Tuesday 19th September: "It's going to be all about adding human value"

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As AI advances continue to disrupt the way we work, there are many questions from news and media organisations: What will be the impact of AI on audience expectations? How can we maintain trust in our news content in the AI era?

Reuters sheds light on these questions in an exclusive report: Powering Trusted News with AI: Navigating the present and shaping the future.

The report explores the role of AI in news and journalism and offers practical advice on how AI can help streamline your processes.

“I welcome our robot overlords in the sense that it means we will do less boring crap,” media expert Professor Charlie Beckett tells Mx3 in a wide ranging interview. The director of the LSE’s JournalismAI project predicts new tech will allow swamped content creators – already expected to be more multi-skilled than ever before – to get out of the office.

Describing a ‘Jetpack journalist’, he sees a world where content creators will have ‘little robots’ working for them. “When an Editor says do me a long piece, a short piece, a snippet for Twitter, a piece for TikTok, etc, you’ll press an F key and the AI will reformat it all for you.”

Beckett’s more positive spin on the potential for AI is a welcome counter to the doom-mongering we are more used to hearing, especially if it lets publishers re-establish a human advantage. “Your company’s USP is going to be – we have empathy and go out there and work with our community and witness what is happening. A machine can’t do that.”

Underlining the importance of community connections, Nieman Lab has a piece on the value of bringing your audience into your content planning. The premise is simple: provide a service that answers questions posed by audience members and they are more likely to reciprocate through subscriptions.

Over on Podpod, Chris Phin is questioning the validity of podcast stats. As a podcast producer, he doesn’t trust the numbers he is being given and worries that a “lack of transparency across many aspects of podcast analytics smears an unfortunate stench of charlatanism and chicanery across the whole industry.”

What fresh Hell is this? Gannett is hiring a “Taylor Swift reporter” to quench an undeniable thirst for all things” T-Swizzle. Meanwhile the US newspaper group ended 2022 with 16,300 less journalists, editors and photographers than it started the year with and has been accused of not having enough reporters to cover basic, daily, non-Taylor Swift news.

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