Many journalists spend their days reporting on how the world is changing and what different industries are doing to adapt and thrive. The journalism industry itself is no exception and must move with the times, especially when it comes to using new technology. 

This year’s Future of Media Technology Conference, held by the Press Gazette, explored some of the different ways that publishers are adjusting. Here are some of the key takeaways from the day.

Opportunities and challenges of AI in journalism

AI has been the buzzword in the industry for the last few years now, with publishers both wary of it as a threat and experimenting with its potential in the editorial process. One such threat is from bots trying to trawl through articles and data, and Tom Jackson, Chief Technology Officer of News UK, revealed some stats from the publisher:

‘In the last six months, about a fifth of our traffic was non-human across all of our products, and about a third of that fifth, we ended up blocking because it was malicious bot traffic. So 6% of that traffic we’re currently blocking’.

The Financial Times CEO, Jon Slade, had a case where a single account generated 1.23 million access requests in just eight hours. The FT has now invested in building its own tool to help identify these unauthorised access requests, while News UK has opted for an external tool.

The threats don’t just come from bots and scrapers, there has also been a rise in both fake experts and fake journalists. David Higgerson, Chief Content Officer of Reach plc, said the publisher now has detection tools in place and best practices when it comes to verifying sources, becoming ‘universally unpopular in the PR industry’ by creating a database of trusted PR companies.

Press Gazette has teamed up with Flip-Pay to launch Made by Humans. This new tool aims to both detect and prevent any AI content, experts or sources from finding its way into journalists articles.

While AI is causing issues for publishers, it’s also proving useful, too. Jon Slade mentioned the introduction of prompts to the AskFT tool which gives readers a starting point for searching through articles and is leading to higher engagement. While Anna Sbuttoni, Deputy Head of Digital at The Times and The Sunday Times, talked of experimenting with it for making recommendations, and how it has helped the community team:

‘We have brought in AI to support comment moderation. It’s still overseen by humans but it’s brought that work way down and freed up that team to more interesting community-focused work’.

Quality over quantity (and clicks)

Publishers seem to be shifting away from views and clicks, to ensuring readers are actually engaging with what they are offering. Jon Slade talked about how the FT made ‘a deliberate choice’ to focus on its subscription business because it’s not interested in trying to ‘pursue volume for volume sake’. 

The FT team has come up with a specific calculation for engagement, as well as paying close attention to the number of recognised users – which requires readers to give their email address, permission to market to them, and general consent. Jon elaborated on this further:

‘Engagement is the metric that we really care about. Lots of dimensions go into that and the word quality is within most of them. So we’re looking at not just reading the article, but how far down the article did they go? Did they comment? Did they share? Those are the signals we are looking for and it gives confidence that we’re building an engaged audience.’

Anna Sbuttoni explained how they are also focusing on value, both ‘the value that a subscriber brings, and what value you can give to a subscriber’. She thinks that this is no longer necessarily just volume and the newsroom instead has to measure engagement via how often readers are coming to them, what they’re doing when they are there. and how they are engaging. Anna believes that ‘incentivises quality and great journalism’.

Reach plc is also making this change. David Higgerson spoke of how the ‘scale and volume model worked for Reach for a long time’ but said the focus now had to be around keeping audiences on their own platforms:

‘People are less likely to see us and they’re less likely to come back at the moment. The focus is around making sure that we take our brands to where the readers are.’

Adapting to the current media landscape 

The Reuters Digital News Report has become a must-read for anyone in the media industry since its inception fifteen years ago. Mitali Mukherjee, Director of the Reuters Institute, covered some of the key facts from this year’s report, which came out back in June.

On a positive note, 66% of people who pay for subscriptions do so on a recurring basis. Mitali said that despite it only being ‘a lean base’, there is loyalty from readers. Those readers are also worried about fake news, with 77% of respondents saying it was a concern to them. This likely links to the fact that trust in news has fallen by 5% in the UK since last year. However, Mitali mentioned that ‘trust in individual news brands, such as the BBC, ITV, Financial Times, has actually stood quite strong’.

The other notable change is the continued rise of people accessing news and information via social media. Instagram has seen an 11% rise since 2021 and 26% of the respondents now get their news from here. 20% are getting their news from TikTok and after gradual decline, Facebook has turned a corner and is now up 7% since last year, to 43%. The most consistent growth has come from YouTube which is now at 34%. This also ties in more generally with readers wanting to consume online video, with Mitali saying that ‘77% of those that Reuters surveyed now consume some form of online video across platforms’.

She also shared more generally a few points for publishers to consider in the current media landscape:

1. Develop and value top talent as a core part of the brand experience
2. Reinforce news brands’ reputation as bedrocks of trust in a fraying media landscape
3. Create more products/bundles to create more value and loyalty
4. Broaden appeal by leaning into online video and audio formats
5. Use AI smartly to innovate news products, content and personalisation

Relationships and community key with the audience

If you want to be successful as a publisher or news outlet then ultimately it comes down to the relationship with the audience, and Jason Konen, Director of Product, Newsroom & Media Technology for WP Engine, said that ‘it’s very important in the age of AI to have that interconnection with someone and grow your communities’. He said that a lot of their customers are seeing ‘newsletters re-emerging as the vehicle to reach people, because there’s no algorithm sitting between you and the reader’.

POLITICO has seen great success in this area. Originally starting out in America before moving to Brussels, it is now in the UK with its London playbook. Katie Palisoul, General Manager, UK at POLITICO believes this is due to being audience first:

‘For us, it’s an obsession with audience. The playbook is written with an exact audience in mind (an MP, a cabinet minister, etc.) and it thinks of that person as a person. It’s really focused on the daily life of that individual.’

Sam Hall, Managing Director at Ascend Media, has an audience of high net worth individuals and because the company knows and understands its readers, it is able to sell intelligence and insight into that audience, which is valuable for advertisers. Sam says that this ‘creates a really strong relationship with the audience because we can anticipate their needs. Plus it creates a strong return on investment for advertisers because they’re reaching the audience most likely to want their products and services’.

In addition to knowing what the audience wants, publishers also need to consider going where the audience are. The Reuters Digital News report highlighted that audiences are consuming news across a variety of platforms and Anna Jeys, Director of Audience at Reach plc, said that they have to be ready for that to reach new audiences:

‘We’ve experimented in a couple of places, such as Substack, and we launched the Northern Agenda Extra on LinkedIn because we felt there might be an audience for it there. For Reach plc, it’s about not limiting ourselves to our own platforms and getting on a platform where that community is building’.