The fediverse buzz continues to grow, with articles highlighting the potential to revolutionize the digital landscape. Proponents say it’s similar to the Internet’s early days, before Big Tech platforms built their algorithmic fiefdoms. Instead, the fediverse is about interoperability and flexibility.
Media companies are always on the lookout for ways to attract new audiences and engage more meaningfully with their readers. And – given Google’s experimentation with AI answers and social sites “distancing themselves from news” – finding new routes to audience development has become an increasing imperative.
The decentralized nature of the fediverse offers a compelling alternative to traditional search and social. Importantly, this approach allows media companies to retain their direct relationship with audiences, which removes the dependency on social and big-tech platforms for reaching new people.
Unlike traditional social media platforms that operate within closed ecosystems, fediverse represents a decentralized network of interconnected servers and platforms. It comprises a federation of independent servers, each hosting its social media platform.
These platforms, which range from microblogging to image sharing to video hosting, communicate using standard protocols. Their interoperability allows people on different servers to interact seamlessly. The fediverse decentralizes media companies by enabling them to distribute their content across interconnected servers and platforms rather than relying on a single, centralized platform.
Emphasis on choice and control
Unlike centralized platforms, where a single server owned by the platform provider stores user data and content, fediverse lets people choose their server. This server is selected based on individual preferences regarding privacy, content moderation, and community guidelines. This decentralized approach empowers audiences by putting them in charge of their online experience. It also mitigates concerns about data ownership and platform censorship. For media companies, this translates into an environment where people are more likely to engage with content they trust and have control over.
Encouraging diversity and inclusivity
The fediverse enables people to connect across different platforms and communities within the federation. For example, a user on a microblogging platform can follow and interact with users on a video hosting platform. This functionality breaks down the barriers that typically separate content and conversations on traditional social media platforms. This cross-platform interaction fosters a rich tapestry of ideas, perspectives, and content, creating a more vibrant and dynamic online ecosystem. Media companies can leverage this aspect of fediverse to reach diverse audiences actively seeking varied content.
Organic and community-driven engagement
In contrast to the centralized model, where platform algorithms often dictate content visibility and user interactions, fediverse promotes a more organic and community-driven approach. Users have greater control over their timelines and content visibility, allowing for a more personalized and authentic online experience.
This user-centric design aligns with evolving expectations of digital privacy and autonomy, resonating with individuals seeking alternatives to mainstream social media platforms. Media companies can benefit from this by creating content that naturally finds its way to interested audiences without algorithmic interference.
Media companies test the fediverse
At least two digital media companies are exploring the fediverse to gain more control over their referral traffic and onsite audience engagement. The Verge and 404 Media are building new functions that allow them to simultaneously distribute posts on their sites and federated platforms like Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Replies to those posts on those platforms become comments on their sites.
This functionality means people from different platforms can interact with the content without creating individual accounts for each platform. For media companies, this interoperability can significantly enhance audience reach and engagement.
Advantages for media companies using the fediverse
Usability and interoperability are ideal for enhancing user experience. This approach enables seamless communication between platforms, ensuring autonomy, and providing robust content control.
Interoperability ensures that different platforms can communicate using common protocols like ActivityPub. This allows people to interact with content across various platforms seamlessly, thus creating a unified and interconnected ecosystem.
User autonomy empowers people to select their servers (instances) based on their preferences for privacy, moderation, and community guidelines, offering greater freedom and reducing the dominance of any single platform.
Content control enables media companies to host their servers or collaborate with trusted ones, giving them direct control over content distribution and audience engagement. Therefore, it mitigates risks associated with algorithm changes or policy shifts on major social media platforms.
Cross-platform interaction allows content like a media company’s article shared on one platform to receive comments, likes, and shares from users on other platforms, broadening reach and engagement without being confined to a single platform.
Community-driven moderation decentralizes content moderation, allowing it to occur at the community or server level. Media companies can set moderation policies to ensure their content meets their standards and audience expectations.
Enhanced privacy through decentralization gives media companies more control over their data and privacy settings, protecting user data from being exploited by large platforms.
Although federated platforms have smaller user bases than the larger walled gardens like Facebook and X, they offer significant audiences for media companies. Federating sites allow media companies to tap into the growing demand for decentralized, user-centric platforms, attracting new audiences and fostering a more loyal and engaged user base.
Federated platforms offers the potential for a fundamental shift in how media companies interact with their audiences. Media companies that experiment with the fediverse can initiate engagement and have an opportunity to build stronger, more direct connections with their audiences.
These days, digital media companies are all trying to figure out how to best incorporate AI into their products, services and capabilities, via partnerships or by building their own. The goal is to gain a competitive edge as they tailor AI capabilities to their audiences, subscribers and clients’ specific needs.
By leveraging proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) digital media companies have a new tool in their toolboxes. These offerings offer differentiation and added value, enhanced audience engagement and user experience. These proprietary LLMs also set them apart from companies that are opting for licensing partnerships with other LLMs, which offer more generalized knowledge bases and draw from a wide range of sources in terms of subject matter and quality.
A growing number of digital media companies are rolling out their own LLM-based generative AI features for search and data-based purposes to enhance user experience and create fine-tuned solutions. In addition to looking at several of the offerings media companies are bringing to market, we spoke to Dow Jones, Financial Times and Outside Inc. about the generative AI tools they’ve built and explore the strategies behind them.
Media companies fuel generative AI for better solutions
Digital media companies are harnessing the power of generative AI to unlock the full potential of their own – sometimes vast amounts – of proprietary information. These new products allow them to offer valuable, personalized, and accessible content to their audiences, subscribers, customers and clients.
Take for example, Bloomberg, which released a research paper in March detailing the development of its new large-scale generative AI model called BloombergGPT. The LLM was trained on a wide range of financial data to assist Bloomberg in improving existing financial natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, news classification, and question answering, among others. In addition, the tool will help Bloomberg customers organize the vast quantities of data available on the Bloomberg Terminal in ways that suit their specific needs.
Launched in beta June 4, Fortune partnered with Accenture to create a generative AI product called Fortune Analytics. The tool delivers ChatGPT-style responses based on 20 years of financial data from the Fortune 500 and Global 500 lists, as well as related articles, and helps customers build graphic visualizations.
Generative AI helps customers speed up processes
A deeper discussion of how digital media companies are using AI provides insights to help others understand the potential to leverage the technology for their own needs. Dow Jones, for example uses Generative AI for a platform that helps customers meet compliance requirements.
Dow Jones Risk Compliance is a global provider of risk and compliance solutions across banks and corporations which helps organizations perform checks on their counterparties. They do that from the perspective of complying with anti-money laundering regulation, anti-corruption regulation, looking to also mitigate supply chain risk and reputational issues. Dow Jones Risk Compliance provides tools that allow customers to search data sets and help manage regulatory and reputational risk.
In April, Dow Jones Risk & Compliance launched an AI-powered research platform for clients that enables organizations to build an investigative due diligence report covering multiple sources in as little as five minutes. Called Dow Jones Integrity Check, the research platform is a fully automated solution that goes beyond screening to identify risks and red flags from thousands of data sources.
The planning for Dow Jones Integrity Check goes back a few years, as the company sought to provide its customers with a quicker way to do due diligence on their counterparties, Joel Lange, executive Vice President and General Manager, Risk and Research at Dow Jones explained.
Lange said that Dow Jones effectively built a platform which automatically creates a report for customers on a person or company, using technology from AI firm Xapien. It brings together Dow Jones’ data that is plugged into other data sets, corporate registrar information, and wider web content. It then leverages the platform’s Generative AI capability to produce a piece of analysis or a report.
Dow Jones Risk & Compliance customers use their technology to make critical, often complex, business decisions. Often the data collection process can be incredibly time consuming, taking days if not weeks.
The new tool “provides investigations, teams, banks and corporations with initial due diligence. Essentially it’s a starting point for them to conduct their due diligence, effectively automating a lot of that data collection process,” according to Lange.
Lange points out that the compliance field is always in need of increased efficiency. However, it carries with it great risk to reputation. Dow Jones Integrity Check was designed to reshape compliance workflows, creating an additional layer of investigation that can be deployed at scale. “What we’re doing here is enabling them to more rapidly and efficiently aggregate, consolidate, and bring information to the fore, which they can then analyze and then take that investigation further to finalize an outcome,” Lange said.
Regardless of the quality of the generated results, most experts believe that it is important to have a human in the loop in order to maintain content accuracy, mitigate bias, and enhance the credibility of the content. Lange also said that it’s critical to have “that human in the loop to evaluate the information and then to make a decision in relation to the action that the customer wants to take.”
In recent months, digital media companies have been launching their own generative AI tools that allow users to ask questions in natural language and receive accurate and relevant results.
The Associated Press created Merlin, an AI-generated search tool that makes searching the AP archive more accurate. “Merlin pinpoints key moments in our videos to exact second and can be used for older archive material that lacks modern keywords or metadata,” explained AP Editor in Chief Julie Pace at The International Journalism Festival in Perugia in April.
Outside’s Scout: AI search with useful results
Chatbots have become a popular form of search. Originally pre-programmed and only able to answer select questions included in their programming, chatbots have evolved and increased engagement by providing a conversational interface. Used for everything from organizing schedules and news updates to customer service inquiries, Generative AI-based chatbots assist users in finding information more efficiently across a wide range of industries.
Much like The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other digital media organizations that blocked OpenAI from using their content to power artificial intelligence, Outside CEO Robin Thurston explained that Outside Inc. wasn’t going to let third parties scrape their platforms to train LLM models.
Instead, they looked at leveraging their own content and data. “We had a lot of proprietary content that we felt was not easily accessible. It’s almost what I’d call the front page problem, which is you put something on the front page and then it kind of disappears into the ether,” Thurston said.
“We asked ourselves: How do we create something leveraging all this proprietary data? How do we leverage that in a way that really brings value to our user?” Thurston said. The answer was Scout, Outside Inc.’s AI search assistant. Scout is a custom-developed chatbot.
The company could see that generative AI offered a way to make that content accessible and even more useful to its readers. Outside had a lot of evergreen content that wasn’t adding value once it left the front page. Their brands inspire and inform audiences about outdoor adventures, new destinations and gear – a lot of which is evergreen and proprietary content that still had value if it could easily be surfaced by its audience. The chat interface allows their content to continue to be accessible to readers after it is no longer front and center on the website.
