The Tools Factor is about to dominate what people write and read, know and believe to know. In this book, we explain how digital tools and agentive AI shape – and are shaped by – text production, ethics, and creativity in the newsroom. Based on thirty years of longitudinal ethnographies in research frameworks of transdisciplinarity and applied linguistics, we discuss what this means for researching and integrating AI in professional newswriting. Key topics include: How has tools development interacted with professional writing? What does the case of implementing AI in a multilingual newsroom reveal? Why can applied linguists contribute to a sustainable AI shift of public discourse? Tracing the future of digital newswriting has resulted in three key learnings from empirical evidence. First, tools make a change that can scale up from practices to professions and society at large. Second, in seemingly unstoppable grand movements, counterchange often starts bottom-up, from positive deviants. Third, as applied linguists and transdisciplinary researchers, we are to identify the creative practices that can disrupt mainstream disruption.
