- When information is no longer scarce, what is journalism actually selling?
- Financial journalism is no longer competing to report the news first. Now, it's competing to make sense of it better.
The ‘Letter from the Editor’ series features exclusive insight and opinion-driven analysis from Tearsheet editor Sara Khairi. The focus is on linking ideas, questioning assumptions, and tracking shifts across both mature and emerging trends in financial services.
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Issue # 10
Buried among Anthropic’s job listings was one role I didn’t expect: Standards Editor.
Like everyone else, that got me thinking: why would a company capable of easily generating billions of words invest so heavily in human editorial talent?
The human-in-the-loop remains the critical piece of the equation. A large language model (LLM) can summarize an earnings release, explain a product launch, or rewrite a press release in seconds. But it still can’t reliably answer the harder reaction-driven editorial questions, such as:
- Is this story actually important to tell?
- What’s the bigger trend(s) hiding underneath it?
- How do you build a publication that sounds like one voice instead of a hundred different writers?
Those questions have a way of following you. My Editor-in-Chief, Zack Miller, and I have had versions of the same conversation more times than I can count over the past few months.
It usually starts with AI and seldom ends there. One week, we’re talking about an earnings release. The next is a bank acquisition or another AI product announcement. But somewhere along the way, the conversation always drifts back to the same question: If everyone can find out what happened within seconds, what exactly is the job of a financial newsroom or a media house now?
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