Losing a job is never easy and always raises large, important questions: how will I pay the bills, especially with my health insurance expiring in just a few days? What do I do next?
What is different in the modern world, though, is the speed of change. Firings have usually moved at a 20th-century pace. When Goodyear announced layoffs at its Danville plant last year, for example, it announced in January that it would cut 850 workers by the end of the year. Being fired still hurts, but workers in that case had a bit of runway and a chance to adjust.
As a journalist, I’ve cycled through a few layoffs as the landscape of our field keeps changing. But nothing prepared me for the speed of my most recent career adjustment. I had spent the last 20 months launching and writing the Virginia Flyover newsletter. I was fired at a moment’s notice last week, and the publication will hereafter apparently be produced by artificial intelligence.
It wasn’t just me. The writers of our Arizona, Florida and Texas publications were all fired at the same time on a single Zoom call, which we were told to join about 45 minutes before it happened at noon on a Tuesday. Our access to the company’s computer systems was turned off during the call. After months of hard work and dedication, we were all treated as if we were security risks, even though we had all been working on our next editions that very day. The next day, they published all the items I had drafted, so they never lost trust in my editorial judgement.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
On his LinkedIn page last year, the company’s co-owner staked out a bold position. “[H]ere’s something we’re deeply proud of: None of our content is AI-generated. Every single story, summary, and subject line is researched, written, and edited by real humans,” he wrote. “Our writers and editors think deeply about every issue we cover. That’s why our work feels so different—and why our readers trust us.”
All of us delivered expertise in selecting and covering stories: “every writer lives in the state they cover,” he wrote. “We believe local stories should be told by locals—people who actually live in and love the communities they write about. That means our Texas news is written by Darrell from Leander. Florida? That’s Cathy in Port Orange. And so on.”
All of us were fired, we were told on the brief call, because the publications are “bleeding money.” That’s despite a recent fundraising round that brought in $2 million from loyal readers. Investors were told they were funding “hiring experienced content and growth talent to maintain quality while scaling operations.” We know for certain that this money isn’t going to writers who had been there when it was raised. Instead, it will apparently be spent on a “Senior Director of Software Engineering” who will, in part, take ownership of a “significant build-out of agentic AI capabilities across content and operations.” That probably isn’t what readers thought they were investing in.
I worked hard to launch the Flyover, although it was a time-intensive endeavor: I took a total of five days off during my 20 months there. Harvard Business Review wrote a few years ago about the odd fact that people who don’t have a set number of vacation days tend to take less time off, and that was certainly true for all of us at the Flyover. We had an open-ended vacation policy, yet people seldom took vacations. Nobody wanted to seem like a slacker.
Still, I enjoyed the work, and I’m sorry to see it go away. Just as I used to enjoy reading Sports Illustrated, I’ve been sorry to see it go away, as it also seems now to be produced by AI. But hard work isn’t necessarily rewarded in the modern economy.
What’s now going on in the information economy mirrors what happened to factory workers in the 2000s. It is easy to blame Bill Clinton for allowing China into the WTO or George W. Bush and Barack Obama for failing to enforce the rules.
But don’t let Americans off the hook.
Beth Macy (now running for Congress in Virginia) wrote in her book “Factory Man” about one owner who kept his furniture factory in the commonwealth. It really highlights the fact that most owners didn’t keep facilities here. They moved production to China because it was cheaper. Now, many seem surprised that there is less manufacturing in the U.S., fewer blue-collar jobs, people are frustrated about the lack of opportunities and China controls all the supply chains. We did that to ourselves.
Today, we see similar short-sightedness from politicians and the people who own information companies.
At the Flyover, writers knew changes were coming when the company launched weekend editions, which were drafted by AI, in several states earlier this month. Still, the pace of change was breathtaking, especially considering that the AI used to produce those editions was not ready for prime time. It introduced silly errors that no human would have made and that we then had to apologize for in later editions (“UVa softball did not defeat Virginia Tech in the ACC tournament championship. We regret the error.”).
And speaking of humans, no matter how poorly the Flyover may be doing economically, the suddenness and finality of this firing process were unnecessary. Those decisions were made by people, not by AI. They needed to do better and should also regret the error.
There is no policy prescription for the AI problem. But we all need to realize that it will be difficult to build an economy in a world where every worker knows that any job can disappear in a minute. It’s no way to build a life or run a company. Humans are allowing AI to smother our creativity and upend our livelihoods.
We can still chart a better course, but it’s getting late.
Rich Tucker is a communications professional based in Richmond. He writes Student Driver on Substack.
