Two men seated on stage during a panel discussion at an event, both dressed in formal attire. The man on the left is speaking into a microphone, while the man on the right listens attentively. A screen in the background displays information related to the event, hosted by RMIT University.

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News bosses: AI can’t break a story

Nine and ABC News bosses see productivity benefits from AI, but there are still things old fashioned journalism does better.

Published byDavid Knox
onFebruary 15, 2026

Filed underNews,Top Stories

TV news bosses see benefits in what AI can bring to newsrooms, but are confident there are some fundamentals it can never replace.

Nine’s National News Director Hugh Nailon (pictured left) sees AI as a productivity tool.

“It can allow you to find stuff quicker and can allow you to access information more quickly,

“One thing I will say about AI is, I don’t think it will ever break a story. I’m sure that some people out there will tell me that some day they will develop a version of it that will be able to have an original idea. But at the moment, I can’t see it,” he said at RMIT’s 100 Years of Television Symposium.

‘News and journalism is idea-led. So I feel fairly comfortable that whilst it can help you corral a great deluge of information in a quick way, and it can help us distribute our stories – probably one of the greatest aspects it can have- I feel very comfortable that it can’t break a story.

“So I think that will hold our journalism, and make it even more important from that regard, but there’s no doubt it’s coming at us like an absolute steam train.”

ABC News Director Justin Stevens (pictured right) agreed saying, “Like you, I share a sense of intrigue, excitement about all the potential opportunities, and then clearly it’s going to throw up a whole lot of challenges and headaches and hideous problems.

“I think what we’ll see, obviously, is journalism and what we create and our staff create, will gravitate to the things that AI can’t do. I think that’s a good outcome for the public. In terms of it killing journalism, I think the main thing it will kill in the short term is referral traffic from Google search, and that’s a challenge for all of us. But it’s a challenge we created by relying on it too heavily.

“Potentially, it will also mean there’s less bare facts, explainer-driven journalism, which was the rage for the last five year. AI will provide that information. What AI can’t do is what Hugh was pointing out. What we do really well in Australian media is live breaking news across platforms. AI cannot deal with what’s happening in present or future. It can only really calculate what happened. So that’s going to be a key point of difference.

“We’re trying to figure out how to deploy it in really cool, amazing ways. I think what we’re finding is we have a long way to go in terms of how we’re going to be able to do that in a reliable way.

“For instance, we’ve been prepping for weeks to try and make sure when the Epstein Files dropped, we had an AI database to be able to search and corral all those documents. Turns out we didn’t factor in it’d be 3 million files.

“So to store 3 million files out of the Epstein Files is way too big for our AI database, and would have cost us way too much money.”

BlueSky

Tagged withABC News,Nine News

2 Responses

Jasonsays:
February 15, 2026 at 1:08 pm
Don’t worry about the Epstein files, let AP, ABC(US), Reuters, etc., etc. do it. Let’s just try to get decent regional news services from 10 and 7. E.g. 10’s reader Casper-someone insists on mispronouncing the Wollongong suburb You-nan-derra as Un-an-deera. Yes, it must be hard to keep up when you’re in Hobart or Canberra or elsewhere. But there’s a thing called Wikepedia on the Internet thing that’s there to help. /ˈyuːnandera/ YOU-nan-derra /. Or call your Wollongong sales office. “Walcha”? Is mispronounced with a “cha” sound, but the correct pronunciation uses a hard ‘k’ sound for the “ch,” making it rhyme with “polka”. It’s always good for a giggle. Shows lacking credibility when the names of towns can’t be pronounced correctly. Let’s get AI working on this issue? Oh, sorry, it already is, but…!
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1. SydneyCityTVsays:
  February 15, 2026 at 8:10 pm
  The Southern NSW/ACT Updates on Ten are being produced/presented from Sydney this year, if I’m not mistaken. Northern NSW updates will presumably come from Pyrmont once WIN takes over NBN, while Ten affiliate NRN finally comes under the control of Ten proper.
  Anyway, it’d be pretty bad if a Sydney-based presenter wasn’t able to pronounce “Unanderra” correctly IMO: Being an adjacent market which has some level of signal overlap into Sydney and with our local bulletins running major Illawarra/Southern Highlands stories as headline news often enough, you’d think broadcast newsrooms in the Harbour City (especially Ten’s, given that a few of their reporters are ex-WIN/regional!) should have a more than passing familiarity with Wollongong/Illawarra towns and suburb names, etc.
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