Scout gives users a summary answer to their question, leveraging Outside Inc’s proprietary data, and surfaces articles that it references. “It’s just a much more advanced search mechanism than our old tool was. Not only does it summarize, but it then returns the things that are most relevant,” he explained.
Additionally, Outside Inc’s old search function worked by each individual brand. Scout searches across the 20+ properties owned by the parent company which include Backpacker, Climbing, SKI Magazine, and Yoga Journal, among others. Scout brings all of the results together, from the 20+ different Outside brands, from the best camping destinations, to the best trails, outdoor activities for the family, gear, equipment and food all in one result.
One aspect that sets Outside Inc.’s model apart is their customer base, which differs from general news media customers. Outside’s customers engage in a different type of interaction, not just a quick transactional skim of a news story. “We have a bit of a different relationship in that they’re not only getting inspiration from us, which trip should I take? What gear should I buy? But then because of our portfolio, they’re kind of looking at what’s next,” Thurston said.
It was important to Thurston to use the LLM in a number of different ways, so Outside Inc launched a local newsletter initiative with the help of AI. “On Monday mornings we do a local running, cycling and outdoor newsletter that goes to people that sign up for it, and it uses that same LLM to pick what types of routes and content for that local newsletter that we’re now delivering in 64,000 ZIP codes in the U.S.”
Thurston said they had a team working on Scout and it took about six months. “Luckily, we had already built a lot of infrastructure in preparation for this in terms of how we were going to leverage our data. Even for something like traditional search, we were building a backend so that we could do that across the board. But this is obviously a much more complicated model that allows us to do it in a completely new way,” he said.
Connecting AI search to a real subscriber need
In late March, The Financial Times released its first generative AI feature for subscribers called Ask FT. Like Scout, the chat-based search tool allows users to ask any question and receive a response using FT content published over the last two decades. The feature is currently available to approximately 500 FT Professional subscribers. It is powered by the FT’s own internal search capabilities, combined with a third-party LLM.
The tool is designed to help users understand complicated issues or topics, like Ireland’s offshore energy policy, rather than just searching for specific information. Ask FT searches through Financial Times (FT) content, generates a summary and cites the sources.
“It works particularly well for people who are trying to understand quite complex issues that might have been going on over time or have lots of different elements,” explained Lindsey Jayne, the chief product officer of the Financial Times.
Jayne explained that they spend a lot of time understanding why people choose the FT and how they use it. People read the FT to understand the world around them, to have a deep background knowledge of emerging events and affairs. “With any kind of technology, it’s always important to look at how technology is evolving to see what it can do. But I think it’s really important to connect that back to a real need that your customers have, something they’re trying to get done. Otherwise it’s just tech for the sake of tech and people might play with it, but not stick with it,” she said.
Trusted sources and GenAI attribution
Solutions like those from Dow Jones, FT and Outside Inc. highlight the power of a brand with a trusted audience relationship to create deep, authentic relationships built on reliability and credibility. Trusted media brands are considered authoritative because their content is based on credible sources and facts, which ensures accuracy.
Currently, generative AI has demonstrated low accuracy and poses challenges to sourcing and attribution. Attribution is a central feature for digital media companies who roll out their own generative AI solutions. For Dow Jones compliance customers, attribution is critical to customers, to know if they’re going to make a decision based on information that is available in the media, according to Lange.
“They need to have that attributed to within the solution so that if it’s flowing into their audit trails or they have to present that in a court of law, or if they would need to present it to our internal audit, the attribution is really key. (Attribution) is going to be critical for a lot of the solutions that will come to market,” he said. “The attribution has to be there in order to rely on it for a compliance use case or really any other use case. You really need to know where that fact or that piece of information or data actually came from and be able to source it back to the underlying article.”
The Financial Times’ generative AI tool also offers attribution to FT articles in all of its answers. Ask FT pulls together lots of different source material, generates an answer, and attributes it to various FT articles. “What we ask the large language model to do is to read those segments of the articles and to turn them into a summary that explains the things you need to know and then to also cite them so that you have the opportunity to check it,” Jayne said.
They also ask the FT model to infer from people’s questions when it should be searching from. “Maybe you’re really interested in what’s happened in the last year or so, and we also get the model to reread the answer, reread all of the segments and check that, as kind of a guard against hallucination. You can never get rid of hallucination totally, but you can do lots to mitigate it.”
The Financial Times is also asking for feedback from the subscribers using the tool. “We’re literally reading all of the feedback to help understand what kinds of questions work, where it falls down, where it doesn’t, and who’s using it, why and when.”
Leaning into media strengths and adding a superpower
Generative AI seems to have created unlimited opportunities and also considerable challenges, questions and concerns. However it is clear that an asset many media companies possess is a deep reservoir of quality content and it is good for business to extract the most value from the investment in its creation. Leveraging their own content to train and program generative AI tools that serve readers seems like a very promising application.
In fact, generative AI can give trustworthy sources a bit of a super power. Jayne from the FT offered the example of scientists using the technology to read through hundreds of thousands of research papers and find patterns in a process that would otherwise take years to read in an effort to make important connections.
While scraped-content LLMs pose risks to authenticity, accuracy and attribution, proprietary learning models offer a promising alternative.
As Jayne put it, “The media has “an opportunity to harness what AI could mean for the user experience, what it could mean for journalism, in a way that’s very thoughtful, very clear and in line with our values and principles.” At the same time, she cautions that we shouldn’t be “getting overly excited because it’s not the answer to everything – even though we can’t escape the buzz at the moment.”
We are seeing many efforts bump up against the limits of what generative AI is able to do right now. However, media companies can avoid some of generative AI’s current pitfalls by employing the technology’s powerful language prediction, data processing and summarization capabilities while leaning into their own strengths of authenticity and accuracy.
When aspiring journalists ask me whether the media is dead, I always say no.
I remind them that while the menu might change, the hunger for news and information never vanishes. To stick with the food analogy, news these days is like UberEats: far more options are available at your fingertips.
Here’s the thing: evolution in the media is constant and ongoing.
Historically, the delivery method has evolved in this industry, from horseback to telegraph and radio to television. Cable news, the internet and social media caused disruptive waves over time. These days, news is on a 24-hour cycle that is no longer limited to cable news. And, now, Artificial Intelligence has entered the chat. (And they are here whether we like it or not.)
Newsrooms ignore the emergence of AI at their peril, as history shows that transformative technologies don’t disappear simply because they’re ignored. Remember in 1995 when Newsweek predicted the Internet would fail? It was already decades into its inevitable march to dominate media consumption.
Technology usually gets better in time, and it has only improved in my 22 years in this industry. We have a greater reach than we could have imagined. I can instantly read what’s happening in any part of this country—or the world. All from a device that fits in my pocket.
Technology and journalism will always travel hand-in-hand. However right now, a lot about the relationship is toxic. It’s not serving us and we need to do some soul searching to fix what’s not working.
Change can be a painful experience
News and information is everywhere, and everyone can share their perception of news. It’s transforming in real time and the growing pains are unrelenting.
The year started with over 500 journalists losing their jobs, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. About 2,681 journalism jobs were eliminated in 2023 alone. That’s a 48% increase from 2022 and a staggering 77% increase from 2021.
Circulation, viewership and listeners have steadily declined for newspapers, broadcast TV news, and public radio. Major online news outlets are trying to stave off website traffic and engagement decreases. The shift to social media platforms for news consumption is particularly noticeable among younger generations. All this before we get to the fallout from tarnished community trust and news avoidance.
Everyone is looking for sustainability.
Same old traffic metrics
Meanwhile, social media referral traffic has plummeted globally over the past two years.
The big picture: News organizations invested heavily in social media for two decades, relying on platforms like Facebook and Twitter/X, but the algorithms were not in our favor. They never loved us half as much as we loved them. We infiltrated these platforms, but social media prioritized advertising over truth and accountability.
Now, logic tells us that AI search could be a death knell for search traffic. Search has served as a major entry point for metrics that have helped newsrooms drive advertising revenue. Audiences have grown accustomed to using Google searches to find links to information. AI, however, can directly answer most questions, and it’s getting smarter by the hour.
The WSJ has reported that publishers might lose 20-40% of their website traffic when Google’s AI products are fully implemented. The loss of traffic from social media and search will likely have devastating effects on this industry.
Some local shops still rely on the same old metrics – the volume of web traffic and the value of a click or pageview – because that’s what we’ve always done. But given how much the landscape has changed, that well is drying up and we need to find a new source.
Rather than wait and see and react to the technological changes coming at us, the industry must redefine its relationship with technology and take some control. Some news organizations have come to terms with this, and others see the value in creating new revenue streams. Diversifying revenue sources is key.
But beyond that, the industry has to be more entrepreneurial and less traditional. Doubling down on the old models is simply not enough.
When we think about rebuilding the infrastructure for news, we should ask ourselves: Could we build our own pipeline to traffic? Is there a way we can empower audiences to share content by building a trusted social media platform for distribution? That’s the thing: We – the news and media industry – have to take responsibility and build the infrastructure we need to create new habits for readers.
Provide audiences with utility
The reality is that news organizations have done a decent job building brand presence across platforms, but there’s no measurement for the value of that. Unfortunately, our success is housed under decaying pillars of success. The entire model must be flipped on its ear. We must reimagine everything. That mindset is why some startups have done more than survive and become a new breed of media success story. There’s a there there.
We spend a lot of time curating audiences we already have and need to spend more of our days figuring out how to capture the ones we don’t. Live events, office hours and panel discussions center the news and make it accessible to more people. It’s a way to expand your brand in a three-dimensional way. Lean into your personalities and their subject matter expertise to establish a more potent value proposition. And recognize that not all change is bad. The trick is harnessing it in ways that attract and satisfy audiences.
We must pay closer attention to evolving media consumption habits. Some people do have shorter attention spans and want brevity. However, that’s not absolute; there’s room for it all.
We use our phones to do everything and email is a new form of currency. Delivering news to a consumer’s inbox via newsletters just makes sense. We have to develop content creation and delivery strategies that fit today’s lifestyles. And then be ready to do it again as things inevitably change.
