Slides presented to the Fall Conference of the New York Press Association.

1. How will AI redefine journalism, media
and advertising in the next five years?
Damian Radcliffe (@damianradcliffe)
Chambers Professor of Journalism, University of Oregon

2. Plan for today
1. Intros
2. How has/is AI being used in newsrooms
3. Emerging Use Trends
4. Strategic & Editorial considerations
5. Q&A

3. I know it’s just after 9am on a Saturday…
But hopefully that sounds good!

4. Focus on strategic questions and uses, not tools

5. Who are you?

7. About Me
• British – in USA since 2015
• Married (Habiba)
• 3 x Children (Nyla, Yara and Rafi)
• 1 cat (Oreo)
• Love(d) to travel (57 countries)
• BA and MA Oxford University

8. 1995 – 1999: The Local Radio Company
1999 – 2003: BBC
2003 – 2008: CSV Media (NGO)
2008 – 2012: Ofcom (UK Office of Communications)
2012 - 2014: ictQATAR (Ministry of Information and Communication Technology)
2012 + Freelance journalist + trainer
2015+ University of Oregon
1995 2023
Background and Timeline

9. Carolyn S. Chambers Professor in Journalism
University of Oregon
Fellow, Tow Center for Digital Journalism
Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism
Honorary Research Fellow
Cardiff University, School of Journalism, Media and Culture Studies
Life Fellow
Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA)
Many hats

10. Visiting Fellow
Oxford University

12. Recent research includes…

13. A few more…

15. Ø Community-Centered Journalism Pts 2 & 3
Ø Philanthropy and State-level interventions for local news
Ø World Press Trends 2023-24
Ø Columns: Digital Content Next (Online Publishers Association),
International Journalists’ Network (IJNET)
In the pipeline

17. How will AI redefine journalism, media
and advertising in the next five years?

18. AI is the industry hot topic of 2023
"A tsunami is coming, we
can either ride it or
get wiped out by it.”
Nicholas Carlson
Insider global editor-in-chief

20. This week alone…
Tues, 90+ pages Mon, 30-min read

21. When was ChatGPT released?

22. November 2022

23. Why are we talking about this?
“The next wave of technical innovation is already here – and we are
not talking about the metaverse. Extraordinary advances in artificial
intelligence (AI) in 2022 have laid bare more immediate opportunities
– and challenges – for journalism.
AI offers the chance for publishers (finally) to deliver more personal
information and formats, to help deal with channel fragmentation and
information overload. But these new technologies will also bring
existential and ethical questions – along with more deep fakes, deep
porn, and other synthetic media. Buckle up for the ride.”
- Nic Newman, Reuters Institute 2023 Predictions Report

24. Definition
AI is a “collection of ideas, technologies, and techniques that
relate to a computer system’s capacity to perform tasks
normally requiring human intelligence”
Generative AI is a subfield within machine learning “that
involves the generation of new data, such as text, images, or
code, based on a given set of input data”.
LSE Report

25. Top 50 consumer
web products by
monthly visits
Via a16z

26. ChatGPT = 60% of traffic.
Reach akin to the size of
LinkedIn, Twitch and
Reddit.
CharacterAI = 21%.

27. What are people using AI for?

28. Of the top 50 products, 80% didn't
exist a year ago. Nearly half are
bootstrapped, and only 5% are part of
big tech companies like Google.
Olivia Moore, Consumer Partner, A16Z.

29. Do you use AI? If so, how?

30. What concerns
do you have?

31. Source: WAN-IFRA

32. Hard to ignore.
Too big (and useful) to ignore?

34. How has/is AI being used?
This is about more than
just Generative AI…

36. Routine/Formulaic reporting
• Earnings reports
• Sports
• Traffic updates
• House sales
• New company registrations
• Weather
• … and more!
AP uses automation to produce nearly
4,500 stories covering U.S.
corporate earnings each quarter.

37. A/B Testing, Homepage placement
• Sophi.io, which uses social, retention and engagement data
to measure the performance of the articles.
• Information is used to assist in programming the homepage
and key landing pages.
• According to Sonali Verma, Deputy Head of Audience at the
Globe, it places 99% of the content – only the top three
slots are manually programmed by homepage editors.

38. Generation of headlines, SEO, tags

39. Dynamic Paywalls

40. Personalization

41. Newsletters
ARLnow, already has an automated daily afternoon
newsletter that includes story headlines, excerpts,
photos, and links sent to about 16,000 subscribers.
Recently launched an automated morning newsletter.

