Tuesday 19th December: The year in AI

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

A lot has happened in the AI sphere this year - barely a day goes by when we don’t end up including a publisher-related story involving the tech. So in this sample chapter from our annual report, Chris rounds up the key AI developments which affected publishers this year, and how they responded.

It’s probably as good a time as any to highlight some other AI-related work we’ve done this year, all with the aim of being as useful as possible! Our Practical AI for Local Media report was published in May, cutting through the hype and exploring how newsrooms have actually been implementing automation and AI tools. There’s a corresponding podcast episode too featuring the report’s interviewees.

Then just yesterday we released the first of a two-part podcast episode bringing you some of the main learnings from Mx3 AI; the publisher-focused conference we collaborated on at the beginning of December. This first episode is a big-picture look, with case studies to come in the new year.

Is there anything more you’d like to see from us re AI and publishing? What would be most useful to you going into 2024? Just reply to this email or drop us a note on the community forum!

I actually had no idea Condé had a (sort of) stake in Reddit so many thanks to Mark Stenberg for this brief history and look at what could happen if Reddit does go public in the next few months. There’s no telling how the potentially $3 billion in funds would shake down from parent company Advance, but they are - after nearly two decades - finally imminent.

The Guardian US’s strategies for riding the ad downturn include entering new verticals, appealing to smaller businesses and “educating” advertisers about brand safety in a bid to get them to spend their marketing budgets with them, rather than the tech platforms. My favourite quote: “I do delicately remind advertisers that if you think we’re brand unsafe, you should really be taking a look more deeply at the long tail of the web.”

The fediverse, for those of you not up with the latest trendy term, is an ensemble of social networks which can communicate with each other while still remaining independent platforms. Threads and Insta head Adam Mosseri would really love to make follower portability a thing - where creators can leave Threads and take their followers with them to another app. There’s not room here to explain just how complicated that is so let’s settle for learning about the latest ‘-verse’ instead.

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