UNC AI Journalism Course Challenges Students to Build Newscasts—and Defend Them
The University of Northern Colorado's new "Artificial Intelligence in Media Production" course requires students to produce fully AI-generated newscasts while wrestling with the ethical choices that will shape how Northern Colorado newsrooms work.
Assistant professor Shawn Montano launched the project-based course to immerse students in the rapidly changing landscape of AI tools used across journalism and media.
"I probably revamped this course 10 times before I even started, because things kept changing," Montano said. "At the beginning of the class, I had about seven weeks of the ideal syllabus plan. New AI tools are being published weekly and even daily, so I just pivot the whole course. I'm being as responsive as possible."
Student teams must produce an entire fictional video using only generative AI tools. Students must consider the ethical implications of relying solely on generative AI for broadcast journalism—a tension that mirrors real-world newsroom debates—while assigning roles and engineering prompts.
Students use ChatGPT and Gemini to generate headlines, captions, and scripts, training chatbots to replicate their own voices. But each decision is filtered through an ethical lens—their comfort level, industry standards, and what audiences deserve in terms of transparency.
"It's a question we have every day," Montano said.
Not all students arrived convinced. Kinsley Walker, a Journalism and Media Studies major, initially opposed AI use on environmental grounds. The course shifted her thinking.
"Journalism is moving on, whether you know how to use AI or not," Walker said. "I think that the basic understanding of AI is essential to grow as a storyteller. This course has made me feel like I can move with the rapid change."
"Artificial intelligence is going to create jobs," Montano said. "Certain jobs are going to be rewritten or become non-existent, but new ones will be created."
In April, four UNC students—Walker, Greg Egbert, Jaylen Lee, and Alesea Evangelista-Flores—will present their findings at the Broadcast Educators Association conference in Las Vegas. The students curated the presentation themselves as their final exam.