Monday 8th January: Experiment, report, measure: integrating AI into newsrooms

We’re back, baby! Welcome to the first Media Voices newsletter of the year, brought to you by Chris.

AI is not a pie-in-the-sky dream for media companies: it hasn’t been for years. For close to a decade questions about whether AI will replace or empower journalists have been raised at conferences and in newsrooms. Over the past few years the conversation has changed. It is now no longer a question of ‘if’ AI will be integrated throughout the newsroom, but ‘when’.

In December, Media Voices collaborated with Media Makers Meet on their Mx3 AI conference in London. The speakers – drawn from across the media industry from recruitment to newsroom – confirmed that AI is already suffusing the industry. But where they offered invaluable insight was around ensuring it is used effectively and with consideration for the business goals and employees of publishers.

I’ve written up some of those insights here - but if you’d sooner hear them from the horses’ mouths then the link at the top will take you through to the episode. Honestly, I learned more in one day there than I have in months reading about AI in newsrooms second-hand. It just goes to show you need to experiment with AI directly — and share that expertise with others wherever possible.

Last year has been, well, terrible for publishers. That’s doubly true for those media companies who are exposed to print cost pressures. For our Media Moments 2023 report, Peter has taken a good hard look at the realities of print — with a particular focus on where it still has an invaluable place in the ecosystem. It’s stark, yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely without hope.

Not that things are necessarily all that much better for publishers reliant on digital advertising. Every few years we hear a lot of puffed-up talk about how various players are ‘cleaning up’ the digital advertising ecosystem, which always seems to amount to nothing. This latest report from Greg Krehbiel takes a look at the extent to which the entire digital advertising ecosystem is built on sand — which is more likely than you might think.

Only last week I emailed Amazon asking for an interview about their comms strategy around the launch of their ad-supported tier. The reason? They don’t appear to have one. A single desultory email about how subscribers should be grateful for having ads is pathetic, frankly. In this latest article for The Addition Charlotte Henry asks whether that approach is sustainable.

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