At the heart of publishing’s AI conundrum lies the tension between maintaining public trust and the opportunity to exploit operational efficiencies crucial to commercial sustainability.
At our Definitive AI Forum for Media, Information & Events in November, our panel of UK-based news industry CEOs discussed the future impact of AI on trusted media.
Moderated by Chris Duncan, the panel comprised: Emily Shelley, CEO of PA Media Group; Henry Faure Walker, CEO of Newsquest; Piers North, CEO of Reach plc, and Joanna Levesque, Managing Director at FT Strategies.
Trust is a non-negotiable
Every opportunity to increase operational efficiency is inevitably appetising. But, in an online world increasingly dominated by AI slop, maintaining reader trust is table stakes for premium publishers.
For PA Media Group CEO Emily Shelley there is no question of putting AI efficiencies ahead of established editorial practices. “We come down heavily on the side of editorial integrity,” she emphasised. The newswire does use AI behind the scenes – in finance, tech management and production – but not in its reporting.
“AI can’t doorstep politicians, it can’t sit through court cases, it can’t listen to boring council meetings,” she explained. “We’ve looked at a number of tools and run a number of experiments; they’re just not accurate enough for us at the moment.”
Henry Faure Walker, CEO of Newsquest, the UK regional news subsidiary of USA Today Inc, agreed that integrity and trust in the news brand is critical. However, it has a different approach to AI in reporting: “If we’re not efficient in our newsrooms and if we don’t lean into AI, then we’re not going to cover our community properly, and we’re going to lose integrity that way.”
The drive for comprehensive community coverage has led Newsquest to adopt AI tools ‘quite aggressively’, with the CEO describing AI as positive for ‘hard-pressed’ local newsrooms. He explained how 35 AI-trained Newsquest journalists use a copy-drafting tool to take content from trusted information sources and draft articles using their own prompts. With the support of this type of AI tool, it has increased the number of local stories it covered in the previous 12 months by 10%: “We now do 50,000 local stories a month and that is the bedrock to doing higher impact journalism.”
Piers North, CEO of Reach, the UK’s largest national and regional newspaper publisher, drew a direct line between PA Media Group’s non-negotiable approach to maintaining editorial integrity and Newsquest’s drive for efficiency. Reach is using AI to bolster its video output, where North says it is a challenger: “We need to have subtitling, editing, all of these heavy processes, and that can be done by AI. We might have found it hard to move into a more aggressive phase if I’d needed to hire 200 expensive video editors.”
But the Reach CEO said it is important to look after what defines information as ‘real’: “You have to find that balance between the two, and that is a tightrope to walk. To push the envelope on efficiency and speed, but making sure that we don’t lose the very point of our being.”
The human in the loop
For all panelists, what defines information as ‘real’ was closely related to human involvement.
Of the 1,000-plus global publishers with which consultant FT Strategies has worked with, 100 have AI-related initiatives, according to Managing Director Joanna Levesque. These range from the automation of earthquake alerts to content repurposing in multiple languages: “[What] we see across all of our initiatives is the opportunity to automate, the opportunity to scale, the opportunity to try new formats,” she said. “But the human in the loop and the transparency of where you’ve used AI, I think, is the [biggest] commonality.”
Instead of allowing AI to write straight to the page, publishers should be focussed on internal processes, described by Chris Duncan as somewhere between journalistic discovery and distribution. Deploying AI to automate repetitive processes increases efficiency, but also allows publishers to double down on the journalism that supports greater public trust.
Fure Walker said AI has enabled Newsquest to free up journalists to get out and about and do face-to-face interviews and investigations: “The journalists can breathe again and actually go back – certainly in a local news context – to what you might call true journalism, or higher-impact journalism.”
Better products, faster
FT Strategies’ Levesque said she has seen a tendency to rush to the efficiencies that might be possible when new technologies are introduced, “particularly for our finance colleagues,” she explained. “But I think the opportunity is also in driving engagement and growth.”
For her, one of the biggest benefits in AI adoption is the opportunity to develop new products quickly: “You can do targeted newsletters much faster than you could before, which is a brilliant way of driving growth. You can be faster and better.”
Piers North agreed, suggesting AI can also be used to improve quality: “We do put [our journalists] under pressure for productivity, but it might be that less is more. We’re trialling agentic AI to give content scores and understand where the value really lies. Is it 10 stories about subject A, or is it one story about subject B?”
Although PA Media Group doesn’t use AI in its reporting, it does use it in archive retrieval. Shelley gave the example of Alamy, PA Media’s worldwide image business, classifying 420mn images to support natural language search: “We had previously thought that would take years and years and years.”
AI has also allowed PA to look at how it can better support publishers with verified content in an age of fake experts. “We’ve launched a verified-expert hub where we’ve actually spoken to people on a video call. We’ve got clips of their voice and their image. That’s free for publishers to use so that they can make sure that somebody is a genuine expert.”
No internal pushback
The conventional wisdom is that many staff fear AI disruption, but Henry Faure Walker said this has not been his experience at Newsquest. “I’ve been really surprised that we’ve got virtually no pushback from the newsroom.”
He saw two reasons for that, the first being the recognition that AI automation frees them up to do higher impact journalism rather than merely editing press releases. The second is that the use of AI hasn’t led to any job losses at the company.
He said: “We’ve kept true to our word – we haven’t used this to cut jobs. I think, as soon as the newsrooms get a sense that we might be reducing headcount because of AI, then I think we’re in a fragile place.”
Properly implemented, AI can have a positive, transformational, impact on building sustainable business models for local news and publishing more generally. The secret to success will lie in balancing AI’s efficiencies with the long-established standards that support public trust in journalism: “We talk about the culture of the newsrooms, and they are cultural beasts. AI will change that culture in some good ways, in terms of innovation, in terms of pace, in terms of curiosity, creativity. But at the same time, you don’t want to lose the really positive aspects of that culture: being pedantic on facts, being ruthless, holding power to account, and challenging, and not short-cutting.”
Listen to the full session above, or by searching ‘The MediaVoices Publisher Podcast’ on your podcast app of choice.
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The Definitive AI Forum for Media, Information & Events was presented by Flashes & Flames Media Ltd (publisher of Flashes & Flames and MediaVoices). Our next event is Monetising B2B Information & Events on 13 May, in London. Click here for programme details and early booking discounts for corporates and individuals, now available. Capacity is strictly limited.
