Could automated journalism replace human journalism?

An engineer’s side project is reshaping automated journalism by combining AI with trustworthy reporting methods. The Agentic Tribune represents an intriguing experiment in using AI to produce fact-based news at scale, addressing financial pressures on traditional media while maintaining journalistic integrity. This project offers a window into both the technical challenges of building AI content systems and their potential implications for the future of news production.

The big picture: A software engineer working in AI has created a fully automated news site that publishes original, fact-based reporting daily without human intervention.

• The Agentic Tribune produces approximately 22 articles on weekdays and 12 on weekends, each costing between $0.25-0.30 in API usage.
• The system focuses on neutral, factual reporting based on credible sources like government releases, legal rulings, and financial reports.

Behind the automation: The site runs on a seven-step AI pipeline that handles everything from finding news leads to publishing finished articles.

• The process includes scanning structured feeds for leads, scoring them based on metrics like recency and newsworthiness, conducting AI-powered research, and writing articles.
• Each article undergoes AI self-critique and revision before being formatted, tagged, and published automatically.

Technical challenges: Managing LLM behavior proved to be one of the most significant hurdles in building a reliable automated news system.

• The developer encountered issues with models misinterpreting scoring metrics, leaking details between tasks, hallucinating facts, and misrepresenting themselves as established news organizations.
• Simpler prompts often outperformed elaborate ones, and positive requirements worked better than negative restrictions.

The tech stack: The project combines straightforward web technologies with AI capabilities.

• The backend uses Flask, SQLite, cron jobs, and Python scripts with prompts generated from Jinja2 templates.
• The system is deployed on EC2 with Nginx and Gunicorn, using static HTML for the frontend and ChatGPT-generated icons.

Why this matters: The project demonstrates how AI might complement rather than replace human journalism, potentially freeing up resources for more complex reporting tasks.

• The developer acknowledges that AI news can only report on what’s already public, emphasizing there’s “no substitute for investigative reporters, war correspondents, or interviews.”
• Low-cost, trustworthy summaries of events could help redirect human journalistic talent toward reporting that requires human judgment and investigation.