42. User control of text news articles in the Artifact app.
, including as summaries, as simplified language, as a poem, as ‘Gen Z’ language and as
audio readings by celebrities > well-funded news aggregators such as Artifact (launched by
the founders of Instagram)

44. “Gender Bot”
• Dagens Nyheter or DN, Sweden's largest daily
newspaper, which aspires to full national and
international coverage and positions itself as
"independent liberal," has developed a so-called
"gender robot" in order to promote equality.
• "Genusroboten" or "gender robot" is an app that
informs the staff on how gender equal their
texts have been by sending notifications
with analysis on a monthly basis. The analysis
is based on the number of referrals to men and
women. (2018)
• “It’s not just an altruistic response to the
equality gap: research shows a positive
correlation between stories that include
quotes from women and higher rates of
engagement with female readers – an untapped
market.”
Elisabeth Gamperl, Managing Editor, Digital
Storytelling Unit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich

45. Multi-purposing content
Examples of potentially high-value journalistic tasks that
can be accomplished using cross-media models include:
• Automated or semi-automated creation of text articles
from audio or video source material,
• Creation of audio and video news products from text
articles
• Transformation of text articles into graphical stories
or videos,
• Automated or semi-automated creation of podcasts from
articles.

46. Transcription

47. Alerts
• Quake Bot at LA Times
• Stock market shifts at WSJ
(pings reporter in Slack)
• Predictive (NewsWhip)

48. Recommendation engines

50. Programmatic advertising (90%+ of all digital display ads

51. To sum up
AI innovation in the past
decade can be categorized
into three waves:
automation, augmentation
and generation
h/t Francesco Marconi a computational
journalist and co-founder of the
real-time information
company AppliedXL. Previously, he was
R&D Chief at The Wall Street
Journal and AI and news automation
co-lead at the Associated Press.

52. AI use isn’t new.
Just changing
FAST.

54. 10x Strategic and
Editorial Considerations

55. 1. You need a strategy

57. Adoption lower than you might think
New LSE survey (105 news and media orgs in 46 countries)
• Four in ten news orgs have not greatly changed their approach to AI since 2019
• However, 80% expect an increase in the use of AI in their newsrooms; and
• 73% believe generative AI tools present new opportunities for journalism
• 85% have experimented with generative AI technology to varying degrees so
far.Cautious Experimentation
• 90% of respondents said AI of some kind was being used in their newsroom for news
production (such as fact-checking, proofreading and writing summaries), 80% for news
distribution (for example, content personalisation and recommendation, text-to-
speech tools and social media posting), and 75% for newsgathering (trend detection
and news discovery or tools like transcription and extracting text from images)

58. What do you want AI to help you achieve?
Start with the end goal in mind…

59. 2. And some clear guidelines…

60. Key themes
• Oversight
• Transparency (e.g. labels)
• Banned vs. Allowed uses
• Accountability and Responsibility
• Privacy and Confidentiality
• Cautious Experimentation
• Strategic Use
• Training
• Bias

61. 3. Transparency
• When/where content is
produced using AI
• Publication of AI
guidelines
e.g., Associated Press, The
Guardian, Wired, Insider

62. • We do not publish stories with text generated by AI
• We do not publish text edited by AI either
• We may try using AI to suggest headlines or text for short social media posts
• We may try using AI to generate story ideas
• We may experiment with using AI as a research or analytical tool
• We may publish AI-generated images or video, but only under certain conditions
• We specifically do not use AI-generated images instead of stock photography
• We or the artists we commission may use AI tools to spark ideas
Source: https://www.wired.com/about/generative-ai-policy/

64. Have fun with it!
Italian newspaper Il
Foglio announced a challenge for
its readers: for 30 days starting
in the second week of March, it
will publish short texts written
by AI in its daily edition.
Readers who can correctly identify
each text over a week are eligible
to win a free subscription and a
bottle of champagne.

65. 4. Copyright and IP protection

66. Learn from past mistakes
That means not getting into bed
with tech companies on the promise
that a revenue model will be
worked out down the line.
“We cannot rely on someone else’s
platform to build our business,”
Juan Señor, President
of Innovation Media Consulting

67. Open AI funding for Local News

68. What you can do
1. Opt out - use the OpenAI Data
Opt-Out Request form
2. Block OpenAI's web crawler
"GPTBot" via the
robots.txt file
3. Flag in your Ts&Cs - NYT updated its
terms of service on Aug. 3 to forbid using
Times content in "training a machine learning
or artificial intelligence (AI) system.”
4. License your content – ala AP, need
for consortia esp. for smaller players

69. 5. Managing culture change
Norway’s leading newspaper Verdens Gang
has incorporated AI-generated summaries
of human-written stories.
“That minimizes the risk of things like
hallucinations and could be a good way to
introduce the technology to newsrooms
because journalists may be more receptive
to using AI for mundane tasks”, INMA’s
Paula Felps argues.

