News Fix # 62: When to give up on the field
Today I'm bringing you a conversation with David Eads. It started as a conversation about two challenges: how to best meet immigration-related information needs, and how to build carefully but expansively with automation and AI. Eads is the person behind Immigration Daybook. I'm a huge fan of this new daily digest of data and insights. It is incredibly detailed and complex but still manages to feel digestible and actionable. Eads' robust but careful use of AI is what makes Immigration Daybook possible. He also writes about data on his blog at Recovered Factory.
Eads is doing a lot of journalistic work and yet, by choice, is not working in the industry. I had questions about this, and it took our conversation in an unexpected but valuable direction. We surfaced some frustrations and appreciations with the news, and I asked what it would take for Eads to want to come back into the fold.
Eads and I first met through the folks at City Bureau almost a decade ago. He was an early champion of Outlier and helped the incomparable Katlyn Alo find her way to Detroit to become our first data reporter. Eads is an engineer and a journalist now based in Colombia. He's worked in local and national newsrooms with a history of impactful work. Most recently he was the Data Editor at the Marshall Project.
I hope you find the conversation as thought-provoking as I did. It has been edited for length and clarity. Whenever I take a heavy editing hand to longer conversations, I always run those edits by my conversation partner. So that has been done here, too.
News Fix: In your own professional journey, you're coming up against some of the same tensions that we have in the field overall, which is a real reluctance to be able to reimagine ourselves. What is it about journalism that keeps us from being able to kind of move into the future?
David Eads: One time I heard Aaron Williams say, “You can't fight the fire from inside the burning building,” and I think it’s also true that you can't figure out where the fire is coming from.
I think that some organizations where I’ve worked have been captured by people who were conservative in the sense that they don’t want things to change. And staff that are very conservative.
I don't know. I have a lot of observations, but maybe not a lot of analysis. I was telling somebody who I was working with, “Part of what we are going to have to do is tune our content to surface in the AI answers.” And I think this is cool because we’re a nonprofit, and if thousands of people see our answer to this question in an LLM query, we’ve done a good job. And they replied, “Well, I didn't get into this field for my work to be regurgitated by an LLM.” And it's, like, you took the job of somebody who said, “I didn't get into this field to post on Twitter every day.” That's remarkable to me that hardly a generation later people my age who brought the internet to newsrooms are now, like, “Oh, but now that a computer can talk. We've gone too far.”
NF: That's interesting.
DE: It is remarkable to me, you know? It's just kind of like, oh, “The AI's so bad for the world.” So were cellphones, and so was social media, and we all enthusiastically helped create that world.
NF: You seem to be able to consistently embrace new ideas. And Immigration Daybook strikes this real balance between being forward-thinking and not just using AI as a tool but really increasing your capacity to create a totally different product. First of all, how do you have time to do that?
DE: It's subsidized by the freelance work. Which is inconsistent, and it can be very stressful. But generally it pays pretty well. But also, part of our goal is to do stuff that's not crazy hard.
You know, we've got this 287g thing (editor's note: 287g is a law that allows local police departments to sign agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Eads and Tory Lysik built a tool to track every agreement.) and it looks really fancy, and it's really cool.
But it kind of runs itself. I get a ping when ICE has new data; it uploads the videos to Instagram and YouTube. The Immigration Daybook is 90 minutes a day. I mean, there was a lot of work to create the structure that feeds it and to tune the AI systems to do it. But I spend an hour at night and then half an hour, or an hour, in the morning.
Working in these investigative newsrooms—you run at the story, and you work 80 hours a week, and then you publish the big thing—and you hope that it hits. I'm so not interested in that. I'm so much more interested in projects that start pretty funky and pretty small and pretty lightweight. If people are asking for a server where they can chat with the data, I can do that.
A few more things this week:
The wider conversation about the dangers of AI is changing in tenor and urgency. This dispatch by Gina Chua is, I think, instructive and thoughtful. It is a call to listen to the wisdom of slowing the AI race to match the speed of human control without kicking the can of answering a host of tough but less urgent questions about AI down the road.
And we have some solidarity within the press to celebrate. The White House television pool is pushing back against President Trump's barring CNN, MSNOW and Politico from the White House grounds for what he said was “negative coverage.” This is a welcome change from last February, when the AP was kicked out of the press pool for not changing the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America in the AP Stylebook.
Until next week, take care.