Media veterans Andy Lack and Andrew Morse offered advice to over 200 University of Georgia students about how to navigate the challenges and opportunities of today’s media market in an event hosted Tuesday by the Peabody Awards and the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
The conversation and Q&A in the class called Media, News and Consumers was open to all UGA students and faculty and moderated by Jennifer Duck, a clinical associate professor in the journalism department.
Lack, former chairman and CEO of NBC News, is a 16-time Emmy and two-time Peabody Award winner. Lack is also co-founder of Deep South Today, an organization aimed at developing nonprofit, nonpartisan newsrooms in Louisiana and Mississippi. He centered much of his conversation around the importance of local journalism in combating news deserts.
“There’s a crisis in these underserved markets of finding journalists to come either back to their own communities or to recruit them to the communities,” Lack said.
Watch an in-depth interview with Andy Lack about the future of the media.
I don’t think there’s ever been a better time to work in your community,” Lack said.
Morse, president and publisher of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is leading a major digital transformation with the paper. The paper will end its print version and shift to a fully digital format in 2026, which he was asked about during this conversation.
“It’s about the journalism at the core,” Morse said.
We actually have an ad running that says, ‘It’s not the paper it’s printed on. It’s what’s inside.”
Artificial intelligence was a focus as well, with one student asking about the threat of AI to broadcast journalism.
Morse noted that journalism has been impacted by technology since the invention of the printing press, as the rise of radio, television and satellite brought unique disruptions, and AI is just the latest.
“I think technology has changed journalism for the better over the course of many generations, and I think AI presents great opportunities for us,” Morse said.
Lack, however, expressed concern over how easy AI makes it to spread misinformation. He pointed out that the young generation he was speaking to would be responsible for finding a solution to that worry.
Caroline Scurlock is a journalism major in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.
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