To borrow a phrase from Howard Stern, I am something of a king of all media. Radio, television, digital — I’ve worked in all three, and I’ve had to learn the rules of each one from scratch.
It started in college, when I was fortunate to land a part-time gig as a DJ at Laser 104.1 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I had no idea what I was doing. I figured it out. An internship at FOX 29 in Philadelphia got me into television, which turned into a career. Eight years in, I went back to school at Temple University to earn my MBA, while working overnight shifts producing the morning news at 6abc. I wasn’t the most rested student, but I graduated.
Then came the internet. Nobody handed me a manual for that either. I self-taught: reading voraciously, experimenting constantly, and talking to anyone who knew more than I did. That’s how I’ve always operated.
So when AI started reshaping the media business — not gradually, but all at once — I decided I wasn’t going to learn it from the sidelines. I enrolled in Johns Hopkins University’s AI for Business Strategy course. This week, I received my certificate of completion.
Before anyone rolls their eyes — yes, I know what “AI certificate” sounds like. It sounds like a LinkedIn flex. It isn’t that. It’s the result of months of real coursework: essays, lectures, readings from the World Economic Forum and MIT and McKinsey, and a final project where I built a full AI proposal for a school district from the ground up. Twelve weeks. Real work.
Here’s what I actually walked away with.
The thing nobody tells you about AI
The biggest surprise wasn’t the technology. It was realizing how little most business leaders — including me — understand about what AI actually does inside an organization.
We talk about AI as if it were a feature you add. A button you push. It’s not. AI doesn’t just automate tasks. It reorganizes how work gets done. The McKinsey framing that stuck with me: companies are moving toward “minimum viable organizations” — lean structures in which AI handles structured, repeatable work, and humans focus on oversight, judgment, and context.
That changes everything.
What the course actually covered
The curriculum was broader than I expected. We started with the AI landscape — the history, the current state, who the major players are and why. Then it got practical fast: how businesses are actually deploying AI, how to optimize it, and, critically, what can go wrong.
The week on AI bias and risk was the one that hit me hardest. In journalism, we already live inside the trust crisis. Audiences can’t tell what’s real anymore. An AI that performs “slightly better than a human” at spotting misinformation isn’t good enough — that was the core of an essay I wrote for the course. The bar for AI in media has to be higher than the human baseline, because the stakes of getting it wrong are higher.
We also covered generative AI in depth — not just what it is, but how to use it responsibly for actual business purposes. And the final weeks got into scaling AI projects and managing them at the enterprise level. What does it look like when you’re not just piloting something, but running it at scale across an organization?
The final project brought it all together. I built a full vendor proposal — a fictional AI company called EduAI Solutions — pitching an AI-powered learning platform to a real school district. Every section had to hold up: the executive summary, the implementation strategy, the data privacy compliance, the cost structure. It was the most useful assignment I’ve done in any course, because it forced me to think like someone responsible for the outcome, not just someone writing about it.
What this means for journalism
I came in thinking AI was something I needed to manage in my newsroom. I left understanding it’s something I need to lead through.
Two-thirds of U.S. newsrooms have already integrated AI into at least one workflow. The roles being created — AI Ethics Editors, Automated Content Managers, Data Journalists — are no longer niche. They’re becoming core. And the journalists who thrive won’t just be good storytellers. They’ll need data literacy, an understanding of how large language models work and where they fail, and the judgment to know when to trust the machine and when to override it.
That’s a different journalist from the one I trained to be. It’s the one I’m working to become.
ABL: Always Be Learning
Here’s the thing I’ve told younger journalists for years: the moment you think you’ve figured it out, you’re done. The industry moves too fast. The audience moves too fast. You have to stay a student.
Every transition in my career has required me to start over as a learner. Radio to TV. TV to digital. The people who get left behind in this business aren’t the ones who admit they don’t know something. They’re the ones who pretend they do.
I chose Johns Hopkins specifically because the course is big-picture focused. Not “here’s how to prompt ChatGPT.” It’s about strategy — how AI changes the structure of organizations, how leaders need to think about deploying it, and what the risks look like at scale.
The next frontier I’m focused on is agentic AI — systems that don’t just answer questions but take actions, make decisions, and complete multi-step tasks on their own. That’s where this technology is heading fast, and it has enormous implications for media organizations. I’m already working to understand it.
Getting this certificate at this stage of my career wasn’t about proving something to anyone else. It was about staying useful — to my team, to my company, to myself. The executives and media leaders who will matter in the next five years aren’t the ones who handed AI questions off to someone else. They’re the ones who got in the room, got their hands dirty, and figured out what they were looking at.
I don’t have all the answers. But I know which questions to ask now. And I know where to go next.
Bob Monek is a veteran broadcast journalist and media executive who has worked in radio, television, and digital media. He completed the AI for Business Strategy certificate program at Johns Hopkins University in April 2026.
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