Yep, using AI for news is basically using the work of other human journalists. There's only a limited amount AI could do by itself (weather reports, short sports blurbs, stenographing police/IDF press conferences...), so they're just going to turn WaPo into more of an aggregator while other outlets produce the real news.
At that stage, why even pay for their product then?
The written word isnt worth jack shit anymore; the eyeballs just arent there any more. Companies see a way out through nascent AI which has peaked already at "garbage fire" and now a whole generation of Journos are gonna have to pivot to Tik Tok dancing to earn a living.
Every AI article is completely flat in terms of quality. If I ask the horny minotaur AI what's going on in Iran, I trust the gibberish it hallucinates as much as I would the gibberish the Washington Post bot would hallucinate. Even with human editorial oversight it would only be as good as any of the other shit they publish, but the whole content is indistinguishable from an autogenerated spam blog.