AI isn’t the future – it’s the present of digital journalism

In a previous life as a head of digital I used to get really irritated when people talked about “the digital future”. It’s not the digital future, I’d mutter to myself, it’s the digital present!

A similar feeling struck me this week when I attended the recent WAN-IFRA Newsroom Summit in Zurich. This time, though, I was the one guilty of living in the past.

I had become used to thinking about a future in which AI plays a significant role in the creation and distribution of journalism. Listening to numerous presentations in the futuristic headquarters of local publisher Tamedia, I realised that we are actually living in an AI-enabled present. Newsrooms, often so conservative, are embracing the possibilities of AI with alacrity.

Liv Moloney, head of audio at The Economist, explained how they are using AI to translate their vertical video strand from English into Spanish, German, Mandarin and French. The HeyGen platform then synchronises the lip movements of the journalist to the new language. Any edits to the video, after a review by a native speaker, can be inputted by text and then automatically appear in the video.

The German speaker sitting next to me gave a one-word verdict on the demo video we were shown: “Astonishing!”

At a stroke, The Economist is able to address potential readers – these videos are aimed at a younger audience than its traditional subscribers – in their own language.

Reach, the UK biggest publisher, is using its proprietary Guten AI tool to speed up the production process, explained David Higgerson, its chief digital publisher. It takes feeds from trusted sources, such as the PA news wire, amends the copy to accord with house style, and then sends out publication-ready versions to Reach’s various online operations.

“It used to take nine minutes for a breaking news ‘snap’ to be published – it now takes 90 seconds,” said Higgerson, adding that this method accounted for about 25% of Reach’s content.

Kasper Lindskow, head of AI for Denmark’s JP/Politiken, a true global leader in this area, explained how his team of 15 people is working to “drive a paradigm shift in the way news is produced and consumed”. Next up is the idea of “liquid content”, whereby “stories can be consumed in any way the user wants”.

You want a video, a friend wants an audio story, I like good old-fashioned text. Liquid content would make us all happy. I expect us to be hearing a lot about this at conferences next year.

A familiar theme of conferences this and every year is that the Scandinavians are nailing it. How do they do this with such consistency? How have they dismantled the internal silos that afflict so many others? How have they managed to stay at the top end of digital innovation for a decade or more? These are questions that demand more investigation and are for another day.

For now, we can marvel at Schibsted, who couldn’t work out how to monetise their podcasts and so three years ago bought a podcast platform and hired Norway’s leading podcasters as well as putting their own podcasts on the platform. Oh, and they decided to charge €9.99 a month for something everyone was used to getting for free, explained Kristin Ward Heimal of Podme, the platform..

The result? 100,000 subscribers in the first two years, and up 20% in the third year; 40% awareness in Norway of Podme; 50% of listeners are under 35 and overall they are gender balanced; users are listening five times a week on average and listen to five different podcasts a month. All in all, a remarkable achievement.

At Amedia, a Norwegian local news company, they decided to address a problem that will be familiar to many newspapers – a rapidly ageing reader base. Janne Rygh, a content developer, said that of Amedia’s 790,000 subscribers, more than half were over 60. Worryingly, they had more subscribers (97,000) who were over 80 than those under 40 (95,000).

Their solution was radical. Utilising the principle that “you become what you measure”, they decided to remove older users from internal metrics in a trial involving two of their newspapers. Rather than focusing on overall subscriber reads, which naturally reflect the engagement of the more numerous older readers, they highlight only under-40 readers on dashboards.

The newsrooms were initially a bit unhappy at only seeing 10% of their traffic, and article readership measured in hundreds rather than thousands. But soon the changes kicked in. After six months, the editorial teams have changed the way they work. They are pursuing new kinds of stories to please their new younger audience.

The business editor of one of the papers, aged 59, said he had previously just written about middle-aged men whose businesses were performing well. Now he’s found all sorts of new stories about different kinds of people. The result, more readers overall, more under-40s and more subscriptions.

Indeed, overall an unexpected outcome was that subscribers over 40 were not perturbed by the change but they liked the new content too. Readership went up across all genres.

I came away thinking that we’re all – both consumers and producers of journalism – more willing to accept change that we might think. Adopting that mindset opens up a whole set of new possibilities for the future … sorry, present.