Newspapers are going the way of the tablet—not the ones Apple makes, but the ones Moses carried when he descended from Mount Sinai. Hieroglyphics, papyrus and wood had a place in history, as did quill pens. We can appreciate Johannes Gutenberg’s contribution and still embrace all the waves of technology that followed.
Diverse perspectives
The pandemic showed us that people need the expertise journalists wield. However, at the same time we see that people increasingly value the perspectives of social media influencers over journalists. We may not like it, but this needs to teach us something. Rather than ask our journalists to be invisible or unobtrusive, perhaps we need to re-examine ways to humanize them for audiences.
The plethora of free options suggests that every media outlet needs to focus on offering more distinctive coverage. No, it shouldn’t be harmful or polarizing. But it has to be inclusive, reflecting more communities that demand to be heard. That’s why so many niche and local publishers have cropped up; to fill a void that was created by arrogance, neglect and an unwillingness to change – a poisonous recipe.
Media has to marry new technology, develop a trustworthy infrastructure for news distribution and create a steady diet of distinctive coverage mixed with utility and expertise and get back into communities.
The media landscape will look different by the end of this year (and the next, and the one after that), but you can’t point to a time in history when information didn’t matter. And you cannot point to a time in civilization when news – no matter its platform – didn’t make a difference.
If we haven’t learned anything else, history tells us we should pay attention.
New technologies will be critical to the media landscape in 2024, converging with trends towards immersive, personalized experiences and the increased impact of the creator economy, according to Arthur D. Little’s State of the Media Market 2024. The report is subtitled “Back to Balance: A Year of Prudent Economic Expectations,” reflecting the authors’ belief in the sector’s recovery and stabilization following a rocky 2023. Read on for a few takeaways from this extensive report.
The media embraces new technologies
A persistent theme in the ADL report is the need to employ new technologies to improve operations, engage new audiences, and customize experiences.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) continue to transform the media landscape, helping to automate manual processes, personalize content and experiences, and enable data-driven decision-making to power industry growth. However, for all its utility and potential, AI is a powder keg of potentially explosive issues, as seen during the WGA strikes (which resulted in greater protections and compensation for writers). The ADL report maintains that early adopters will benefit from AI innovations, even as the regulatory and ethical landscape around AI continues to evolve.
VR and AR add dimension to immersive experiences for customers and will increasingly merge with other new technologies in the development of cutting-edge user experiences.
Cloud computing facilitates agility and reduces costs. Cloud gaming continues to expand globally, driven in part by immersive experience.
Big data and analytics should be wisely employed to discover customer preferences and behavior and inform industry decision-making.
Social media continues to be vital to the overall media industry, with huge capacity to engage audiences, build brand awareness, and boost content discovery. Platforms such as Twitch, Reddit, Discord, and TikTok are enticing content creators with AI tools that facilitate video and music editing, while also developing tools to label AI-generated content.
Audio is a big opportunity
Perhaps it’s a sign of multitasking culture, but the public’s appetite for music, podcasts, and audiobooks has remained robust and is forecast to remain strong.
Music streaming saw almost double-digit growth globally during the pandemic, and that growth is forecast to continue at a somewhat slower but still steady rate. The U.S. was the main driver, contributing about 40% of the growth in the global music streaming market in 2024. Spotify continues to dominate as a platform. Most streaming services increased consumer prices in 2023 but also expanded options such as audiobooks and podcasts.
Podcasts are still climbing in popularity and attracting advertisers. A significant portion of the public are tuning in to news podcasts, especially in the U.S. 19% of U.S. residents surveyed have tuned into a news podcast in the last month, compared to an average of 12% globally. Sweden is just behind the U.S. in news podcast use at 17%, with the UK lagging at only 8%, according to the ADL study.
Audiobooks continue in popularity overall and will benefit from a boom in education publishing (which is expected to achieve double-digit growth between 2020 to 2025), and in self-publishing. Spotify has moved into the audiobooks business, offering 15 free hours of audiobook listening to paid subscribers in the U.S., UK, and Australia.
Traditional news vs. the “creator” economy
Creator culture and the resulting creator economy have grown, and AI tools are making even it easier for individuals to create and edit content. Brands are recognizing the power of influencer marketing and giving creators more leeway to put forth fresh, albeit less polished, content.
A flipside of the enthusiasm for interactivity and user creation is declining interest in newsprint and linear television. Younger generations are driving this change. In the UK, only people aged 55 and older cited television as their primary source of news (42%). Those under age 45 showed a strong preference for online sites and apps as news sources, followed by social media. People under 25 relied on social media above all, with 41% of people in that age group citing it as their main source of news, according to the survey.
A concerning aspect of this trend is the lack of regulation, which makes misinformation much easier to launch and spread. Print news struggles to compete with free but often less reliable digital news platforms. Only a small minority of all age groups (ranging from 6% of people 55+ to 0% of those 45-54) in the ADL’s UK survey cited print as their primary source of news. Bundling and partnerships may be one path to combine more traditional linear media sources with more fluid and creator-friendly platforms.
Recommendations for media companies
In addition to the key theme of embracing and leveraging new technologies, the report’s authors offer a few more recommendations.
Forge strategic partnerships to reach new audiences, pool resources, and share expertise.
Balance user privacy with data-driven decision-making.
Invest in customer relationships, using new technologies to better understand and communicate with users and tailor content accordingly.
Deliver excellent content and experiences. There’s no substitute for outstanding content. Audiences seek high quality, engaging, unique experiences, so media leaders must invest in content that rises above that of competitors.
News has long relied on the power of visuals to tell stories: first through illustrations and more recently through photography and video. The recent rise in access to generative AI tools for making and editing images offers photojournalists, video producers and other journalists exciting new possibilities. However, it also poses unique challenges at each stage of the planning, production, editing, and publication process.
As an example, AI-generated assets can suffer from algorithmic bias. Therefore, organizations that use AI carelessly run the risk of reputational damage.
AI-generated images can suffer from algorithmic biases. As examples, without specifying any demographic or environmental attributes, text-to-image AI generator Midjourney returned four images—all of light-skinned men and all in seemingly urban environments—for the prompt, “wide-angle shot of journalist with camera.
However, despite the risks, a recent Associated Press report found that one in five journalists uses generative AI to make or edit multimedia. But how are journalists using these tools, specifically, and what should other journalists and media managers look out for?
I recently undertook a study of how newsroom workers perceived and used generative visual AI in their organizations with Ryan J. Thomson and Phoebe Matich. That study, “Generative Visual AI in News Organizations: Challenges, Opportunities, Perceptions, and Policies,” uses interviews with newsroom personnel at 16 leading news organizations in seven countries, including the U.S. It reveals how newsroom leaders can protect their organizations from the dangers of careless generative visual AI use while also harnessing its possibilities.
Challenges for deploying AI visuals in newsrooms
Mis/disinformation
Those interviewed were most worried about the way in which generative AI tools or outputs can be used to mislead or deceive. This can happen even without ill intent. In the words of one of the editors interviewed:
When it comes to AI-generated photos, regardless of if we go the extra mile and tell everyone, “Hey, this is an AI-generated image” in the caption and things like that, there will still be a shockingly large amount of people who won’t see that part and will only see the image and will assume that it’s real and I would hate for that to be the risk that we put in every time we decide to use that technology.
The World Economic Forum has named the threat of AI-fuelled mis/disinformation as the world’s greatest short-term risk. They rank it above other pressing issues, such as armed conflict and climate change.
Labor concerns
The second biggest challenge, interviewees said, was the threat that generative AI posed to lens-based workers and other visual practitioners within news organizations. AI-generated visual content is much cheaper to produce than paying for bespoke content but the interviewees noted that quality is, of course, different.
An editor in Europe said he didn’t think AI tools would take peoples’ jobs. Instead, he felt it would be others who apply these tools well who would be hired instead, as the newsroom can thus be more efficient by using them.
Copyright
The third biggest challenge, according to the interviewees, was copyright concerns around AI-generated visual content. In the words of one of the editors interviewed:
“Programs like Midjourney and DALL-E are essentially stealing images and stealing ideas and stealing the creative labor of these illustrators and they’re not getting anything in return.”
Many text-to-image generators, including Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALL-E, have been accused of training their models on vast swathes of copyrighted content online. The two biggest players in the market that said they are taking a different approach are Adobe (with its generative AI offering, Firefly) and Getty (with its offering, Generative AI by Getty Images).
Both of these claim they’re only training their generators with proprietary content or with content they have license to use, which makes using them less legally risky. (Although Adobe was later discovered to have trained its model partially on Midjourney images.)
The downside of not indiscriminately scraping the web for training data is that this affects the outputs that are possible. Firefly, for example, wasn’t able to fully render the prompt: “Donald Trump on the Steps of the Supreme Court.” It returned four images of the building itself sans Trump along with the error message: “One of more words may not meet User Guidelines and were removed.”
Adobe Firefly wasn’t able to fully render the prompt “Donald Trump on the Steps of the Supreme Court.” It returned this image of the building itself, instead.
On its help center, Adobe notes, “Firefly only generates images of public figures available for commercial use on the Stock website, excluding editorial content. It shouldn’t generate public figures unavailable in the Stock data.”
Detection issues
The fourth biggest challenge was that journalists themselves didn’t always know when AI had been used to make or edit visual assets. Some of the traditional ways to fact-check images don’t always work for those made by or edited with AI.
Some participants mentioned the Content Authenticity Initiative and its Content Credentials, a kind of tamper-evident metadata used to show the history of an image. However, they also lamented significant barriers to implementation. These included having to buy new cameras equipped with the content credentials technology and also re-develop their digital asset management systems and websites to work with and display the credentials. Considering that at least half of all Americans get at least some news from social media platforms, content credentials will only be effective if they are adopted widely across the industry and by big tech giants, alike.
Despite these significant risks and challenges, newsroom workers also imagined ways that the technology could be used in productive and beneficial ways.
Opportunities for deploying AI tools and visuals in newsrooms
Creating illustrations
This is how text-to-image generator Midjourney responded to a prompt about visualizing generative AI. Journalists said they could see the potential for using generative AI to show difficult-to-visualize topics, such as AI itself.
