Wednesday 17th July: How Hamburger Morgenpost has embraced AI to transform its business model

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Find out how Schibsted, Time Out, and Jagran New Media put diversification into practice. FT Strategies' new report will guide you through executing your own revenue diversification plan, drawing on these real-world examples to provide best practices for success.

Digital transformation is not a one-and-done process, as anyone who has ever worked in the publishing industry can attest. For Hamburger Morgenpost the digital journey has been made in a series of steps and investments - all with an eye on transforming a once print-centric newspaper business into a digital pioneer. Now, with AI on the horizon, it is set to take another leap into the future of digital publishing by integrating artificial intelligence throughout its newsroom and processes.

In this special Conversations episode we hear from Arist von Harpe, Publisher of Hamburger Morgenpost and Peter Dyllick-Brenzinger Head of Product and Engineering at digital publishing platform provider Purple, about how the venerable newspaper is futureproofing itself and potentially providing a template for other media businesses taking their own first steps along that journey.

Arist and Peter tell us how MoPo went from a daily to a weekly newspaper while also embracing AI and digital technologies to reengineer their entire business model and become, as Arist explains, "bigger than they are". Now that’s an ambition I’m sure we’d all like to emulate.

How you feel about this news will depend on how you feel about both Taboola and Apple News. The deal is, says Sara Fischer, “a recognition from Apple that growing its ad business will require a serious sales operation — one that, if Apple doesn't build internally, will need to be outsourced”.

And in our evergreen AI slot for the daily newsletter (at least until it gets retired very shortly), we come to a really interesting piece of research from the Reuters Institute. I really enjoyed the section on public concern around the disclosure of AI use in newsrooms, which found a sizeable difference between concern around the use of AI to ‘assist’ journalists versus ‘augmenting’ them.

During the Euros final the other night I took a screenshot of the Guardian’s live blog waxing lyrical about some film or other entirely unrelated to the football and sent it to some mates with the caption “Guardian liveblog having a normal one”. As this fascinating interview on journalism.co.uk explains, though, there are a lot of considerations that go into running a successful live blog during heated events.

Related from us: How live blogging adds an audience-first dimension to election coverage

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