Weekly Digest | Issue #118 | 19 April 2024

My digest in this week's news cycle. An overview of the latest in news media market trends, sustainable business news, product development, media tech and AI.

Curated by Vincent Peyrègne

If you were forwarded this reading list and like it, consider passing it on to a colleague or friend who might find it helpful. Explore past issues here. New readers can sign up here. I love feedback. Let me know what themes you’re curious about and what features you want to see.

Subscribe

AI in journalism: how would public trust in the news be affected?

According to YouGov poll in the UK, few Britons think the positives would outweigh the negatives – although there are some tasks they tend to think it would be ok to allow AI to do.

➽ Humans instil more trust than AI in the media sphere, stating that “around half of Britons say they would trust a news article written by a human journalist and overseen by a human editor. Replacing [either a journalist or an editor] with an AI reduced trust to about a quarter; replacing both with AI reduced it to just one in eight.”

yougov.co.uk | Read More

AI is already reshaping newsrooms, AP study finds

A new study from The Associated Press reveals that generative artificial intelligence is already reshaping newsroom roles and workflow.

➽ Nearly 70% of newsroom staffers from various backgrounds and organizations surveyed in December say they’re using the technology for crafting social media posts, newsletters, and headlines, translating and transcribing interviews, and writing story drafts, among other uses. One-fifth said they’d used generative AI for multimedia, including social graphics and videos.

poynter.org | Read More

Stanford AI Index Report 2024

Essential trends such as technical advancements in AI, public perceptions of the technology, and the geopolitical dynamics surrounding its development

aiindex.stanford.edu

Read More | Market Trends

US Digital Ad Revenue Growth Decelerates Again in 2023, Per IAB Ad Revenue Report

US digital ad revenue grew at a slower rate in 2023 compared to 2022, according to the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report. ➽ Total revenue grew 7.3% YoY to $225B, digital video grew 10.6% to $52.1B, and digital audio grew 18.9% to $7B

adexchanger.com | Read More

Global Digital Subscription Snapshot 2023 Q4 - FIPP

The quarterly Snapshots, exclusive to FIPP members, are the most comprehensive reports on the global digital subscriptions market today and features information on publishing titles that enjoy the support of over 52 million subscribers.

fipp.com | Read More

UK Competition Authority outlines growing concerns in markets for AI Foundation Models

The CMA has outlined 3 key risks to effective competition on AI Foundation Models and has set out plans for further action in the market.

➽ The move from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) follows its initial report on AI Foundation Models (FMs) last year. The report proposed a set of principles to help sustain innovation and guide these markets toward positive outcomes for businesses, consumers, and the wider economy.

gov.uk | Read More

Getty Images CEO Calls for Industry Standards Around AI

The stock photo giant has entered into a deal with AI giant Nvidia to create AI tools trained on Getty's copyright-protected library of stock images. ➽ The CEO of Getty Images remains clear-eyed about the dangers generative AI could pose to the creative industries.

hollywoodreporter.com | Read More

Consumers approach AI-generated media content and news read by an AI voice with reservations

Sanoma Media Finland examined the opinions of the working-age population regarding generative artificial intelligence (AI). The survey examined the general relationship with AI-generated media content and particularly the relationship with news and audio articles read by an AI voice.

mediaalantutkimussaatio.fi | Read More

TollBit is building a marketplace between AI companies and media outlets to broker IP licensing deals.

TollBit, co-founded by Toast alumni Olivia Joslin and Toshit Panigrahi, basically lets publishers make their verified content available to AI companies, for a fee. Those fees can be dynamic — based on keyword prompt trends, for example — with TollBit providing both sides with pricing insights.

➽ It claims that a publisher can get on the platform with just about 15 minutes of IT integration, and that it's already signed some up (without providing names). Moreover, it believes that a third-party will be able to provide valuable usage analytics to companies that instead sign "traditional" licensing agreements.

axios.com | Read More

How People Are Really Using GenAI

There are many use cases for generative AI, spanning a vast number of areas of domestic and work life. Filtered technologies found that the use of this technology is as wide-ranging as the problems we encounter in our lives.

➽ The 100 categories they identified can be divided into six top-level themes, which give an immediate sense of what generative AI is being used for: Technical Assistance & Troubleshooting (23%), Content Creation & Editing (22%), Personal & Professional Support (17%), Learning & Education (15%), Creativity & Recreation (13%), Research, Analysis & Decision Making (10%).

hbr.org | Read More

When Facebook blocks news, studies show the political risks that follow

Canada has become ground zero for Facebook's battle with governments that have enacted or are considering laws that force internet giants - primarily the social media platform's owner Meta opens new tab and Alphabet's opens new tab Google - to pay media companies for links to news published on their platforms. Facebook has blocked news sharing in Canada rather than pay, saying news holds no economic value to its business.

➽ It is seen as likely to take a similar step in Australia should Canberra try to enforce its 2021 content licencing law after Facebook said it would not extend the deals it has with news publishers there. Facebook briefly blocked news in Australia ahead of the law.

