Tomorrow’s news, today (with AI)

This article is about the journalism industry and AI, but the changes we see happening here have broader applications for many companies. Having a sound strategy in place to deal with AI’s impact is now a matter of relevance or oblivion.

These days are not that great a time to be a journalist. It is hard to find a publication or media company which is not getting rid of people. Famous news organizations like The Los Angeles Times and Time magazine are doing major layoffs. The journalists left behind reported that just in January of 2024, over 500 were let go. Yours truly wrote last July about the dire strait of the industry which for years ignored the signs of a failing business model. Now, the industry is blaming everyone but itself. That article covering these changes in the news business could be easily dismissed. After all, it was written by someone who knows very little about the industry. Perhaps it was dismissed by most. But I would be happy to argue that what I wrote at that time is still accurate.

Why do I bring this topic up again? I came across a paper by a researcher at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism discussing the state of the industry and predictions for years to come. One thing which doesn't breed optimism is that only half of the respondents are confident about the future. From this paper, you also learn about the sharp decline of traffic from social media to news websites. The paper versions of the news are already dead and AI is coming for the rest.

The competition is no longer just 'the other media company' but individuals on various social networks, who provide news coverage and have more of a following than the biggest brands in journalism. You place yourself in the middle of the action (protest, war, accident) and provide live coverage through your? TikTok account. You look trustworthy by not being part of the establishment. You speak in the language of your audience and the message resonates.

This is something which the traditional media companies had a hard time understanding until recently. However, based on the report, we see that some news organizations are - at this late hour - starting to grasp this concept. Most of the news organizations surveyed in the report are realizing that just producing text with a few pictures and then posting it on the website won't work anymore.

While trying to expand the publishing channels to WhatsApp, TikTok, YouTube and few others (and leaving Facebook and Twitter/X) they are turning themselves into multimedia publishing organizations. It has to be now not only text and pictures, but also audio and video. They’re expanding production, increasing distribution channels, collecting all the data, and running analytics puts extra pressure on these companies because the revenue is not growing fast enough to be able to hire more people.

Getting more subscribers is the name of the game now (in contrast with the media’s old default strategy of just letting advertisers pay the bills). Some publications are trying to attract a new audience with games (what's your Wordle strategy?) and cooking - oldies but goodies.

So many possibilities, so many ideas, not enough time and not enough money. That's where the conundrum comes. There is so much technology around which can help. That seems especially true with AI, where one prompt on the screen can replace so many people ... or can it?

Based on the report, the news organizations want to use the tech for back-office automation, content distribution, support for content creation and news gathering. Some either do or plan to use the tech as AI presenters or news readers. With the latest announcement from OpenAI about Sora, the text-to-video? model, nothing seems impossible. The report goes into many more details about trends, competition and possible ways going forward.

The recurrent pattern in all this? Running a business without sound strategy is a road to oblivion. If you don't have the vision, can’t decide on the market and the customer you need to target, don't understand what's required to provide the value to the customer and what tools are required to achieve that - then you end up in the fight of your life, just like the newspaper business.