The newsroom employees interviewed were most comfortable with using generative AI to create illustrations that were not photorealistic. AI can be helpful to illustrate hard-to-visualize stories, like those dealing with bitcoin or with AI itself.
Brainstorming and idea generation
Those interviewed also thought generative AI could be used for story research and inspiration. Instead of just looking at Pinterest boards or conducting a Google Image search, journalists imagined asking a chatbot for help with how to show challenging topics, like visualizing the depth of the Mariana Trench. Interviewees also thought generative AI could be used to create mood boards to quickly and concretely communicate an editor’s vision to a freelancer.
Visualizing the past or future
Journalists also thought the potential existed to help them show the past or future. In one editor’s words:
“We always talk about how like it’s really hard to photograph the past. There’s only so much that you can do in terms of pulling archival images and things like that.”
This editor thought AI could be used in close consultation with relevant sources to narrate and then visualize how something looked in the past. Image-to-video AI tools like Runway can allow you to bring a historical still image to life or to describe a historical scene and receive a video in return.
Image-to-video AI tool Runway allows a user to bring life to a still image from history.
More guidance (and research) needed
From our research, which also discusses principles and policies that newsrooms have in place to guide the responsible use of AI within news organizations, it is clear that the media industry finds itself at another major crossroads. As with each evolution of the craft, there are opportunities to explore and risks to be evaluated. But from what we saw, journalists need more guardrails to guide their use and allow for experimentation and innovation in ethically sound and responsible ways.
A few years ago, social media platforms were seen as the “digital town square,” where people could come together in communities around shared interests and passions. But as the platforms have turned towards feeds full of algorithmically-generated recommendations – and further away from professional news – few publishers are confident in building communities on platforms they aren’t sure will continue to support them.
This is something that the team at Filipino online news website Rappler have been thinking about for some time. Rappler co-founder and CEO Maria Ressa (winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize) was among those in the news business noticing a decline in social media traffic. She also saw how the algorithms were creating deep silos of information for individuals, creating an “information dystopia.” Rather than continue to reinforce the role of platforms in building information communities, Ressa and the Rappler team felt there was a better way.
“The insidious manipulation of Big Tech – inciting fear, anger and hate for profit – has destroyed the public sphere and the crucial discussions needed for democracy,” she wrote in a launch post for Rappler Communities. “It’s time to build our shared reality and redefine civic engagement, to restore trust.”
This community platform is a true digital town square
Rappler launched its own community platform as an iOS, Android and web app in late December 2023. The approach is intended to create a true digital town square, moderated by Rappler’s own journalists, which connects people with their interests and passions. From local politics to tech, food and climate change, there are chat groups (called channels) to cater to a wide range of audience interests.
These channels are organized according to the beats Rappler covers. It offers a way to introduce audiences to the journalists, and cultivate a more direct relationship, which humanizes reporters.
Community Lead Pia Ranada thinks that Rappler’s professional journalists are well-suited to cultivate their community. “Journalists have always traditionally been the gatekeepers of information,” she explained. “We believe we write what people need to know, and what the public interest is. And we have the interests of the public at heart because we want to keep them informed. We want to give them facts and not propaganda. We want to give them information that is timely, is verified, and is comprehensive.
“As people who deal with information dissemination and journalism and fact checking on a daily basis, we think that we would have this role. So, a platform that combines our journalism, coupled with engagement with our audiences is something we’re uniquely positioned to provide.”
There is a particularly acute need for community-building that incorporates the media in the Philippines, given that journalists are regularly vilified. “When you go into chat rooms and you see Maria or another Rappler reporter asking you what you think, there’s something there that builds trust,” said Ranada . “We care enough that we want to bring you into our app and our chat rooms. We care enough that we will tag you and let you know that we have a question that we’re crowdsourcing, and that your questions matter. These little things speak volumes about how a newsroom treats its audience, its community.”
This principle carries through into the name “Rappler Communities.” The approach is not just a one-way relationship news. Rather, Rappler’s team wants to harness the community for their journalism. “Crowdsourcing things, getting civil society to talk about their issues and amplify their concerns. I think those build action, and I think those build community,” Ranada said, giving examples of action. “In the end, the whole point is to build trust, which benefits not just journalists, but society.”
The Rappler Communities app’s decentralized approach
Rappler has built its community app on Matrix; an open protocol which allows secure, decentralized communications. It is similar to Slack in the way channels are accessed. However, Rappler felt that it was very important that the publisher owned the app rather than cultivating a community on a third-party platform.
“Having an app is a tighter communication and distribution effort. [Our audience is] in a piece of tech we made for them,” Ranada explained. “It’s a way to ensure that if something bad happens with the other Big Tech platforms, we always have our backyard that we can depend on. It’s under our control. And that’s an assurance to our community.”
AI has also been built into the app from the start. AI moderators work alongside the journalists to keep conversation civil, although members can always appeal to a human if they think the AI has incorrectly blocked something. The app uses bots to post relevant stories to relevant chat rooms, and for fun, has a games bot which sends questions and quizzes to some of the channels.
Although Rappler has a membership program, Rappler+, the community is free to anyone as long as they register with an email address. However, the Rappler Community does have a private group in the app just for Rappler+ members where they get updates about upcoming stories, events and briefings.
Nurturing the Rappler news-based community platform
As any publisher who has attempted to start a community knows, keeping it going after initial launch is no easy task. Ranada said that she is beginning by tapping into the loyal base of Rappler readers rather than attracting people who aren’t yet familiar with the brand. “Our target is to involve people who are our fans, our loyal base,” she outlined. “This is a gift to them that we’re trying to lean into this loyal base even more and introduce them to our journalists.”
From there, they plan to grow and expand to other communities, groups and audiences from an existing position of strength.
Since launching in December, the channels have been useful for crowdsourcing. For example, a new policy was recently announced in Manila about a ban on e-bikes on major roads. After the news broke, the team went on the chatroom and asked the community what they thought.
“It was really helpful to our journalists to see that, oh, this is what they think, and we got to directly quote from them,” explained Ranada. “We created instant quote cards based on the quotes people sent in, then we amplified them on all of our social media accounts. So that way, people who are chatting on our app also feel that their voices are amplified.”
That’s not to say it’s all smooth sailing. Ranada acknowledged that not all reporters are community builders: “We’re used to chasing stories but not really tending to a community. But we think this is something that we’re training into all of our reporters, every staff member.”
Part of her role as Community Lead involves highlighting best practices, and bringing experienced moderators together to share handbooks and guidelines on how to moderate or start chats in the communities. “We have our own coordination channel where we help each other,” Ranada said, explaining that best practice is communicated to different units. “What do I do when no one’s answering my call-out? What’s the best way to ensure this community chat is well-attended? Or how do I convince this particular person to join?”
One early learning Ranada was keen to share was that they were initially unsure which channels to create. “At first, we thought that the hard topics like justice and human rights would carry the day because our audience is naturally drawn to that kind of content,” she explained. “But actually we’ve found that leaning into the softer sections has been rewarding. We even have a chat room where our sales team gives away discount coupons from our brand partners.”
The next step is to look at potential monetization options. But because the Rappler Community is still in a very experimental phase, this is something Ranada is approaching very cautiously.
Communities as the future of news
Underpinning all of this is Rappler’s belief that journalism and community cannot exist without each other. On the launch page, for Rappler Communities they stated: “Trustworthy information and news cannot survive in the toxic environment of today’s social media platforms. And a positive, empathic community is not possible where malicious, manipulative content is allowed to thrive.”
It’s also a way to futureproof the publisher against the threats of generative AI and its impact on SEO. Ranada expressed a fear that LLMs (Large Language Models) are at risk of crippling sites like Rappler if snippets of their content are displayed without encouraging clicks back to the website. But an app – especially one that builds habit and alerts to breaking news events – potentially makes it even easier for users to stay up-to-date.
“If people are used to, ‘Oh, I’m going to get notified anyway by Rappler the moment something big breaks, I click the notification, I end up on the page, I won’t have to search it on Google,’ those things help newsrooms survive and stay relevant and stay embedded in people’s habits,” she speculated.
For Ranada and the Rappler team, staying relevant to their readers is the best way to navigate the quickly-changing landscape. “The more news products we create that are really attuned to our audiences, the more [publishers] will survive and thrive in this environment,” she encouraged.
n the rapidly evolving digital landscape, content producers constantly seek new ways to engage with audiences and promote their brands. That’s especially important right now as traffic continues to fall from sites such as Facebook and Twitter/X.
One weapon in their arsenal with some powerful potential is LinkedIn, a site that may offer a higher likelihood of referrals and engagement than some publishers have historically considered.
2. LinkedIn users tend to be millennials and professionals
LinkedIn is typically described as a social network for business professionals. As a result, it doesn’t yet attract much of Gen Z, but it is a site they transition to as they enter the workforce. Worldwide, 60% of users are in the advertiser-friendly 25-34 age bracket.
In the USA, a 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 40% of 30-49-year-olds had used the site. That’s on a par with Pinterest (40%), TikTok (39%) and WhatsApp (38%) and some way ahead of Twitter/X (27%) and Snapchat (30%), platforms many publishers continue to invest considerable energies in.
3. Around 1 in 5 American users harness LinkedIn for news
Further data from Pew finds that 17% of U.S. adults using LinkedIn regularly get their news on the platform. Interestingly, in contrast to other social networks, LinkedIn has the greatest gender parity among news consumers.
Its news audience is not huge, c.5% of U.S. adults. However, this is on par with Snapchat (4% of the total adult population) and WhatsApp (3%).
The site also offers a more educated demographic, 60% of regular news consumers on LinkedIn have a college degree, and just over half (53%) of their users enjoy a household income over $100k per annum. For many media companies, these are appealing demographics.
Many media companies will already be using some of the most obvious functions on LinkedIn. This includes posting job ads, sharing company news and creating business landing pages.
Those functions will continue to be useful. However, they only scratch the surface of some of the wider potential the site potentially affords publishers and creators.
Tactics for publishers to try on LinkedIn:
1. Publish newsletters
Image via The Economist on LinkedIn. Screenshot 3/18/24.
“In the past year, LinkedIn has seen a 150% increase in the number of newsletters being published by publishers and journalists on the platform,” Axios reports.