70. 6. New roles, skills,
workflows and beats
• NYT job – this week
• Internal training

71. 7. Understand – and manage risks
• Generative AI isn’t full-proof (CNET, MSN, Gannett)
• Typically, still requires editing, proofing etc.
• A lot of generated images are just plain weird!

73. 8. Misinformation will be important
Harder than ever to discern fact from fiction

75. Memes

77. 9. Understand changing consumer habits
“As a news industry, we have to be
hyper-aware of changes in audience or
consumer expectation.
The media industry has been left behind
by previous technological changes.”

78. A series of images showing OpenAI's proposed uses of the
ChatGPT Android app, taken from the Google Play Store.

79. 10. Innovation + do something new!
“Rather than focusing on how to get AI to do all the things human
reporters do, why not make new types of content that will engage
readers, but that are beyond what your human teams can create?”
Louise Story in Nieman Lab

80. https://aiportrait.wsj.com/

81. What of the future?
10 predictions and things to look for

83. 5 x Resources and Further Reading

84. Free training
offered in English, Spanish and Portuguese

85. Numerous
Playbooks

87. AI Tools for Local Newsrooms Database

88. What of the future?
10 predictions and things to look for

90. Wariness is understandable
Aimee Rinehart quote WNIP
NFTs
The Metaverse
Citizen Journalism
VR
AR
Chat Bots?
Some social media
- Threads, Google +
- Pivot to video
- Facebook Local
What else?

91. “…These days, being a journalist shares
at least one quality with being a shark.
If you‘re not moving
forward, it's over.”
Margaret Sullivan

92. 1. This feels different…

93. “AI will reshape the media
landscape, and the organizations
that use it creatively will thrive.”
Louise Story, Nieman Lab (21 September 2023)
At The New York Times, she co-authored the Innovation Report and ran the live
video unit, and at The Wall Street Journal, she led content and product strategy

94. 2. AI will generate more efficiencies
• Sifting for stories – AI as a “metal detector”
• Free up journalists to spend more time reporting and investigating,
community engagement etc.

95. Same content – many channels

96. 3. What you do with these
efficiencies is key

97. 4. Differentiation, Expertise, Niche

98. “In a world of AI-driven
journalism, your human-driven
journalism will be the standout.”
Professor Charlie Beckett, LSE

99. 5. RIP Commodity Content
“Developing forms of differentiation will likely be very
challenging for many news organisations, especially for those
whose current product is largely built on packaging commodity
information, however there may eventually be no alternative.”
David Caswell, consultant, builder, and researcher focused on AI in news. David has led news
product innovation at the BBC, Tribune Publishing & Yahoo! and publish peer-reviewed work.

100. 6. Some jobs will go, some will be created

101. "ChatGPT is not a journalist.
You are responsible for the accuracy, fairness,
originality, and quality of every word in your stories."

102. 7. Only going to become a bigger labor issue
“If such technology involves the use of artificial intelligence (AI), including
machine learning or deep learning, it shall be limited to supplementing the
collection, organization, recording or maintenance of information…”
“AI shall not be used to perform work
that is editorial in nature, including
but not limited to the interpretation or
analysis of information, communications
with sources or generation of news
content or illustrations.”
APP-MCJ Guild and the AP News Guild

103. 8. Search is dead.
Long live Search.

104. 9. Changes in advertising
• Copywriting
• Placement
• Personalization
• Image creation

105. 10. Regulation and Self-Regulation to the fore
• Xxxx
• Unions and writers strike

106. TLDR
• Embrace change > AI is inevitable (and that’s fine), won’t work for everything
• More content – more noise = Differentiation opp for trusted sources/brands
• Verification, trust, voice and objectivity; areas publishers should lean into
• Develop your AI beat(s), incl. verification and misinformation skills
• Understand risks (inaccuracy, subscriptions, loss of IP, need to label)

107. Q&A

108. Email: damianr@uoregon.edu
Twitter/X: @damianradcliffe
Web: www.damianradcliffe.com
Thanks for listening