FT Strategies, the media consulting arm of the Financial Times, this week announced the launch of NewsCaaS which it described as “an end-to-end strategic content service, developed in partnership with Noah Wire Services and HBM Advisory”.
The new service sidestepped the delicacy of an AI content creator being launched by a quality newspaper employing hundreds of journalists and its consulting team largely funded by Google, by asserting that its target market was B2B media. But Noah founder Ivan Massow (see our previous story, below) aired the contradictions about whether the primary purpose of NewsCaaS was to strengthen or replace under-staffed journalist teams. He said some of his current publishing clients didn’t want finished articles ready for publication (“because it would make the reporters lazy”) while, by implication, others were unconcerned. The FT journalists in the audience visibly winced, although none of their reporting on NewsCaaS seemed to have made it into the Financial Times.
The FT claimed the service scanned “over 500,000 global sources to surface timely, relevant content…and produce fact-checked, human-edited content” although whether or not there was “human-editing” seemed to be up to the client publisher.
The NewsCaas launch seems significant, not least because it is likely to prompt imitators and rivals including, perhaps, specialist providers. Here’s the FT Strategies’ presentation:
