By Isabella Simonetti | Photography by Amy Lombard for WSJ

Journalist Nick Lichtenberg produced more stories in six months than any of his colleagues at Fortune delivered in a year.

One Wednesday in February, he cranked out seven.

"I'm a bit of a freak," Lichtenberg said.

While many journalists hit the phones and cultivate source relationships, when news breaks Lichtenberg often uploads press releases or analyst notes into AI tools and prompts them to spit out articles that he can edit and publish quickly. His work involves what some view as the third rail of journalism: AI playing a leading role not just in researching, but in writing stories.

AI-assisted stories accounted for nearly 20% of Fortune's web traffic in the second half of 2025. Most were written by Lichtenberg.

Lichtenberg's approach to journalism is a far cry from the dogged, shoe-leather reporting memorialized in movies like "Spotlight," about the Catholic church's child-abuse scandal, or "All the President's Men," about the Watergate scandal. Lichtenberg isn't pounding the pavement to find and unveil secrets about institutions and power brokers.

That's OK with him. "I would love to get inside" companies and do that kind of work, Lichtenberg said. But he's learned to "play the hand that's been dealt to you in life."

He's been lauded for his speed throughout his career, and AI helps him move even faster. Using the technology has also freed up time for Lichtenberg to focus on feature stories. In January, he published a profile of a 23-year-old electrician who skipped college to be a part of "Gen Z's blue-collar revolution." AI helped with an outline, the rest was Lichtenberg.

"I know that this won't be seen as some people's idea of journalism, but I've always seen myself as kind of a nobody from nowhere who scrapped and clawed to get into this industry and find solutions to problems," he said.

In addition to the longer features, he writes everything from pithy recaps of comments made by executives and economists to business news announced by companies and career pieces like "Recruiter reveals broken Zoom interview etiquette: bathrobes, yoga, and outsourcing thinking to AI."

The 42-year-old, who has penned more than 600 stories since rejoining Fortune in July, may be a bellwether for where much of the media business is headed.

The growing popularity of chatbots has changed how consumers seek information online; many would rather have a free conversation with a tool that summarizes answers from a range of sources than click around for stories. Short-form videos on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube have replaced traditional media outlets for many people.

It can be challenging for midsize, legacy publications like Fortune to find relevance in a media era that values deep investigative reporting or viral punditry. Lichtenberg's work helps Fortune scale the quantity of its output. Fortune said AI-assisted stories have helped drive subscribers.

Some executives have made full-throated declarations about the threat posed by AI. New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said AI "is almost certainly going to usher in an unprecedented torrent of crap," referencing deepfakes as an example.

The NewsGuild of New York, the union representing Fortune employees and journalists at other media outlets, said the people are what makes journalism so powerful. "You simply can't replicate lived experiences, human judgment and expertise," said president Susan DeCarava.

For Chris Quinn, the editor of local publications Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer, AI tools have helped tame other torrents facing the industry. AI has allowed the outlets to cover counties in Ohio that otherwise might go ignored by scraping information from local websites and sending "tips" to reporters, he said. It has also edited stories and written first drafts so the newsrooms' journalists can focus on the calls, research and reporting needed for their stories.

"There's nothing we do that doesn't touch AI," Quinn said. The technology, he noted, has endless attention to give reporters and can fix a bad draft almost instantly.

Much of the content people now consume online is generated by artificial intelligence, with some 9% of newly published newspaper articles either partially or fully AI-generated, according to a 2025 study led by the University of Maryland. The number of AI-generated articles on the web surpassed human-written ones in late 2024, according to research and marketing agency Graphite.

Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner has said fighting AI isn't an option. "We have to embrace it, we have to understand it, and we have to do it to the benefit of our product in order to deliver on trust and not to destroy that," he said in November. Axel-owned Business Insider in December launched a pilot program for AI to write quick news stories under a designated byline.

Newsrooms from the New York Times to The Wall Street Journal are deploying AI in various ways to help reporters and editors work more efficiently.

That has also been the goal at Fortune with its AI experiment, spokesman Patrick Reilly said. "We're excited about seeing how AI can handle routine tasks so our journalists can continue their focus on what only humans can do."

