Monday 18th December: AI in the newsroom: Opportunities, regulation and risk

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Chris.

Media Moments 2023, our annual report looking at all the most important events of the year for publishers, is here!

In this last episode of Media Voices of 2023 we take a big picture look at AI, based off our recent collaboration with Media Makers Meet on their MX3 AI conference. We hear from experts from Immediate Media, Ipsos, the News Media Association and more, about where they are placing their chips to take advantage of the fastest-moving area of media.

For example Ross Sleight, Chief Strategy Officer EMEA, CI&T, said: “The first act, which we're in right now is around productivity and efficiency. Today, we're barrelling quickly into act two, which is hyper personalization, the ability for AI to start to bring multiple different modalities, multiple different information sources together for you in response to a natural language question”.

This holistic look at AI in the newsroom has been split into two parts. In this first part we set the scene for AI and its use for journalists, as experts tell us how to prepare for internal and external changes to media businesses. The second part - coming in the new year - is comprised of case studies from publishers  already getting their hands dirty with AI tech. Look out for it!

This is more of a PSA than anything else, based off the claim by Cox Media Group that it can listen in through your smart speakers that went viral over the weekend. For one thing — no, no, it almost certainly cannot except in very specific circumstances and certainly not without permission. And for another thing — no, no marketer or media bod worth their salt should even seek to do this.

Alan Rusbridger has taken a look at the outcome of the Prince Harry hacking verdict - and its likely implications. A few weeks ago we spoke to the Reuters Institute’s Dr Amy Ross Arguedas on trust, and she mentioned that phone hacking was still impacting the UK public’s trust in the media industry. That’s stuck with me. The press cannot be the bad guys if we want to serve the public.

We’re not going to get into why this is cynically motivated and flawed legislation again - but just take a look at this measure by which news orgs are judged to see if they’re eligible for money from Google: “The annual compensation for news organization… will be distributed to outlets based on the number of full-time journalists they employed in the last calendar year who were producing original news content.” Certainly no room for abuse there, no sirree. We’re not on Google’s side, either, just for the record…

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