AI is Ushering in the Best Era for Journalism - Welcome the times of AI-Powered Journalists (Thoughts from an AI Expedition to Silicon Valley)

I have put on hold my roles as VP of the Board and COO at the large media group Ringier Axel Springer to spend six months in the Silicon Valley, immersing myself in AI to understand how this new technology will influence media, advertising, and eCommerce industries. In this series of articles, I'll share my observations on its impact, starting with journalism.

There are many dilemmas about how AI will influence the flow of information, the news industry, journalism as a profession, and consequently, western democracies and the right to objective information. Although there are still too many unknowns, and it's probably too early to make projections, my time in the Valley and discussions with many platform, media, and AI startup executives have made me optimistic about this topic.

I strongly believe the best time for journalism lies ahead.

There are three main reasons why I think journalism will thrive in the age of AI:

1. AI-augmented journalists will become true Power Journalists capable of far more amazing work than ever before.
2. I tend to beleive that credible media will regain a direct relationship with users, away from social media platforms.
3. We will see compensation for content creators when their work is consumed by users via generative AI platforms (chatbots).

Let's analyze each one:

1.) AI-Augmented Journalists = Power Journalists, and this is why:

• Information and news discovery in the AI era will reach entirely new heights. AI tools will enable journalists to analyze millions of unstructured files, including handwritten ones, searching for specific information and presenting it in a digestible, easy-to-use format. Tasks that would take ages manually will now be accomplished in hours.
• Repetitive, boring, non-journalistic work will be taken off journalists' plates. Today, significant share of the time invested in a story goes toward preparing it for digital distribution: writing alternative headlines, bullet points, SEO headlines, cross-linking, SEO optimization, social media distribution, preparing one piece for multiple channels... All of these tasks and more will now be automated.
• Hidden correlations in large datasets or complex corporate corruption schemes will be exposed with the help of massive processing power. No information will be hidden in a world where journalists are augmented by AI. AI will find masked correlations in large datasets and listen to public debates in search of news. What was preventing the truth due to capacity limitations will no longer be an obstacle.
• Stories will have better illustrations. Often, journalists cannot find the right photo or, due to time pressure or lack of resources, illustrate with nice graphics. Occasionally, they would like to create visual illustrations or graphics explaining complex events, but for the above reasons, they cannot always do so. With AI, a few prompts could create amazing infographics.
• Young journalists will get AI guidance for their work based on a knowledge graph of the best journalists out there. Senior editors currently spend much time coaching young journalists on story flow. Now, AI can do this directly in content management systems.
• Video storytelling will not require huge equipment and studios. In some cases, writing a prompt scenario would be enough to get an animated story to complement an article.
• Fact-checking will be more precise and real-time.
• Immersive storytelling is becoming a reality. With Meta Quest Pro, Apple Vision Pro, and their incredible immersive experiences, journalists will tell stories in entirely new ways while readers will immerse themselves in stories.

For all of the above to happen though, we would need to make sure that our journalists acquire AI skills, that they get access to AI tools, that their content management systems support AI solutions, that they are supported by data and ML experts who can recognize available models and ideate how these models can be used for beter journalism.

I would still though like to underline that i used the word augmented journalists. No content should be published without human touch and careful evaluation by the professional editors as this is the only guarantee that this content can be trusted.

2.) Regaining Direct Traffic from Social Media Platforms:

I'm convinced that, over time, media companies will regain a direct relationship with users, away from social media platforms, for 3 main reasons, 2 of which is AI:

• In the avalanche of fake content that "so-called journalistic products" and different interest groups will start mass-producing with AI, people will lose trust in content served through social media. When this happens, they will need a trusted compass and will go back to credible sources

• On the other hand, we see social media platforms resigning from news content, which helps on its own.
• The phrase “content personalisation”, will get completely different meaning in the age of AI. While today, under personalisation we were concidering personalised content recomendation, in other words personalised selection of the articles for every user, in future we will be seeing personalised content generation. Every single article will be potentially generated in different way for each particular user. Lets for a moment think about the story about popular “On” sneaker producer where the core story consits of: story about the founder, company performance, company roots, fashion collection, latest models… this same story could be structured in completely different way for fashionista or banker… I tend to beleive that better personalisation will influence readers to come to publishers websites directly.

3.) We will see compensation for content creators when their work is consumed by readers via generative AI platforms (chatbots).

There is no such thing as free and non-partisan journalism without financial independence. What the media industry didn't accomplish with web 2.0 platforms like Google and Facebook – fair compensation for their work – will, in my opinion, be possible with AI-powered platforms. I believe this for 3 reasons:

• The companies behind Large language models and and AI bots, will be forced to offer revenue-sharing opportunities or license compensation on news stories, as they realize that for the open web and their products to work well, content needs to be good. This can only happen if media companies can earn from their content. Otherwise, when media companies lose financing, the only thing remaining will be unverified content. The whole system, including AI platforms, would collapse.
• Considering the clarity that AI platforms' knowledge is created from the collective archive of all content creators, I cannot imagine a world where regulators do not require content creators to be rewarded for their work.
• Media companies have learned their lessons and won't give in so easily this time.

After a decade of clickbait, the hunt for easy traffic, populist content, and shrinking newsrooms, I want to believe that for all the above reasons, we will see a growing amount of journalistic quality on the internet, thanks to AI! As an industry, we just need to embrace it and not allow a few misuses to become an excuse for maintaining the status quo. Like most revolutionary technologies, there was always the potential for misuse, but let's focus on the positive use cases that can truly help make journalism better than ever.

I personally, cant wait to go back to my colleagues and start implementing all these things at Axel Springer and Ringier Axel Springer.