Some personal thoughts about working at Tarbell

(Thanks to Lizka's recent post for the inspiration!)

The Tarbell Center for AI Journalism supports journalism that helps society navigate the emergence of increasingly advanced AI. We're hiring for two roles running our flagship Fellowship Program:

1. Program Manager/Director to lead the program — building the community of expert journalists who will hold frontier AI companies accountable, investigate emerging risks, and shape how the world understands transformative AI.
2. (Senior) Program Associate, working with our Program Manager/Director to execute our fellowship at scale: vetting 2,000+ applications, teaching core skills (either journalism craft or AI fundamentals), and mentoring fellows through their placements at outlets like Bloomberg, The Guardian, and Time.

Cillian asked that I write a post like this, but he did not review it in advance. As such these are entirely my personal thoughts and don't necessarily represent the views of Tarbell or my coworkers.

I'm not going to spend any time here trying to convince you that AI might be the most important technology ever invented, or that it could very possibly lead to human extinction. Welcome to the EA Forum, there are 3,762 other posts like that.

Why does news matter?

Tarbell focuses on news media, primarily text, and we especially value prestigious legacy outlets with a long institutional history. We don't focus on social media, podcasts, video streaming, or any other "new media". To many people this seems backwards: The newspaper industry is dying, no one gets their news from the New Washington Times Post anymore, they just watch Twitch streams and listen to Joe Rogan, and we should focus on that instead.

My response to that is, "Yes, someone should absolutely do that!" If legacy news media sounds really boring to you and you're really excited about making TikTok videos instead, then you shouldn't work at Tarbell. (But maybe finish this post first, so you can at least say you've considered all the arguments.)

News reporting is the foundation of all other communication

There are three main ways you can learn about events in the world:

1. You personally witnessed the event, or your friend personally witnessed it and told you about it. This doesn't scale very well and you're going to miss out on a lot.
2. A corporation or government agency issues a press release or holds a press conference. While often useful, these are inevitably biased towards the organization releasing them. Their main motivation is almost never, "Communicate true information to the person hearing this."
3. A professional reporter writes about it in a traditional news outlet.

Careful reporting with stringent fact-checking is what creates our shared reality. If a major newspaper writes "X happened," I am reasonably certain that X did in fact happen!^[1] I think most people feel similarly: As much as someone might think a particular news outlet focuses on the wrong topics or frames their stories deceptively, most people still take it for granted that if an event is being reported, it did actually happen. Then we can all discuss that event and decide what it means.

Having a shared reality of some basic current events is extremely important for living in a society. People often bemoan how different parts of society (e.g. Trump-supporters and non-Trump-supporters) are living in "different realities". While I do think we're edging in that direction, I also think we're all still mostly in the same reality, because almost all of these people still believe the news. They might not read it, and they might not believe the parts where they already have strong opinions, but if a major paper says, "An earthquake struck Los Francisco," very few people will say, "I won't believe it until my friend tells me they saw the earthquake."

For most of human history this is not how the world worked: It's a precious and valuable fact about our society, and therefore we should both (1) appreciate it and (2) leverage it for doing good in the world.

What does this mean for AI?

I'm not going to spend too much time on why it's important to communicate to the public about AI. Lots of organizations have come to a similar conclusion, and if you feel confident that humanity will achieve existential safety without the knowledge or participation of the vast majority of humans, then you shouldn't work at Tarbell.

Tarbell is not an advocacy org: We're trying to grow the community of AI journalists writing about different topics from a variety of perspectives. We often fund reporting^[2] that we disagree with or don't think is the absolute most important thing. Why?

1. Truth-seeking: We're probably wrong on some things, and we won't find out if we only support people who agree with us.
2. Perception: If we focused on placing x-risk-pilled journalists at every outlet, and made them all write about reward hacking, AIxBio, and superintelligence, people would start to get suspicious. They would accuse us of manipulating the journalism industry and the public commons to push our idiosyncratic views, and they'd be right! This would undermine not only Tarbell but also the entire cause of AI x-risk reduction.
3. Practicality: In practice, there is way more appetite among journalists, editors, and publishers for reporting on "normal" AI topics than there is for reporting on AI x-risk. Also, determining what stories are "x-risk relevant" is pretty difficult^[3], so in reality we have to fund a lot of reporting about adjacent topics.

If you thrive as a vocal advocate and get frustrated by enforced neutrality on contentious topics, then you shouldn't work at Tarbell.

What it's like working at Tarbell

Getting the basic stuff out of the way:

1. We have nine full-time staff and we're looking to expand to 15+ by the end of 2026. I like this size, because there's a lot going on but I can still know everyone and understand roughly what's happening everywhere.
2. We started as a remote org and still mostly function that way, but we have an office in London (at LISA) and are planning to get spots in relevant coworking spaces in SF and NYC.
3. Everyone is really nice! But also honest, open, and eager to give and take criticism. For me, the culture has been pretty ideal so far.

The more interesting thing that I didn't expect, and that you might not expect either, has to do with Tarbell's location at the intersection of "EA culture" and "journalism culture". As someone coming to Tarbell from the EA culture side, I'm still working on finding the right middle ground for me personally. The two cultures don't exactly conflict, but they do emphasize different values:

• In my experience EA culture is obsessed with openness, optimization, and moral clarity, and is excited to act on rough, approximate reasoning when that's the only thing available. EAs don't care what other people do or think: We can figure out the Best Thing from first principles.
• To me so far, journalism culture seems obsessed with verification, neutrality, and privacy. News reporters only write Definitely True things; moral clarity is code for suspicious ideology; knowledge is power so you should hold your information close until you're ready to publish.

Some toy examples of how these cultures can create tension at their intersection:

• When I write an important policy document, my first step is always to look at what other orgs have done. If I find something I really like, and the other org is OK with it, I might just copy their policy entirely!
  • To me (EA culture) this is obvious: Other people have thought about this, I don't want to reinvent the wheel, and I'm typically not an expert on the subject.
  • To a journalist, this reeks of plagiarism. You can't copy someone else's writing and put your name on it, what are you thinking?
• I like stating my beliefs openly and then acting on them directly. I like being able to openly say, "I think AI might cause human extinction, and I base my career decisions on this belief."
  • In EA culture this is great: Stating your true beliefs is how we avoid group think and false consensus, and it's the best way to improve our knowledge.
  • In journalism culture, at least in a professional setting, this broadcasts my bias: I'm probably biased towards EA (true), biased towards weird x-risk people (true), and secretly working for a frontier AI company (not true).

Every org has its own internal culture, and you'll encounter quirks like this wherever you work. But it's useful to know this going in: If you think journalism culture sounds really dumb and annoying, then you shouldn't work at Tarbell.

Conclusion

In summary:

1. Tarbell is hiring: Applications close November 2.
2. News is important, it's important to report it well, and Tarbell is the biggest program doing this right now.
3. Tarbell is a good place to work, but has a different (more journalistic) culture than other orgs posting on the EA Forum.

1. ^{^}

   I mean this sentence literally and minimally. It mostly applies to specific, isolated events, and much less to analysis, op-eds, and the overall framing of a story. It also doesn't mean that their choice of what to cover is a good one! I'm just saying that the thing they said actually did happen.

2. ^{^}

   Both directly through grants and indirectly through our fellowship program.

3. ^{^}

   "EVERYONE DEAD! More at 11."