COOKED
The bulk of editorial hours — copyediting, grammar and style enforcement, headline and SEO variants, trimming to length, rewriting weak drafts, formatting to house style — is exactly what language models do at usable quality and near-zero marginal cost. What survives is the commissioning and accountability tier: deciding what stories are worth running, judging whether a source claim holds up, managing writers, and owning the legal and reputational consequences of publication. The modal editor today spends far more time on the first list than the second, and there is no license or signature requirement anywhere to slow substitution.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $61,370 → $77,920 +1.6% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+0.6%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 91,690 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +0.6% more of these jobs by 2034. Demand for the output is growing faster than the work is being automated away — the mechanism BLS gives for software developers, and the combination people most often misread as an error.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~9,800 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
CensorEditorReaderReviewerArt EditorWeb EditorBook EditorCopy ReaderFood EditorNews EditorPlay ReaderSlot EditorAcute EditorIndex EditorLegal EditorPhoto EditorStory EditorStory ReaderMarket EditorScript EditorScript ReaderSports EditorContent EditorDigital Editor
Holding it up: judgment & accountability . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Line-level work — enforcing AP or Chicago style, cutting a 1,400-word feature to 900, generating six headline and dek variants, fixing subject-verb agreement, checking that a byline matches CMS metadata — is now a prompt away, and what pushes this to 7 rather than 4 is the residue that still needs a human in the room: pitching decisions in the morning meeting, calling a reporter to ask how they know a claim, and deciding a piece isn't ready to run.
Fully desk- and screen-based The job is a CMS, a style guide, and Slack; the only physical element left is print-era press checks and proofing physical galleys, which almost no one on this SOC code still does, hence 2 rather than 0.
No licence, no signature requirement There is no editorial licence, no board, no continuing-education requirement — anyone can hold the title tomorrow, and when a defamation claim lands it names the publisher and the corporate entity, not the editor who approved the copy.
Meaningful discretion Deciding whether a single anonymous source is enough to publish, whether to hold a story for another day of reporting, or whether a correction needs to be a retraction are genuinely unscripted calls with real consequences — but they sit inside a masthead where an EIC, standards desk, or legal review signs off on the truly dangerous ones, keeping this at 11 instead of the high teens.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (7/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (1/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (7/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (11/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 19 of this occupation's 28 points (68%).
Embodiment (2/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
Producers and Directors EXPOSED
History Teachers, Postsecondary EXPOSED
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 41/100 — EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift is genuine here: if copyediting and headline generation are fully absorbed, the residual role is commissioning, source verification, and writer management — work that requires phone calls, relationships, and adjudicating contested claims. Watch for job postings retitled to 'standards editor' or 'verification editor' with no line-editing duties, as at Reuters and AP fact-check desks.
Certification schemes that require disclosed human editorial review as a condition of carriage or ad eligibility — e.g. NewsGuard criteria, the Content Authenticity Initiative / C2PA provenance labels, or a platform rule granting ranking preference to human-reviewed content. Also union contracts: the WGA 2023 MBA and several NewsGuild agreements already bar AI from replacing covered editorial work at specific shops.
Publisher liability for AI-generated defamation landing on a named human: if courts hold (as plaintiffs are arguing in Walters v. OpenAI and similar suits) that Section 230 does not cover AI-generated output, outlets need a named editor who reviewed and approved each AI-assisted piece before publication. Watch for masthead 'editor of record' bylines on AI-assisted copy.
No licensing route exists for editors and none is plausible — the First Amendment makes state licensure of editorial judgment effectively unavailable in the US. The nearest analogue is a contractual sign-off obligation (insurer requiring a named human approver for media liability coverage), which is a private requirement rather than a license and shifts this dimension only marginally.
The limit. Even with every lever firing, the headcount question is separate from the score: a 'verification editor' role can be genuinely resistant while requiring one-fifth as many people as today's copydesk. Higher per-role resistance is compatible with steep occupational contraction.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 16,600 | $102,120 +31% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 8,830 | $100,050 +28% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 5,470 | $84,800 +9% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 2,520 | $80,380 +3% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 2,480 | $86,410 +11% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 2,040 | $102,940 +32% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 1,930 | $29,040 -63% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 1,690 | $74,530 -4% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 560 | $117,580 +51% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 2,040 | $102,940 +32% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 16,600 | $102,120 +31% |
POLITICO · Axios · Dalloz · The New York Times Company
WNY Labor Today reports that news workers at Skagit in the Pacific Northwest went on strike seeking higher pay and contractual protections against AI use.
French union CFDT raised concerns that the adoption of artificial intelligence at legal publisher Dalloz will lead to job cuts, according to franceinfo.
The NewsGuild-CWA reported that POLITICO agreed to shut down the two AI tools that were the subject of a union arbitration over their use in newsroom work.
Trade outlet Tomorrow's Publisher reports Axios is expanding its use of AI in its newsroom and editorial workflows.
ABC reported that staff at Australian regional newsrooms say an AI rollout in their editorial workflow is producing potential errors.
The New York Times Company issued a staff announcement concerning its artificial intelligence initiatives.
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