When most people think about AI in journalism, they tend to picture recent advances like ChatGPT and image generation. But AI’s role in the newsroom dates back at least a decade. In 2014, the Associated Press partnered with Automated Insights to begin automating its corporate earnings reports. Using natural language generation, the AP scaled from producing a few hundred earnings stories per quarter to more than 3,000. This tenfold increase expanded coverage to include companies that had previously gone unreported, and freed up journalists to focus on deeper, more investigative work.
A decade later, AI is back in the spotlight, but under far more complex circumstances. With newsroom resources stretched thin, foreign bureaus shrinking, and misinformation rising, AI is becoming key to how news is sourced, translated, verified, and distributed. Nowhere is this more urgent than in Asia, where language barriers, tightening media controls, and escalating geopolitical relevance make reliable reporting both harder and more necessary.
Few understand this better than Lihui Zhang, founder of Asia Media Pulse and president of Caixin Media. Under her leadership, Caixin has become one of China’s most respected independent financial outlets—recognized globally for both its editorial integrity and technological foresight, including Stanford’s Shorenstein Journalism Award. Today, she shares her insights on how AI can be responsibly deployed to strengthen the core values of journalism.
“AI lets us process more information, much faster, and from more places than we ever could before,” Zhang says. “But it has to serve a real editorial purpose. The role of a journalist is to interpret and explain.”
The New AI Newsroom
The most prominent newsrooms have already woven AI into their daily operations. Reuters’ News Tracer combs through hundreds of millions of tweets daily to flag breaking events and assess their credibility, while Bloomberg News introduced their Cyborg system to help reporters quickly produce earnings summaries. During the 2016 U.S. election, The Washington Post’s Heliograf notably allowed the paper to cover all 435 congressional races—something that would’ve been logistically impossible without automation. In some cases, AI-generated drafts reviewed by human editors have even improved factual accuracy, thanks to the consistency and structured logic of machine output.
But Zhang points out that the most impactful uses are unfolding in translation and multilingual aggregation, particularly across linguistic and geopolitical divides. She emphasizes the growing gap in Asia coverage.
“U.S. reporting on Asia has declined as foreign correspondents are pulled out and access becomes more restricted. But the region isn’t any less relevant. If anything, the need for context is more pressing.”
AI-powered translation tools are now capable of near-instant conversion of news content across dozens of languages. This allows editors in New York to monitor developments in Indonesia’s regulatory shifts or social movements in South Korea, without waiting for secondary English-language outlets to catch up. In regions where bilateral media presence is fading or absent, these systems are helping fill the void. Still, Zhang is quick to draw a line between translation tools and authorship.
“AI tools are more like interns than reporters,” she says. “They can help with research and even early drafts. But they don’t publish unsupervised or decide what’s news. The accountability for truth and quality still belongs to journalists.”
A Defense Against Disinformation
AI also plays a growing role in fact-checking and verification, particularly in surfacing credible sources and detecting manipulated media. Emerging tools can now flag deepfakes, synthetic audio, and AI-generated images, offering a bulwark against volatile media environments. As disinformation campaigns grow more sophisticated, so must the methods used to counter them.
This, Zhang argues, is where AI shows its real long-term value: as a tool for preserving journalistic resilience in fragile information ecosystems. With fewer journalists on the ground and increasing digital censorship, AI can be used to surface stories that might otherwise never reach an international audience. Her team at Asia Media Pulse combines algorithmic filtering with editorial oversight, surfacing emerging developments from underreported regions and ensuring they’re vetted and contextualized before hitting the wire.
“If journalism wants to act globally, it has to see globally,” Zhang says. “It’s very important that we build both the tech infrastructure and editorial capacity to find and translate credible reporting, across all languages and contexts.”
A Global Lens, Built On Algorithms
This work has implications far beyond newsrooms. For U.S. investors and policymakers, the ability to monitor fast-moving developments in Asia, where English-language reporting is often scarce, is increasingly an advantage. Trade policy, supply chains, and security dynamics all hinge on information flow from regions with limited press freedom and complex local ecosystems.
Zhang doesn’t believe AI is a silver bullet. But she does believe that when deployed with clear editorial intent, it can serve as a force multiplier.
“The technology itself is neutral,” Zhang says. “If we apply it with discipline and humility, AI can extend the reach of journalism without diluting its values.”