These newsletters might be native to LinkedIn, offer a remix of content produced elsewhere, or simply be republished on the platform. Audiences can read them on the site, or have them emailed to them. Either way, they can potentially reach large, professional, audiences. Users have more than 450 million newsletter subscriptions on the platform. That’s up 3x year-on-year.
The Wall Street Journal’s Careers & Leadership newsletter, for example, has nearly 3 million subscribers and over 100 editions on LinkedIn. With the WSJ’s company page enjoying 9.7 million followers, that’s a high percentage of users who are digging deeper.
Another LinkedIn behemoth, The Economist, reaches over 3.1 million weekly subscribers with its “week ahead” newsletter, while Harvard Business Review’s Management Tip of the Week reaches over 5 million subscribers with a short article that takes just 1-2 minutes to read.
The pandemic demonstrated the potential for publishers to livestream events. Although we have seen a renewed interest in the ability of in-person events (particularly to diversify revenues), many media companies have retained an online component. Some media providers, like Harvard Business Review, continue to run live events that remain 100% virtual.
The Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit & sponsor list, via Forbes
Online-only, or hybrid events, are more inclusive, helping to overcome geographic boundaries. But they also present additional income streams.
Forbes, for example, attracted several blue-chip sponsors for their Sustainability Leaders Summit last Fall. If you were unable to attend in person, you could view a live stream on various platforms, including LinkedIn, sponsored by Toyota.
Events, newsletters and posts by a company – or its staff – offer multiple means to engage with users on LinkedIn. Aside from blasting them with news and information, they’re also a space to dig beyond the analytics to garner insights from your audience.
As Meredith Turits, the former editor of BBC Worklife – a vertical that includes the Worklife 101 newsletter – explained to Nieman Lab last year “content that does well is, of course, shared and clicked on, but some of our most important insights come from the comments on the newsletter,” she said. “We’re always looking at conversation in the comments or shares.”
These audience insights can shape future editorial efforts. Moreover, by sharing content that stimulates discussion and offers insights from LinkedIn members, publishers can act as a convener for conversation. That’s an approach in line with the goal of many publishers to move beyond scale by developing direct relationships with audiences.
“Don’t treat it as a traffic play, full stop,” Turtis advises. “One of the things that’s most unique about LinkedIn is that people want to talk, and will talk — it’s UX makes that easy and encourages it.”
4. Drive referrals, subscribers and registrations
Posts on company pages, the feeds of the people who work at them, as well as newsletters published on LinkedIn, can all play a role in encouraging audiences to dig deeper.
USA Today’s weekly consumer news newsletter, The Money, breaks down stories from the past week, and includes links to other USA Today stories. It also highlights that you can sign up for a daily newsletter offering more of the same, more often.
Other outlets, like CNN’s PM Plug In, lean into when audiences might be using LinkedIn. In this instance, providing “a weekday newsletter to catch you up on important news you may have missed during your busy day.”
Meanwhile, Business Insider uses the platform to offer a “shorter version of our flagship newsletter,” which they then encourage readers to sign up for.
The Economist ends their newsletter with a registration link offering three free articles a month, as well as linking to their main subscription page.
Collectively, these approaches demonstrate some of the different ways that publishers are using LinkedIn to support their wider engagement and revenue strategies.
5. Humanize your brand and staff
In some instances, LinkedIn may be your first engagement with a company. A good initial impression can matter, therefore, in terms of attracting potential consumers, subscribers and prospective employees.
Because of this, some media companies are making their LinkedIn presence more personal and approachable.
The Editor’s Digest, a newsletter from the Financial Times, sees an editor pick their top stories from the FT that week. Each hyperlinked newsletter is simply signed off by the author using their first name (e.g. Patrick, or Roula). It offers a casualness one might not expect from such an august brand, even if I personally would love to know their surname and job title!
Elsewhere, Nicholas Thompson the CEO of The Atlantic publishes a monthly newsletter that highlights his picks of The Best Things To Read. Most of this content is from places outside of The Atlantic, increasing its usefulness and making it feel much less like a PR exercise. Thompson also posts casual hot-take videos on different topics, which also makes him – and by osmosis his publication – more accessible and relatable.
Moving forward
According to Daniel Roth, LinkedIn’s Editor in Chief, the platform works with 400 preferred news partners to help maximize their work on the site. These efforts, as Axios reports, include sharing trending topics with partners so that they can tap current audience interests, as well as featuring content on LinkedIn News.
However, for content creators not in this club, there are still multiple things you can do to leverage LinkedIn more effectively. Journalists can get free training on how to use the platform, as well as a free premium membership. They can also use the platform to promote their work, and the work of others, as well as engage directly with audiences.
Your digital and social teams can – and should – do that too. Newsletters, events and posts can create high-quality, relevant content that resonates with LinkedIn’s professional user base. In doing this, outlets may reach new audiences as well as serve existing ones. That can drive traffic and engagement, increase subscriptions and take-up of other products.
Image via Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
As a result, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, more media companies are investing in LinkedIn. A survey of 314 media leaders in 56 countries, revealed that four in ten (41%) of executives said they would be putting more effort into the platform in 2024. This is only just behind the proposed prioritization in YouTube and Google Search.
As Sara Fischer the senior media reporter at Axios recently put it, “LinkedIn alone won’t be able to make up for the dramatic reduction in traffic referrals from social media sites to news publishers, but it does offer outlets and journalists a platform to meaningfully grow their audiences amid a broader tech crackdown on news content.”
Put another way, as the tech journalist Ryan Broderickoutlined earlier this week, “the traffic firehose days of the 2010s aren’t coming back. And LinkedIn is not the secret to infinite pageviews.” But, he adds, “finding a home for news publishers in 2024 isn’t about finding a perfect fit, but rather finding one that’s close enough.”
For some content creators and media companies, that might just mean leaning more into LinkedIn in the year ahead.
From Google to Facebook and Instagram to TikTok (and so many more), publishers have spent the last couple of decades chasing their audiences from one platform to another—only to be betrayed by changing algorithms and shifting platform priorities. For years, popular wisdom held that you had to go where the audience is. Now, despite the fact that audiences (particularly younger ones) seek out news and information on social platforms, those platforms are “backing away” from making that content visible. But regardless of a media brand’s position on social media, search has remained the undisputed path to traffic.
Now, publishers face a whole new threat: generative AI search. Years of fine-tuning search engine optimization strategies may all be for naught as Google embraces AI-driven answers in lieu of links to relevant content. Meanwhile, Gartner predicts that traditional search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026 as users shift to AI chatbots and virtual agents for their answers.
The Wall Street Journal reports that publishers expect a 20% to 40% drop in their Google-generated traffic if the search giant rolls out its AI search tool to a broad audience. So, what are media executives supposed to do in the face of yet another shift in the technology landscape that threatens to put them on the outs once again? There’s really only one solution: devise a plan to regain control of their audience relationships once and for all.
Discovery: a problem as old as algorithms
AI search has yet to reach its full potential, but referral traffic is already taking a hit. AI-driven search results that fail to link to the content they scrape from is just one part of the problem. Searchers are often satisfied with AI “answers” and have little need to click through for more. And platforms from across the web are trying to keep more users within the walls of their gardens, and that means the likes of Facebook and Google have gone from partners in traffic acquisition to the opposition.
“We’re seeing an industry in real crisis,” says Jim Chisholm, a news media analyst. While Chisholm says he is not seeing evidence that AI is impacting traffic just yet, that does not mean publishers are not already feeling the squeeze from elsewhere.
Liam Andrew, Chief Product Officer at The Texas Tribune, says that while his team expects generative AI to impact search traffic, they are still waiting to see a substantial impact. The bigger problem facing the Tribune now is social media traffic or the lack of it.
While social platforms across the spectrum are pulling the rug out from under publishers, our old friend search is slowly changing the rules of the game. “Search is still working,” Andrew says. The Texas Tribune sees that explainers and guides still drive traffic and even subscriptions. However, other sites have not been so lucky.
Back in October 2023, Press Gazette found that of 70 leading publishers, half saw their search visibility scores drop—and 24 of those saw double-digit dips. That was the result of one update—more bad news is certain to follow as new updates make their way to the masses.
AI bots: To block or not to block
Publishers may be preparing for a more significant battle when it comes to traffic. However, right now, there’s another fight on their doorsteps: bots are crawling their sites and using their work to train the AI poised to steal their traffic. Some are already taking steps to stop the free—and possibly illegal—use of their content. The Reuters Institute found that 48% of the most widely used news websites across 10 countries blocked OpenAI’s crawlers by the close of 2023. Far fewer—just 24%—blocked Google’s AI crawler.
For Andrew and The Texas Tribune, blocking AI crawlers is not a major concern. They already have an open-republishing model and are used to seeing their content scraped and used on other sites (often without the requested attribution). “It improves our readership and impact, but we compete with ourselves for SEO,” he says. He also says they see versions of their stories on news sites where the content is entirely AI-written. However, it is “not affecting our core audience traffic,” according to Andrew. So — at least for now — The Texas Tribune is not planning to block the bots.
Meanwhile, Google is reportedly paying publishers to use its AI tools to write content. While in the short term, this may offer (smaller) publishers relatively small sums as well as an easier way to create low-lift content, like other Google News Initiative (GNI) projects, there’s an underlying concern that Google is not focused on publisher health in the long term.
Developing a direct-to-reader strategy
As Andrew and the product team at The Texas Tribune look toward a less search-dependent future, they are changing strategies. For 2025 and beyond, “we are not going to be focusing on a really good SERP [Search Engine Results Pages] unnecessarily,” Andrew says. Instead, they’ll focus on products built directly for readers.
“Newsletters have been part of our model for over 10 years. It’s nothing new, but we’re continuing to see success with it,” Andrew says. Not only do the newsletters still drive traffic, but they also drive conversions. Subscribers become members at a higher rate, vital to a publication that does not depend on paywalls for revenue.
DCN conducted an informal survey on concerns around the impact of AI search on traffic, and while the sample size may not hold up to scientific scrutiny, it was clear that newsletters are a crucial tactic for publishers looking to own their audiences. Other stats suggest this is a good move. Storydoc research found that 90% of Americans subscribe to at least one newsletter. That number goes up for younger audiences as 95% of Gen Z, Millennials, and even Gen X receive newsletters, compared to 84% of Baby Boomers.
