What if Every Newsroom Had 20,000 Journalists?

Most debates on the role of AI in news focus on the immediate questions: How do we use this tool? Where does it fit in the workflow? What can it automate today?

But David Castwell, Founder of StoryFlow and former BBC Executive Product Manager, wants us to take a step back. He asks news organisations to look at the final destination AI could create for how journalism is produced, distributed, and consumed.

In an earlier piece, David outlined several of these possible futures and, on Twipe’s AI Frontrunners in News podcast, he futher distilled this vision. We explore this below.

The shift from scarcity to infinite news

David Castle’s idea of infinite news starts with a challenge to one of the news industry’s oldest assumptions: that journalism is defined by scarcity. Newsrooms have limited staff, limited time, and limited resources, and because of this, they make constant choices about what gets covered and what doesn’t.

Infinite news flips that logic. With AI able to read, analyse, listen, translate, transcribe and process information at scale, the old limits begin to fade. Instead of deciding which stories are worth attention, the system could, in theory, cover everything. As Castle puts it, there is “no logical ending point” to newsgathering when the capacity to collect and process information becomes effectively abundant.

At first glance, this idea can sound like a recipe for even more noise. However, infinite journalism is not about producing endless articles, videos or other content. It’s about expanding the amount of information available and making it easier to reach what truly matters. The underlying idea is that surfacing relevant and timely information is empowering.

Reimaging news organization architecture

If AI reshapes the very core of journalism (i.e., collecting and distilling information) then the architecture of news must change with it. To remain valuable in this new environment, news organisations will need to make deliberate choices about what their core role should be.

Caswell highlights that one path is owning and operating the infrastructure behind large-scale newsgathering. In this model, newsrooms shape the AI systems themselves by owning the tech and inserting an “editorial judgement” layer within them. Editors shift from helping crafting individual stories to designing processes that ensure machines produce accurate, verified and trustworthy information.

Another path is artisanal journalism. Here, organisations position themselves at the high end of the market, producing deeply crafted, human-made work. The value comes from the telling of subjective human experiences and stories.

In any one of his scenarios, Caswell argues that trust will be a “fundamental value in this emerging ecosystem”, whether it be the quality and truswrothiness of the information AI agents are using or the level of trust that individuals put on others (whether based on status, experience, similar background, etc.).

The 20,000-journalists thought experiment

For David Caswell, the shift brought by AI is not about small adjustments but about defining a new strategic core. As he puts it, news leaders must “propose and describe and articulate and build towards the good outcome,” not merely tweak existing workflows.

To break leaders out of incremental thinking, he offers a pointed question:

“If tomorrow you ended up with 20,000 new journalists, what do you tell them to do? What is your instruction to those journalists?”

Suddenly gaining 20,000 highlights the move from scarcity to abundance, the premise behind infinite news.

Caswell adds one more twist:“You’re not the only one that gets 20,000 new journalists. Everybody gets 20,000.”

If everyone has the same vast capability, differentiation depends on clarity of purpose. The thought experiment forces executives to confront a simple, defining question: What is your non-negotiable value?