'10 Nicks'

Lichtenberg's job is the brainchild of Editor in Chief and Chief Content Officer Alyson Shontell, who joined Fortune in 2021 from Business Insider. She is tasked with overseeing Fortune's approach to AI and competing with a growing class of independent business journalists publishing via platforms like Substack and traditional premium publications like the Economist.

"Sometimes I'm like, 'Wow, the martini lunch days of the magazines sounded really nice,'" she said.

Owned by Thai businessman Chatchaval Jiaravanon, Fortune relies on a mix of paid subscriptions, events and advertising. Its CEO abruptly departed in late 2025 after less than two years in the role, and the company has faced financial pressure.

AI "forces you to be unique or die," Shontell said. "We're not big enough to be a site of record. Our scoops are more of the longer-term access, and scoops of insight."

Shontell first suggested the idea of using AI to privately test drafts for quick news stories after OpenAI's November 2022 release of ChatGPT.

She pitched it to Lichtenberg and his now-manager at Fortune, Ashley Lutz, who experimented with the fledgling technology, but the initial results were unsatisfactory and the test was discontinued. By summer 2025, AI's advancements made AI-enhanced articles more feasible.

"How many times do you have the superstar on your team that you're like, 'Ah, I wish I had 10 of them'?" Shontell said. "To me, this is a way to almost have like 10 Nicks."

Lichtenberg grew up primarily near Amherst, Mass., where his parents ran a veterinary hospital and had as many as eight cats living in their New England farmhouse. He attended Syracuse University, studied drama and history and later was hired at American Lawyer Media as an assignment editor for a civil tort database.

He held roles at companies including Bloomberg and Business Insider before joining Fortune in 2022 as an executive editor. He returned in 2025 after a brief stint as an editor at Netflix. In addition to writing stories, Lichtenberg now helps manage a team of six reporters. (His wife works for Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones.)

A story by Lichtenberg sometimes starts with a prompt entered into Perplexity or Google's NotebookLM, asking it to write something based on a headline he comes up with. He moves the AI tools' initial drafts into a content-management system and edits the stories before publishing them for Fortune's readers.

He doesn't have a dedicated patch to cover, but said he relies on AI to help craft unique angles on straightforward news that will appeal to young, high-income audiences. Lutz is also now writing AI-assisted stories.

On a Tuesday morning in February, Lichtenberg uploaded a Bank of America research note, on a bond deal software giant Oracle said would cover its debt funding needs for the year, into NotebookLM and Perplexity.

He asked NotebookLM to "write a 600 word news story framed around how Oracle defused the key risk going into 2026 with a press release about a single bond deal."

Lichtenberg rewrote the top of the story using information he gleaned from an earlier phone conversation with a Wall Street executive. With some rejiggering, fact-checking and original writing from Lichtenberg and a colleague, it became publishable.

Simple news stories "can be really quick." A piece from earlier that morning about Josh D'Amaro being named Disney CEO took 10 minutes to get online, he said.

Avoiding AI hallucinations

Lichtenberg considers himself an AI alchemist of sorts, because he often has to re-prompt the tools he uses to get the writing and analysis he's looking for. Sometimes, he will combine the best elements from NotebookLM and Perplexity into his story.

He turned to Perplexity for a February story, asking it to help aggregate billionaire Peter Thiel's comments on the Antichrist. He later prompted it to write a news story based on Thiel's comments, guiding it with a specific headline.

Lichtenberg wasn't satisfied with the result.

"You have to read it and see like, does this hold up? What's missing? What do we need to add to it? And I wasn't happy with it," he said. After tinkering more, he landed on a story he liked.

Fortune is among the publishers Perplexity compensates for the use of its content. Two subsidiaries of Wall Street Journal parent company News Corp have sued Perplexity. News Corp has a content deal with OpenAI.

Initially, Lichtenberg would share bylines with Fortune Intelligence. Now, he typically takes sole bylines because he feels the work is mostly his own. Shontell said of Lichtenberg's stories, "more than 50% is Nick." His stories sometimes include a disclosure explaining that generative AI was used as a research tool.

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March 26, 2026 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)

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