Year in Review: AI Tools and Trends
JournalistsTookBox.AI: “2025 will be remembered as a year newsrooms really began to embrace AI tools and find innovative ways to implement them into their workflow. I’ve featured dozens of examples of award-winning AI projects on the Journalist’s Toolbox cool examples page.
The year will also be remembered for Google’s surge ahead of OpenAI in the AI tools race. The launch of Veo, Nano Banana and the vast expansion of NotebookLM tools pushed Google to the forefront. Some of my fave tools this year:
LLM Journalism Tool Advisor: Friend and AI guru Joe Amditis built this tool that helps you write prompts for specific journalism tasks. It also evaluates strengths and weaknesses of various tools and LLMs. Joe’s work at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University has been transformative. Look for more in 2026.
NotebookLM: I’ve loved this tool since it was created, and it expanded in 2025 to allow web search imports, video creation, mindmaps and more. It’s simple to learn and teach, and my UIC journalism students love using it to create add-on multimedia to their papers and stories.
It added in many new capabilities in the second-half of 2025, including the ability to inject questions into podcasts, set the tone of the podcast and generate some slick charts and infographics. For example, I dropped my resume into NotebookLM, hit the “Infographic” button and it generated an accurate visual of my work experience.
The Bruising Reality of Searching for a Job at 65
Lynn Lee is contending with her fourth layoff.
By
Dan Frosch
Quick Summary
Lynn Lee, 65, faced her fourth layoff when the ADM soybean plant in Kershaw, S.C., closed, leaving her with medical debt and a mortgage.
KERSHAW, S.C.—Lynn Lee had just arrived for work at the ADM soybean processing plant one April morning when she spotted the cars with out-of-state license plates and knew something was wrong.
After more than five decades in this town of about 2,200, agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland was shutting down its facility as part of a consolidation. Lee, who had been at the plant since 2021, boxed up her belongings and drove home.
At 65, it was her fourth layoff. Yet tears still rushed down her cheeks.
“I remember thinking, ‘What are the odds this would happen again?’ ” Lee said.
Lee has survived a rolling tide of economic forces that have transformed manufacturing in rural America. The textile plants that moved to Brazil in the mid-2000s. The glass-fiber plant that shut down several years later. The sign-making company that shed workers during the Covid-19 pandemic.
After each layoff, Lee found something new. Now, she was at retirement age. But like many older Americans with little savings and heavy financial burdens, retirement was out of the question.
She had $7,000 in mostly out-of-pocket medical debt left over from breast-cancer treatment in 2020 and a heart procedure in 2024. Plus, there was the $42,000 she still owed from a second mortgage on her home.
Lee was back to searching for work. This time, she would be competing against a legion of other job seekers in an unforgiving market. Nearly a quarter of unemployed people have been without a job for at least 27 weeks.
Lee had hoped the ADM plant, with its towering silos and trains rumbling in and out of town, would be her last stop. She had been earning $17.40 an hour handling invoices and tracking the loads of soybeans. A few more years and she would feel financially secure about calling it quits. She could travel to Anna Maria Island along the Florida coast as she had imagined.
Weeks after the April layoffs, Lee got her first unemployment check for $270 after taxes, calculated in South Carolina based on wages. Under state law, the weekly checks stop after five months. After that, she would have to rely solely on $830 a month in benefits from her ex-husband, who died of a heart attack in 2020.
“In my mind, I thought I’ll find something better than ADM,” she said. She cheerfully set about applying to a few places. A scheduler for an orthodontics office. A clerical job for a water company.
Lee quickly scored an interview for a human-resources job at a propane company through a friend who worked there. The job paid $22 an hour.
“That went wonderfully,” Lee thought after the interview. But the manager never called. Her friend reported that the company hired someone else.
Lee’s next best shot was with the newest big venture to come to Kershaw: the Haile gold mine, which multinational mining company OceanaGold acquired in 2015. Between the 1820s and early 20th century, the mine was among the most productive gold operations in the U.S. Production was mostly dormant from 1942 until 2017.
Not long after ADM closed, Lee attended a job fair for laid-off employees at the town’s old railroad depot. Days later, she said she got a call from an OceanaGold human-resources manager asking whether she could come in for an interview.
The questions were routine. Was she familiar with Excel spreadsheets? How would she handle conflict with an employee?
This time, Lee wasn’t sure how it went. The mine said it would let her know in a few weeks.
For the first time, Lee began going to a monthly food pantry in Kershaw. She picked up chicken thighs, pork chops, fresh vegetables and milk. She worried about people seeing her. She had lived in Kershaw all her life and greeted people around town by their first names.
While Lee waited on word from the mine, she scoured the internet for jobs. She had been working since the 10th grade. Back then, she would wake every morning at 5 a.m. to drive a school bus, picking up children around Kershaw and driving them—and herself—to school. After class, she would take everyone home before heading to her second job as a carhop at Sonic.
