The problem is not the tools. It is what happens to the people using them.

When the BBC fine-tunes a model on its editorial guidelines, it is doing something genuinely difficult: translating decades of human judgement into machine behavior. That is a technical and editorial challenge worth taking seriously.

The separate challenge, and the one getting less attention, is what happens to the journalists and editors working alongside those systems every day. Delegating research, summarisation, and first drafts to AI is not neutral. It changes how people practice the skills that make editorial judgement possible in the first place.

Trust in media rests on the belief that accountable humans are making editorial calls. That belief is harder to sustain when those humans are increasingly ratifying AI outputs rather than originating their own.

Training staff to use AI is not the same as keeping them sharp.

Most newsrooms are focused on adoption: which tools to deploy, how to train staff on them, how to build AI into production workflows. That work is necessary. It is also incomplete.

Knowing how to use a tool and knowing how to think without it are different capabilities. When AI handles the retrieval, the synthesis, and the first cut, the cognitive habits that produce good editorial judgement get less practice. Over time, that has consequences that do not show up in productivity metrics.

The organizations asking the harder question are not the ones resisting AI. They are the ones asking what they need to do deliberately to keep their people thinking clearly inside an AI-assisted workflow.

What Steve covers with media and publishing audiences.

Steve speaks to editorial teams, journalism conference audiences, and publishing organizations about the specific ways AI-assisted workflows affect human reasoning. He draws on research into cognitive offloading, skill retention, and how dependency forms gradually in professional settings.

The talk is practical. It covers how to recognize when AI is substituting for judgement rather than supporting it, and what individual journalists and editorial teams can do to maintain the skills their credibility depends on.

He does not argue against AI in newsrooms. He argues for being deliberate about what you are trading away when you bring it in.

Topics for Media and Publishing audiences

Steve speaks to media and publishing organizations on the following topics. Each can be delivered as a keynote, half-day workshop, or executive briefing.

Who books Steve

Editorial directors, L&D leads, conference organisers for journalism and publishing industry events.

If you are planning an event and want to discuss whether Steve's work is a good fit, the fastest route is a short conversation. No pitch deck required.