I Do Worry About the Ethics

I was in front of the room at the Minnesota Newspaper Association, talking about where AI leaves our business, when a publisher asked me — point blank — why I didn't seem worried about the ethics of it all.

Fair question. I think they expected a revenue guy's answer: something about efficiency, or margin, or the whole thing being somebody else's department. Here's what I told them, and where I still stand — because the people who wave the costs away are running their own version of the noise, and I want no part of it.

I do worry. The water is real; a data center drinks it by the reservoir to stay cool, often in towns that never got a vote. The power is real, and the grid it leans on is the same one your readers pay to heat their houses. And the jobs question is the realest of all — realer to me than to most people writing about it, because I'm the one who'd have to answer it. I carry a revenue number. I've read the payroll that number has to cover, line by line, and I know exactly which of those lines a machine can now do in minutes — and they aren't mostly in the newsroom. They're in ad operations, in production, in finance, in the back office. I'm not going to stand in front of the people whose names are on them and pretend otherwise.

So no, I'm not untroubled. Anyone who is hasn't done the math, or hasn't met the people the math is about.

Where the worry goes

Here's the part the hand-wringing leaves out. Take each of those costs and set it next to the one lever I actually hold.

I can't change how a hyperscaler cools a building three states away. The gallons and the watts get decided far above my pay grade and my zip code, in rooms I will never sit in. A local newsroom swearing off these tools doesn't save a single gallon or a single watt. It changes nothing about the thing you're worried about — except to pull the newsroom out of the one fight its absence would actually lose.

The costs are real. Almost none of them are yours to move. The one thing you can move is whether your town still has someone covering it.

That isn't a dodge. The dodge is waving the costs away — and the other dodge is letting them freeze you, because both let you skip the only choice that was ever actually yours. Take every one of those costs seriously. Then spend your worry where it can do some work.

The cost I won't pay

Because here's what I actually lie awake over. It isn't the model. It's the empty chair at the council meeting. The school board that runs for two years with no one in the room writing it down. A county where nobody local is left to be the signal — so the only thing left to fill the silence is the cheap, confident, sourceless stuff that floods in wherever real reporting walks out.

That cost doesn't show up in anyone's ethics column. It's also the only one on the list I can do something about. So I'll use the tools — carefully, eyes open, a human accountable for every word that goes out under our name. And I'll take what they save us, across the agency and the ad desk and the back office, and spend it on the people who do the thing no machine can: go to the meeting, ask the question nobody wants asked, and put their name on the answer.

That's the whole ethics of it, in the end. Not whether you touch the tool — where the time it hands back goes. Into the reporting, or into your pocket. Nobody makes that call for you, and it's the one you'll answer for.

I take the ethics seriously enough to use the tool. The people telling you the clean choice is to refuse it have never sat in the chair where you decide whether the lights stay on.