Experiment with engagement approaches
The solutions to the Google problem don’t end at email, though.
“We also have a big robust event system,” Andrew notes. The Texas Tribune holds dozens every year. They range from “pre-gaming the Texas primary” to deep dives into transportation in the Austin/San Antonio area. They gather experts and pundits to share their expertise on topics that interest readers. The team also live-streams these events — a universally important tactic for engaging younger, more diverse audiences. These events also turn out to be effective for converting casual readers into subscribers and members.
Andrew alluded to products his team is working on that are still under wraps. Still, it’s clear that, like many publishers, The Texas Tribune is preparing for a future when search no longer drives most traffic.
Chisholm thinks mobile apps are another excellent direct-to-reader strategy, and research backs this up. Pew reports that “A large majority of U.S. adults (86%) say they often or sometimes get news from a smartphone, computer or tablet, including 56% who say they do so often. This is more than the 49% who said they often got news from digital devices in 2022 and the 51% of those who said the same in 2021.” Cultivating a relationship with readers through their mobile devices—where you can use push notifications and other native capabilities to grab their attention—will likely be one of the many tools publishers must deploy going forward.
“I’ve been in the news industry – which I love – for 48 years. Now we are at a crossroads,” says Chisholm. “Either we choose the road to recovery, rebuilding relationships with our readers, or we continue down the road we are on, subject to algorithms, more confusion between legitimate news and social media infested with AI nonsense.”
As the technology continues to develop at breakneck speed, publishers are taking every imaginable stance on AI. From The Telegraph forbidding staff from using AI-generated text in its journalism, to Politico actively optimizing its website for generative AI crawlers, a wait-and-see approach is not an option.
There are still many unknowns around both the use of generative AI technology and the potential legal and ethical implications. So, it is understandable that many media executives are hesitant to take a stance. But in all likelihood, you’ve got staff using it already; one survey found that 70% of workers did not disclose their ChatGPT usage to their boss.
So how can senior leaders work to introduce AI in a way that benefits the organization, or at least empower the experts and evangelists to explore and share solutions? Here, we look at publishers who have created frameworks for experimenting in ways which benefit the businesses, as well as some tips from an innovation expert to help shape your own AI strategies.
“Waddle Inn” at William Reed
William Reed is a data and events publisher focused on the food and drinks sector. They have found success with their “Waddle Inn” project, named lightheartedly after the way ducks and penguins waddle together, with the extra ‘n’ to make it sound “more like a pub,” explained Chief Digital Officer John Barnes.
William Reed has three locations in the UK, as well as offices in France, Chicago and Singapore, not to mention staff working remotely. So they decided that an online forum would be the best way to bring everyone together. They set up a Microsoft Teams group composed not just of techies and experts, but also those who are new to AI, intrigued, or even frightened by it.
“Whatever your starting position is, here’s a group where you can come together.” Barnes explained. “We use it to share articles, pose questions to each other, we use it to discuss and come up with ideas. It helped form our AI statement… What’s come out of it is a whole series of ideas, some of which we’re working on, some of which we’re still debating, and some of which we’ve just put a spike through because it was too crazy to even contemplate!”
A year on, the Teams group has now become a “record” of William Reed’s AI journey. Barnes noted that some of the ideas they discussed when it first started now seem “less crazy” given the speed at which the AI landscape is developing. “It’s such a useful social resource that seems to be well-liked and well-attended,” he said. “It’s very, very active.”
Immediate Media’s AI experimentation days
Magazine and special interest consumer publisher Immediate Media have found that offering staff events focused on AI has driven experimentation and innovation. They started off with an AI Immersion Day in the summer, which Roxanne Fisher, Immediate’s Director of Digital Content Strategy said was about setting a level playing field of understanding.
“We had a morning of keynote speakers come in and talk about things like the ethical implications and the opportunities, and we also had our CEO stand up and say, ‘This is what we’re doing with AI, and this is what we believe we shouldn’t do,’” she explained. “Then in the afternoon we had really hands-on workshops about prompting, ChatGPT, basic frameworks, Midjourney and how to decide what the right tool is for your use-case.”
But they didn’t just leave it at that. To encourage practical outcomes, Immediate then set up an AI Experimentation Days where they asked staff to submit projects that they might want to use AI for. From over 70 submissions, they took forward 27 projects to work on a hackathon-style event.
“The experimentation days were really useful because people were getting to work on something they had submitted, and were quite excited about,” Fisher said. “But also we had expert facilitators going around the business for the two days. So, if you got stuck…we had people to give really good prompting tips.”
The days were seen as a success by staff as well. Fisher noted that having no expectations around experimentation or productivity gains really helped take the pressure off. Although they’re planning more days in the future, she acknowledged that they’re now working on ways to build the outcomes into the business more strategically. “The experimentation is going really well, but building that into a process or ways to use these tools on a regular basis that’s really meaningful is more difficult,” Fisher said.
Have a clear company-wide generative AI statement
Plenty of publishers have put out statements and policy guidelines to clarify their approach to AI tools over the past year or so. This shouldn’t be seen as a frivolous exercise or a PR move; both Barnes and Fisher noted that publishing clear, public guidelines have really helped reassure staff, as well as provide a framework for internal experimentation.
“If I hear somebody in our company saying, ‘I’m really worried about AI, I’m going to lose my job,’ I don’t see that as a problem. It’s something I need to try and address so that they, for their own well-being, aren’t feeling frightened and worried,” William Reed’s John Barnes said. “We’re not going to be doing certain things, hence having a statement that’s transparent and published that everyone can see.”
Immediate has also put together their own manifesto for how they will use AI, and have communicated that to staff. “The first thing we wanted to do is be really clear in the business what our stance was for using it; what we would and wouldn’t do,” Fisher explained. “We really want to stay up to date and understand it, and understand how it’s going to change everything, but we also want to really maintain the trust of the brands.”
For Fisher, it was important to put guardrails and rules in place for experimentation. This includes basics like not putting personal or sensitive data into tools, but also ensuring staff feel secure. “We did a lot of psychological safety work around it, and tried to make sure people felt they could have the conversations and be really honest about how they’re feeling about it,” she said. “But also lots of reassurance and having that clear stance of what we did and didn’t do was helpful. It set out to people that we’re not about to churn out hundreds of news articles or anything. That’s not what we’re about.”
Lead AI innovation from the top
The success of AI initiatives like these are heavily predicated on support from senior executives. Fisher found that, at Immediate, early encouragement to try and use the technology didn’t take off until more structure was provided. “We realized that the testing and usage needed to come from [the leadership team] more,” she explained. “So we were more prescriptive with people about what we thought they should test.”
Immediate now has an “AI champions board” of people from different disciplines around the business who are passionate about, or interested in the technology. This helps galvanize others. It also means that there are recognized representatives staff can go to with ideas or concerns.
Barnes explained that he sees three types of people who experiment with new technologies in a business: the over enthusiastic early adopters, the pragmatists, and those who are afraid they’ll lose their job to it. “You want to rein in the early adopters who are going to waste lots of time, and you want to make sure that the people that are being pragmatic about what it could or couldn’t do aren’t seen as being the party poopers,” he outlined.
But AI policies and strategies aren’t something that can simply be delegated out to someone else. Media consultant Ian Betteridge, who has worked in leadership positions at publishers like Bauer and Dennis, says that it needs to come right from the CEO. “Firstly, you need to understand this new technology,” he said. “You need to understand how it impacts your ways of working. Because quite often, when it gets to a certain level, everyone just assumes that everybody else knows, or everybody else can just find it all out themselves.”
This means going through several change management processes. “You’ve got to run, as the CEO, a change management process with your executive team,” explained Betteridge. “They then have to run the change management process with the senior leadership team…and they then have to run it with the broader business.”
While that’s going on, media leaders have to “stop people just going off and doing it themselves.” “You’ve got to put guidelines in place from the off,” Betteridge advised.
That doesn’t mean media leaders need to understand the technical detail, or every use case. “But we need to understand it to a point to be able to say to people, that’s not possible, or how to help them unlock things,” Immediate’s Fisher emphasized. “One of the biggest things that people in leadership can do is actually just get hands on with it… therefore you can make sure what you’re asking people in the company to do is realistic and reasonable.”
“Somebody on the leadership team that is looking after digital in some way, shape or form needs to own [it],” Barnes echoed, noting that it can’t simply be delegated to the IT team. “And if they’re not able to lead it on their own, they need to put a group of people around them from their teams or from around the company that can own it.”
Get your AI experimentation going
Some publishers will have teams and individuals eager and ready to experiment with AI. But for those at organizations with leadership teams who are more cautious about the technology, there are still ways to get things moving.
For organizations without strategies in place or a willingness to experiment, “the best way is to always just be able to share results. That’s the thing anybody sitting at the top is going to care about,” Betteridge advised. “So if you can share results and say, we’re now getting five exclusives and more traffic through there, then that matters.”
Barnes suggested simply talking about it as a way to get things started, even if full understanding isn’t there yet. “You want to make sure you’re working within the law, you’re doing something that isn’t going to damage your brand, you’re using tools in the right way to be efficient but not at the expense of humans,” he said, noting that these are points most leaders can agree on.
Whether organizations choose to appoint a board, hire or earmark individual champions, or bring everyone into the conversation, AI is not an issue media leaders can afford to stay silent on. It is a given that there are people within nearly every media organization using generative AI tools in some way. While you might not hesitate for staff to use Grammarly, you’ll likely feel quite differently about using ChatGPT for research or writing. Therefore, it is not only critical that you get started, the impetus and innovation need to start at the top with clear leadership driving smart experimentation.
As publishers look for ways to accelerate audience growth, engagement, and monetization in 2024, they have a multitude of options for driving change and innovation. Last year I worked with Nick Nyhan, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Upside Analytics, to develop a model for roadmapping the innovation journey in the publishing industry. As part of that effort, we uncovered some key strategies and ideas that publishers can use to accelerate their organizational velocity in the coming year across three areas: audience growth, audience engagement and monetization.
