Thursday 16th November: The future of news is by people, for people

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There’s just three weeks to go until Mx3 AI; a live event in London from Media Voices and Media Makers Meet. We’ll be featuring sessions on AI in local, national, consumer and B2B media, as well as discussions on innovation, developments and regulation.

Peter and I spent yesterday at Newsrewired in Canary Wharf, surrounded by amazing views of the city, some old friends, and plenty of new ones. I didn’t get to sit in all the sessions I wanted to as I was accompanied by my 5 month old (thank you journalism.co.uk for supporting us both being there!) but they had a helpful live blog which meant I could keep up with the talks from the other room.

I’ve written up the closing speech I gave partly because - hopefully - it draws together many of the key themes from the day, but also because we’ve had a pretty shocking couple of weeks in terms of media layoffs (there is a connection!)

For every aspect of news and newsgathering that makes an impact on people’s lives, human journalists will need to be at the forefront. We can definitely use AI to make that job easier. But now is not the time to be cutting the very people whose work is the foundation of a news business.

One early piece out the door from the ever-excellent Lucy Kung’s talk on key leadership challenges in 2024. Lucy and a number of other Newsrewired speakers and attendees will feature on a special podcast we’re producing in collaboration with journalism.co.uk, to be released next week. Watch this space!

Blodget is stepping back as CEO of Insider to launch some other projects with owners Axel Springer. But what is notable here is that the publication will be adding ‘Business’ back in its name, just two years after Axel Springer retired it to expand coverage. In a world where more specialist media is winning, getting back to Business is a logical way to (re)focus the brand’s coverage.

I try and limit the newsletter to one AI post a day as it gets a bit silly otherwise, but this one ties in nicely with some of the points I made in the Newsrewired speech above. Ian Betteridge breaks down what sort of content AI can do well, and where human value will really/should be be prized.

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