Lee’s mom sewed children’s clothes at a textile plant before dying of complications from a hysterectomy at 35 when Lee was 16. After high school, Lee got a job working nights hanging drapes at a textile plant as well.
Over the next 29 years, she worked packing, inspection and scheduling jobs for Springs Industries, whose textile plants were scattered across the area. Her final job was in the baby-product department, earning about $48,000 a year with benefits.
Springs, whose roots in South Carolina date to the 1800s, had transformed communities such as Kershaw into flourishing towns. The closure of its U.S. operations in 2007 and move to Brazil stunned locals. Lee had envisioned herself retiring from the company. She received six months’ salary as severance, she said.
She spent some time raising her daughter and began commuting to Charlotte, N.C., a few nights a week to take college classes, earning her associate degree. She wrote her final paper on the expendability of the American worker.
“Who else knows this better than me?” she thought to herself.
A few weeks after her interview with OceanaGold, Lee was at the zoo in Columbia, S.C., with her adult daughter and 3-year-old granddaughter. She sat on a bench, tired from trying to keep up, checking her phone for word from the dozens of jobs she had applied for. A short email from the mine appeared, saying her application for the position hadn’t been successful.
A more personal note followed, saying there had been many strong candidates and the mine would consider her for other jobs.
At home, Lee signed on to her computer and fired off more applications.
“When God closes a door, he opens a window somewhere!” she said.
She did a mock phone call with a customer for a job at a pet-vitamin company. She stopped by a job fair and applied for a position at a temporary-staffing agency. She landed another interview with the mine—this one for a six-month clerical gig that could lead to something permanent.
None came through. Lee began having swings of anxiety and sadness.
“In a bad way this weekend,” she texted one day in August. “So upset and beaten down. Sitting here crying and scared.”
Lee began to run the numbers if she retired. She would collect roughly $1,850 in her own Social Security, but lose her ex-husband’s survivor benefits. With her $700 mortgage, as well as medical and other bills, it would be tight.
“I’m going to have to put on red stilettos and head out to the boulevard,” she chuckled. “At least I still have my sense of humor.”
On Sept. 30, Lee received her final unemployment check.
She called the bank and said she wouldn’t be able to make her mortgage payment for the first time. The bank agreed to allow her to pause payments until February.
In October, finally a flash of luck: Lee got a job through a temp agency collecting water payments at $17.30 an hour. She struggled to hoist herself into the high rolling chair at the teller window.
A few days into the job she fell off the chair, hit her head and drove herself to a local emergency department. She was more mortified than hurt, she said, and back at work the next day. The job ended shortly after that.
At night, Lee couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t take any more rejection. She worried about losing her home.
She decided not to buy a Christmas tree this year to save money. One night in early December, her daughter drove up from Columbia and surprised her with one. Lee’s granddaughter helped her decorate it. A friend took her shopping and bought her a ham, a turkey and enough groceries to fill her refrigerator.
She snagged another interview with the mine for a clerical job and one for a part-time bank-teller position. By now, she had given up trying to gauge how she fared.
Still, Lee said, she felt blessed. She had her family, her friends and her spirit. “Something is going to break for me,” she said. “It has to.”
Write to Dan Frosch at dan.frosch@wsj.com
ChatGPT’s year-end review knows way too much. How to fix your privacy settings.
Washington Post [no paywall] – A clickable guide to the complicated privacy settings for ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini and Meta AI. ChatGPT has been pushing its own year-end review like Spotify Wrapped. “Your year with ChatGPT” describes what you asked the bot in poems and pictures.
It also reveals a giant hole in your privacy. Imagine how you’d feel if Google rewound a year of your searches. People use chatbots the way they’d use a therapist or a diary —which makes this even creepier.
Most AI companies keep a file on everything you say to their bots. Your words, pictures, clicks and ideas help make their AI smarter. They use it to personalize bot responses so you stick around longer. And your chats fuel their other businesses, too: In December, Meta started to use what you share with its bot to target you with ads on Instagram and Facebook. ChatGPT has been pushing its own year-end review like Spotify Wrapped.
“Your year with ChatGPT” describes what you asked the bot in poems and pictures. It also reveals a giant hole in your privacy. Imagine how you’d feel if Google rewound a year of your searches. People use chatbots the way they’d use a therapist or a diary —which makes this even creepier. Most AI companies keep a file on everything you say to their bots. Your words, pictures, clicks and ideas help make their AI smarter. They use it to personalize bot responses so you stick around longer. And your chats fuel their other businesses, too: In December, Meta started to use what you share with its bot to target you with ads on Instagram and Facebook…”
See also PC Mag – ChatGPT Remembers Everything. 8 Privacy Tricks I Use to Prevent It From Learning Too Much About Me