Grow audience reach
Most publishers are already working on the obvious top-of-funnel audience growth strategies, like social media and SEO. But we identified some opportunities beyond those obvious strategies that we encourage publishers to consider.
Idea #1: Add new sites or apps for specific audience segments
Breaking your audience down into sub-segments is a critical tactic for any publisher. When you’ve identified sub-segments with strong subjects of interest, you can build on that knowledge with more advanced strategies for targeted growth in each segment, including adding new properties.
A great example of this is Gray Television, one of the largest broadcasters in the U.S. Gray owns a large number of television stations across the country, and they decided to launch “City Weekend” sites in each of their local markets featuring location-specific lifestyle content on events, food, art and culture. This segmentation-based strategy helped Gray expand its audience, increase traffic, and boost ad revenue.
Following Gray’s example, you could identify a segment of your audience that’s very interested in sports, or local business, or any other specific topic, and introduce a microsite that’s easy to market to that audience.
Idea #2: Create mobile apps for fans
Your brand’s power users – the segments of your audience that engage with you the most – are also the most likely to download your mobile app. To take your mobile strategy to the next level, tailor your mobile app to hyper-engage your power users.
This presents the opportunity to align other elements of your business with your mobile strategy. For example, you can use your website mainly to attract, engage, register, and then drive new users to your mobile app, where you can employ additional strategies to keep them engaged.
Increase audience engagement
Once you’ve gotten your audience onto your site, you need to get them to stay there and have longer session lengths. More content views and more time on site equals more affinity to your brand.
Idea #3: Cater to multi-scenario consumption
People don’t just ingest news while sitting at a computer. They could be stuck in traffic and want an audio option. They could be on the go in a subway and need an offline mode. Some people want to save stories and listen to them later on audio or watch on video when they’re sitting in front of their TV at night. There is a lot of churn going on across all of these modalities, so publishers need a strategy to consciously cater to different audience scenarios for consuming content.
At the simplest level, this might involve letting users create reading lists of stories they can access later. At the most sophisticated level, you could have a completely native team building a custom OTT app. In between are opportunities to experiment with and test modalities for various content consumption scenarios, from podcasts to mobile to TV “sit back” options.
Idea #4: Use AI to suggest related stories
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) presents an exciting opportunity for publishers. In its current state, AI is well-positioned to take on some of the more tedious or repetitive tasks in content creation workflows. For example, AI-powered tools are emerging for auto-summarization and auto-tagging.
Your content creators like to write and create content. Maybe they don’t mind summarizing. But nobody likes tagging—so why not let AI tools do that work? Auto-tagging for text, video, images, and captions makes it easier to suggest related content to your audience, keeping them on your site longer and increasing the amount of content they consume.
Monetize by segment
Before you start trying advanced monetization strategies, make sure you have the basic building blocks in place. That includes the ability to enable and measure customer loyalty, clear calls-to-action across all of your properties, and an optimized checkout process. Beyond those basics, we identified some innovative strategies publishers are using to monetize audience segments.
Idea #5: Provide special content consumption options for subscribers
As I covered in the last section on audience engagement, your audience is consuming your content in many different scenarios, whether it’s sitting in front of a computer, on a mobile phone while on the go, or in front of their TV at night. Providing special consumption options that cater to these preferences can be used to entice people to subscribe.
For example, The Irish Times uses a text-to-speech provider to convert most of its stories into an audio version. A small headphones icon appears in the corner of these stories to indicate that an audio option is available—but only for subscribers. The Irish Times incurs a cost associated with doing the text-to-speech conversion. However, by enticing higher value users to subscribe, this cost is balanced out by the revenue gain.
Idea #6: Try a freemium approach
With a freemium strategy, publishers offer a selection of content that’s available without a subscription, but make higher-value content available only to subscribers. Readers are able to see headlines and short snippets of the high-value premium content featured amongst the free content, enticing them to subscribe to get full access.
We believe that sports-related content, especially if it’s local, will be among the highest value content that publishers can offer in the future. Sports-related stories would therefore be a great candidate to offer as premium content in a freemium model (and also a great testing ground for new monetization approaches).
Ultimately innovation for media companies comes down to having the courage to try, whether it’s one or more of these ideas, or any other tactics for growing your audience and increasing your revenue. We recommend crafting a one pager that outlines the new ideas you’ll test in 2024, including where you are today, where you want to go, and the KPIs you’ll use to measure your progress. Then share that document throughout your organization and take the next steps on your media innovation journey for 2024 and beyond.
At the 2024 DCN Next:Summit, held February 7th – 9th in Charleston, SC, senior executives from DCN’s member companies discussed the biggest issues and opportunities impacting the future of media. It was fitting that CEO Jason Kint opened the event by reflecting on the human agency, energy and collaboration that drive the industry forward.
“Let’s face it, algorithms can’t write a Pulitzer Prize winning exposé. They can’t tap out a heart-wrenching screenplay or build a company culture that thrives on innovation, inclusion and empathy,” he said. “We all understand that algorithms crunch data. Tech is very much part of our future. But it’s the human creativity spark that ignites us all.”
As the industry navigates the ever-changing media landscape–which continues to be shaped by technology–Kint reminded attendees that it’s not machines, but humans, who will write the next chapter of our collective story. While he pointed out that media organizations must be positioned to best-leverage and benefit from emerging technologies, Kint emphasized the critical role of those gathered at the Summit, particularly as they guide the teams they lead.
The impact of generative AI
Unsurprisingly, a broad theme of the event was the many ways publishers are approaching, using, experimenting with and challenged by generative AI. On that note, Todd Krizelman, CEO and co-founder of advertising intelligence platform MediaRadar, said his company approaches AI from two directions: the business and editorial sides of media. For him, AI is the most exciting part of his business, and the media business, right now. “Many companies will be testing the kind of stuff we are, but I do think it is a genuine opportunity,” he said.
Rafael Urbina-Quintero, the chief operating officer of ViX at TelevisaUnivision Inc. told Axios media reporter Sara Fischer that his company is starting to experiment with short form content using AI to do translation. “We have certain properties that travel really well.”
Kedar Prabhu, vice president of ad product and technology at Dow Jones, explained that Dow Jones uses AI for audience lookalike models and contextual targeting in ad tech. The company is also looking at use cases for AI including translation, voice transcription, personalization and video production.
POLITICO is focused on using AI to improve its subscriber experience. Goli Sheikholeslami, CEO of POLITICO Media Group explained that, while POLITICO has tens of thousands of legislative bills on their platform, only about 40% of them had summaries. However, “over the last three months, we’ve now taken all of our bills and through AI, now provide summaries for every single bill that’s on the platform,” Sheikholeslami said. POLITICO is also looking into how to use AI tools to help journalists do their jobs better and improve workflows that allow them to do more value-added work.
Andrea Brimmer, chief marketing and public relations officer at Ally Financial said that they are not only testing the Ally.ai platform, a large language model for campaign development, they’re also using AI to keep up with consumers’ “insatiable” demand for content on their Conversationally blog.
However, as many echoed throughout the event, AI is a powerful tool, best employed wisely by people. “We’ve used AI to make our writers more proficient to accelerate the amount of content that we’re able to put out into the atmosphere,” Brimmer said. “But, the difference at Ally is everything’s got to have a human touch. So, everything that we do has a human in the center of the transaction.”
In general, both speakers and attendees made it clear that despite AI’s huge potential value and use cases, they have concerns. “There’s a gap between tech capability and business value that is yet to be crossed, in particular when it comes to generative AI. I expect that, given what we’ve seen, we will eventually cross that gap, but we’re not there yet,” Prabhu said.
AI can be a powerful tool for making decisions, predictions or completing tasks. However, it is critical to keep in mind that it is not immune to problems like racism, sexism, ableism, explained author of More Than a Glitch, Meredith Broussard, who is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University.
Problematic platform partnerships
From Apple, to Samsung, Facebook, Google or Amazon, publishers and brands seek partnerships with platforms because it helps drive revenue, build audience and market share. However, these days everyone is approaching platform partnerships with caution.
The Weather Company is very selective in the partners that they’ll partner with, explained CEO Sheri Bachstein. She added that they have partnered with Apple, Samsung, Facebook and Google, which helps extend their brand. Platforms add value, drive revenue and add the ability to create more segmentation, Bachstein said. “So, you make a decision strategically, ‘I’m going to partner with this person versus for this data’ to drive your business.”
Brimmer explained that Ally Financial has been somewhat tepid on platforms. “We use platforms episodically. Until we feel comfortable that all brand safety measures are in place, there are platforms that we will just stay away from,” she said.
Indeed, as Paramount COO Steve Ellis put it, in many ways “it is not an even playing field when we talk about platforms because we have to abide by a whole different set of standards as a premium company.”
Marketing and advertising to culture
While coping with cookie depreciation was a recurring theme, the subject of equitable and diverse advertising was also a topic of much discussion. As Axios’ Sara Fischer pointed out, the media industry still lacks systems and processes to support marketing and advertising to culture.
TelevisaUnivision COO Rafael Urbina-Quintero, whose over-the-top streaming service ViX targets the 600 million Spanish-speaking market, agreed. It’s a huge opportunity for the company, which has a large share of the broadcast market in Mexico and about 60% of the Spanish-speaking market in the US.
Urbina-Quintero explained that the company has developed an entire creative services unit to help advertisers create pieces that allow them to effectively market to these audiences. “It’s a massive opportunity where you’re talking about over a trillion dollars in purchasing power, and one of the fastest growing parts of the population.”
Ally Financial’s Brimmer said that, over the past several years, the company has been focused on ensuring that women’s sports get a fair deal. While women’s sports have grown in popularity, they still received a fraction of the marketing investment and sports media coverage. With this in mind, in May 2022 the company committed to spend equally on men’s and women’s sports within five years, and is poised to reach its 50-50 goal ahead of schedule–by the end of this year.
Becoming a champion of women’s sports has been more than a feel-good project for Ally, according to Brimmer. She pointed out that it takes a lot of effort, funding and differentiation to break through in sports. So, leaning into women’s sports gave Ally Financial the opportunity for disruption.