➽ Where once news posts on Facebook garnered between 5 million and 8 million views from Canadians per day, that has disappeared, according to the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a McGill University and University of Toronto project.

➽ A separate NewsGuard study conducted for Reuters found that likes, comments and shares of what it categorised as "unreliable" sources climbed to 6.9% in Canada in the 90 days after the ban, compared to 2.2% in the 90 days before.

reuters.com | Read More

How Personalized EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) will put FAST Services in the Fast Lane

Amagi, a global SaaS technology provider, argues that personalization and data collection is changing how people watch TV, and writes in a white paper that “As FAST services begin to leverage viewer data like location, device ID, IP addresses, etc., the possibilities to deliver personalization, drive engagement, and monetization increase.”

amagi.com | Read More

Axios Sees A.I. Coming, and Shifts Its Strategy

Axios changes strategy in response to AI: more events, a $1K/year membership program, and more subscription newsletters.

➽ “The premium for people who can tell you things you do not know will only grow in importance, and no machine will do that,” says Jim VandeHei, C.E.O. of Axios.

nytimes.com | Read More

The Texas Tribune, Example or Exception?: A Candid Talk with Evan Smith About Earned Income

Q&A with Evan Smith, Texas Tribune CEO from 2009 to 2022, on earned income in nonprofit journalism, sponsorship to fund news for marginalized people.

dicktofel.substack.com | Read More

Raju Narisetti on steering publishing at McKinsey and his leadership philosophy

Interesting interview with Raja Narisetti, media vet and McKinsey’s head of content.

thefix.media | Read More

CNN’s Mark Thompson: ‘There’s plenty of things we have to fix’

Interview with CNN CEO Mark Thompson on having "plenty of things" to fix, how shifting to digital is an "existential question", subscriptions, and more.

ft.com | Read More

How the Atlantic Went From Broke to Profitable in Three Years

The publication’s new chief executive raised subscription prices, and moved away from day-to-day news coverage to focus on deeply reported stories with broad appeal.

wsj.com | Read More

Replay the AI in Media Summit Copenhagen

All the videos from the AI in Media Summit #NAMS24 are live on its YouTube page.

youtube.com | Read More

Nordic AI in Media Summit 2024: Five projects you should keep an eye on

From a newsroom assistant to a tool to create formats for young audiences, here are some of the initiatives presented this week in Copenhagen.

ox.ac.uk | Read More

Newsweek is making generative AI a fixture in its newsroom

A look at Newsweek's use of AI, including in video production, an AI-focused Live News desk for breaking stories, and letting the tech write some first drafts

niemanlab.org | Read More

GenAI: how french newsrooms are introducing the first editorial applications (French Content)

L'Est Républicain, Ouest-France, France Télévisions, TF1, Radio France, Le Parisien, Le Monde, AFP, L'Express, L'Équipe... Cautiously but proactively, more and more media outlets are getting organised to identify and test the best applications of artificial intelligence applied to news. mind Media interviewed around fifteen people from editorial and technical departments to present their strategic visions, work organisations and initial experiments.

mind.eu.com | Read More

AI race heats up as OpenAI, Google and Mistral release new models

OpenAI, Google, and the French artificial intelligence startup Mistral have all released new versions of their frontier AI models within 12 hours of one another, as the industry prepares for a burst of activity over the summer.

➽ The unprecedented flurry of releases come as the sector readies for the expected launch of the next major version of GPT, the system that underpins OpenAI’s hit chatbot Chat-GPT.

theguardian.com | Read More

Schibsted Media’s new Board of Directors is announced | Schibsted

The work to separate Schibsted’s media business into an independent company is progressing. Now, Schibsted Media’s new Board of Directors is ready. Before Easter, the agreement to sell the media business to the Tinius Trust was signed by both parties.

schibsted.com | Read More

NY Times accuses OpenAI, Google and Meta of skirting legal boundaries for AI training data

Some three months after suing OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement, the New York Times Co. claims in a new report Saturday that OpenAI, Google LLC and Meta Platform may have acted dubiously in training their artificial intelligence models. ➽ The report opens by targeting OpenAI, claiming that the company used a speech recognition tool called Whisper to transcribe audio from YouTube videos and generate new conversational text for AI training. In an apparent revelation, the report then claims that OpenAI staff discussed whether the decision to transcribe YouTube videos may go against the video site’s rules.

siliconangle.com | Read More

How many news websites block AI crawlers?

This Reuters Institute Research looks at how many and what type of news websites are blocking AI crawlers from companies such as OpenAI and Google.

reutersinstitute.politics.ox.a | Read More

Rest of World’s 2024 AI elections tracker

As more than two billion people vote, Rest of the World is monitoring the way AI is being used in political campaigns, memes, and misinformation.

restofworld.org | Read More

READ MORE ABOUT AI IN THE NEWS. Here's a dedicated resource where WAN-IFRA members will find helpful links, operational use cases, experiments, and a few other key AI trends ►►►►

KEEP READING ►►►►