
All this new content has been created from material written by MHM contributors. AI has been integrated into our workflow in the following ways:
- Learning structures: To provide structure for new learning materials based on MHM content – this includes short guides on essential journalistic basics, hour-long self-learning exercises, two- and four-hour workshops, day-long lessons, course modules, and refreshers.
- Brainstorming: To offer ideas for exploring existing MHM material in more depth.
- Filtering: To extract important elements from content in order to focus on the main angles being covered.
- Proofreading: To check through new MHM-created content looking for typos and grammatical errors.
- Optimisation: To rework headings and article structure for SEO (search engine optimisation) and AEO (answer engine optimisation) purposes.
AI involvement
There are no resources on MHM that have been created with AI-generated content only. Generative AI’s part in our output can be summed up as providing some structure to existing learning material and checking content which has been created by our network of professional journalists.
Some of the tasks listed above are repetitive and would take someone several hours or a day. But now, AI is completing such tasks in seconds.
Transparency with the audience
If you intend to use AI in your production process, whether it is checking copy or creating a structure for a report or lesson, you should consider telling your audience what you are doing and why.
Some large media organisations have a page where they set out how they currently use AI. This helps the audience understand how the content they are consuming is produced. They typically include three high-level rules:
- Humans remain responsible: AI is a tool to assist journalists, but editorial judgement, verification, and final responsibility must always remain with human editors and reporters.
- Check everything: AI output must never be treated as fact. All information produced with AI must be verified using normal journalistic standards before publication.
- Be open with audiences: News organisations should be transparent about when and how AI is used and must never use AI to mislead the public.
These three rules are often used as a simple foundation, with more detailed newsroom policies sitting behind them covering ethics, copyright, data protection, and editorial oversight.
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