She said that the company could see that “the moment for women’s sports was really coming [and asked] ‘how can we naturally and authentically integrate into that to be one of the brands that can punch above our weight, especially in this highly complex media ecosystem?” The decision has paid off. Brimmer says that the company “finished last year with the highest level of all of our KPIs in the history of our company, highest level of awareness ever in the history of our company, highest level of positive brand sentiment ever in the history of our company…the earned media impressions alone have been staggering.”
As Paramount COO Ellis described, there’s an opportunity being missed in which marketers can align their messaging and actions with underrepresented communities. “It speaks to how entrenched processes and systems are,” he said. “We have to change processes to change the outcomes and I don’t think we’ve done nearly enough as an industry to change how we market to culture.”
Antitrust action
Platforms are coming under heavy scrutiny in 2024. Just last month, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched an inquiry into big tech companies including Alphabet, Amazon.com, Microsoft Corp, and their investments in AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic PBC.
The inquiry will examine the relationship between some of these big tech companies and newer AI firms that they’ve been investing in, explained FTC Chair Lina Khan in a live-streamed interview with Axios’ Fischer. Khan says the agency is asking “Are there certain expectations of exclusivity? Are there certain rights to board seats, or other mechanisms influencing business strategy or direction of innovation?”
Historically, at technological inflection points, you have potential paradigm shifts in the technologies that are available can be enormously important for opening up markets and injecting competition and disrupting existing incumbents, Khan said. “We just want to make sure that these relationships and partnerships are not being misused to undermine competition.”
In a session recorded for The Verge editor Nilay Patel’s podcast “Decoder,” Jonathan Kanter, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust at the department of justice, set the stakes even higher. “News and journalism is the raw material of our democracy and the marketplace of ideas is vital to a thriving… democratic free society.” Therefore, his work examines whether monopolies have arisen, or are poised to, which threaten the health and survival of the news media.
As Kanter described it, “if monopolization and harm to competition is harming journalism, it means that companies can’t invest in original journalism in the kind of reporting and infrastructure that is necessary, not just on a national level but on a local level, to keep our country free of corruption, to make sure that our political discourse is well-informed, to make sure that people can learn about exciting new things, to make sure that we can vote in an informed way. It’s hard to imagine something that’s more important, more critical to the fabric of our nation.”
Press freedom, democracy and the human cost of doing journalism
Throughout the program, storytellers from around the world discussed the human cost of journalism, and the need to unify as an industry to protect journalists and the right and responsibility of the media to speak truth to power.
Paul Beckett, assistant editor at The Wall Street Journal, detailed the work he and a wide team from the WSJ and others are doing to release his reporter Evan Gershkovich, who is being detained in Russia. He emphasized that it is up to the entire industry to protect journalists from forces that would stifle the free press. “It has ripple effects and, at its broadest, it is an attack on one of the great freedoms,” Beckett said.
Rappler CEO and 2021 Nobel laureate Maria Ressa discussed her ongoing efforts to hold the line on press freedom with Pivot podcast co-host Kara Swisher. She also explored her 10 point plan to support journalism. “In 2021, I compared what tech did to an atom bomb exploding in our information ecosystem… because it’s changing the cellular level of democracy. It’s only gotten worse since 2021,” Ressa said.
In 2024, at least 64 countries (including the European Union) will hold national elections. That’s almost 50% of the world’s population. “Since we don’t have integrity of facts, how are we going to have integrity of elections?” Ressa pointed out.
She called for publishers to stop competing with each other when it comes to larger issues of misinformation, disinformation, and the impact of dominant platforms on the media industry and society as a whole. While she recognizes that news organizations vie for audiences, Ressa believes there are areas where collaboration is critical. “I know that we cannot continue competing against each other because we’re on the same side of facts,” said Ressa. “We’re on the same side of a shared reality, right? Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate.”
Amid the attacks on the press by those in power, it’s important that the press behave as professionals, not combatants, former Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron explained to the audience. “I think one of the critical things for us is to actually persuade the public that we’re giving them information… that we’re not just participating in ideological or partisan warfare,” Baron said.
People shape the future
As digital media progresses with artificial intelligence, navigates platform partnerships, protects democracy, and markets to new cultural opportunities into 2024, it’s clear that the future of the industry lies in its people. As DCN CEO Jason Kint remarked, “it’s in the hearts and minds of extraordinary individuals who make up our membership, it’s the humans who uncover the truths, who amplify silenced voices and who hold the powerful accountable.”
The topline: As Generative AI dominates media industry conversations, it is important to understand consumer and worker sentiment and adoption to guide the development and implementation of GenAI tools.
As 2024 unfolds, Generative AI (GenAI) tools will increasingly be embedded into everyday digital products and services, as well as within the workplace. As the digital media landscape evolves and is shaped by the impact of these tools, a growing body of research sheds light on how consumer interest and adoption trends vary by demographic.
Interest in GenAI tools such as ChatGPT, Bing chat, DALL-E, Midjourney, and Snapchat My AI, differs significantly among generations, genders, and nationalities. Studies find younger users out in front of adoption – but with uneven patterns along gender lines. Globally, interest in GenAI tools varies among countries based on type of media (text, audio, image, or video).
Newsroom leaders and workers in general increasingly use GenAI tools, and report positive expectations for future productivity. However, even these “pro” users have concerns, and workplace policies and guidance lags usage. The following takeaways offer insight for digital media professionals as they shape their GenAI strategies, both internally and for consumer facing products.
Young users more avid – and more worried
A recent Ofcom study of people in the United Kingdom aligns with prior research finding Gen Z and even younger children at the forefront of GenAI adoption. The study found 79% of online teens 13-17 and 40% of online children 7-12 using GenAI tools, compared to 31% of adults overall, and only 14% of adults over 44.
However, while the UK teens surveyed were more avid adopters of GenAI, they were also more likely to express concern about it. 67% of 16–24-year-olds surveyed expressed concerns about the societal implications of GenAI, compared to 58% of all respondents. One possible implication is that users more familiar with the power of GenAI are also more cognizant of its potential dangers.
Gender differences in GenAI adoption
The Ofcom study found that SnapChat My AI, which became free to all SnapChat users in April of 2023, has widely been embraced by users, especially teenage girls. In contrast, far more boys than girls report using ChatGPT. Overall, OfCom reports indicate that significantly more online males than females use GenAI tools, making the female preference for SnapChat MY AI all the more noteworthy. As Snapchat My AI became embedded within users’ prior social media accounts, ease of use and syncing with social habits may have boosted appeal for girls.
75% of teenage girls use SnapChat My AI, compared with 51% of all users ages 7-17.
34% of boys ages 7-17 report using ChatGPT, versus 13% of girls in the same age range.
Overall, 39% of men (16 and up) use GenAI tools, versus 24% of women in the same age range, according to the OfCom survey.
69.5% of overall GenAI users were men, 30.5% women, according to a usage analysis of the top 50 AI tools online by Writerbuddy. 60% of the visits to the top 50 tools were to ChatGPT. One tool used almost as frequently by women as men was CapCut, a video-production tool.
Some theorize that gender disparity in the tech sector led to earlier adoption of GenAI tools among males. However, as such tools become more embedded in products and services people already use, like SnapChat, we may see equal engagement among females.
Global Gen AI trends differ by type of tool
Globally, interest in GenAI varies widely by media (whether the material generated is in the form of text, imagery, video, or audio). Maps created by ElectronicsHub reveal that, across all popular tools, the Philippines, Singapore, and Canada lead the world in GenAI interest (as measured by search volume per 100 k residents).
The Philippines clocked 5,288 searches per 100 k of its population, compared to 2,213 in Canada. The United States trailed Canada at 1,187. The United Kingdom fell between Canada and the U.S. at 1,546. However, preferences for certain types of tools varied by country and region.
The Philippines, Singapore, and Canada topped the interest in text-generating services such as ChatGPT and Quillbot.
Israel led interest in image-generating tools (such as DALL-E 2 and MidJourney) with 311 searches per 100 k in the country’s population.
South America showed a strong interest in audio-generating tools such as FakeYou and VoiceGPT. Urugay topped the global list at 230 searches per 100 k population, followed by Chile and Argentina.
Video-generating tools were most popular in Singapore (57 searches per 100 k), the United Arab Emirates, and Cyprus – all of which led over Canada, the UK, and the US.
U.S. workers embrace GenAI tools
Over half (56%) of 1100 United States workers surveyed reported using GenAI on the job, according to the research by The Conference Board. Ten percent reported doing so daily. Most of the respondents were office workers so popular uses include drafting written content, brainstorming ideas, and conducting background research. Of those using GenAI at work, most reported positive outcomes, and had optimistic expectations.
63% of employees surveyed believe using such tools increased their productivity.
33% expect AI to replace elements of their job in a beneficial manner, such as freeing time for more conceptual and creative work by speeding routine tasks.
Lagging the enthusiasm is robust guidelines and policies around the use of GenAI in the workplace. Only 26% of those surveyed stated that their company currently has policy in place, while 23% say policy is under development.
News leaders anticipate GenAI advantages
Newsroom professionals also anticipate advantages in using GenAI tools to improve efficiency and tailor content. In a recent survey of 314 media leaders in 56 countries by Reuters Institute, news executives predicted GenAI would be useful in back-end automation work such as transcription and copyediting, as well as distribution, commercial applications, and content creation with human oversight. They believe GenAI tools will help support investigation work, fact-checking, and verification. Productivity gains around use of GenAI in coding have been significant.
However, over half of those surveyed expressed concerns related to GenAI use in content creation and over a quarter had concerns about its use in newsgathering. Concerns centered around impact on reputation and public trust, as well as protection of intellectual property.
Newsroom leaders face the challenge of shaping policies around the use of GenAI tools. This includes designating senior editorial staff to oversee use and strategy. But Reuters’ Changing Newsrooms 2023 report found only a minority have acted thus far.
16% of news leaders have a designated AI leader in the newsroom.
24% are in the process of establishing a designated AI leader.
16% have detailed AI guidelines in place.
35% are working on establishing detailed guidelines.
Opportunity for leadership
Ethics and policy around the use of GenAI is sure to be a hot topic in 2024, as users express concern about ramifications and look to media leaders for oversight. The World Economic Forum strongly recommends a proactive approach to GenAI governance and risk management. Since this is an area where many companies lag, it represents an opportunity for forward-thinking media executives to lead.
