Financial journalism has changed jobs

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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