Top news sites collectively received 7.5% fewer visits on the Tuesday and Wednesday of the 2024 US election than they did on those days in 2020, data from Similarweb shows.

The Associated Press, Substack and Axios were among the sites with the most growth between the two elections, while Politico, Fox News, The Guardian and The New York Times all lost substantial proportions of their traffic – according to Similarweb.

After aggregator Yahoo.com (130.6 million visits on Tuesday 5 and Wednesday 6 November) CNN was the most-visited news site in the US, drawing 109.1 million clicks. That figure is down 19.4% on the same days in the 2020 election.

The New York Times (62.4 million) was the second most-visited publisher, but its traffic too dropped 36.3%. Fox News, the third most popular publisher on the list, saw traffic drop 46.8% when compared with the 2020 election, the fifth-largest fall among the top 50 most-visited sites.

Among the ten most-visited news sites over election night, Fox was the biggest faller, followed by The New York Times and CNN. The AP (47.6 million visits, up 247.1%) was the biggest gainer, followed by NBC News (44.3 million, up 120.2%) and USA Today (27.7 million, up 70.1%). The rest of the top ten saw single-digit percentage point changes.

The significant declines at the most-visited sites may reflect broader news avoidance trends or the relative speed with which the result of the 2024 election became clear. The 2020 election, in comparison, took days to be called.

Among the broader top 50 election night news sites the fastest grower was Axios, which saw visits grow 291.7% from 1.8 million in 2020 to 7.2 million last week.

Faster growing still was publishing platform Substack (5.1 million, up 423.1%), which hosts publications by numerous journalists and was less than three years old at the time of the last election.

Web culture site The Daily Dot (2.2m, up 287.5%), Al Jazeera (3.3 million, up 204.2%) and People magazine (11.5 million, up 115.5%) also substantially outperformed their 2020 traffic totals.

The biggest fall, on the other hand, was at Politico (8.8 million visits in 2024, down 63.7% from its 2020 total of 24.3 million), followed by Yahoo News (5.4 million, down 54.8%) and Business Insider (4.2 million, down 48.8%). The Guardian (10.6 million, down 45.2%) Google News (11.3 million, down 40.2%) and Breitbart (3.9 million, down 48.5%) were all also significantly hit.

NBC News, Associated Press and climate site The Cooldown saw largest election week traffic surges

Similarweb data also shows that, among the 100 top news sites in the US, NBC News saw the largest week-on-week increase in its web traffic over the week of the election, with visits nearly tripling compared with the week before.

Climate website The Cooldown saw a comparable increase of 209.4% and the AP received 207% more traffic than the previous week.

A handful of sites saw fewer visits the week of the election than the week before, among them Cosmopolitan (down 15.1%), Variety (down 13.2%) and Vogue (down 8%).

The post Top publishers saw less traffic on day of 2024 US election versus 2020 appeared first on Press Gazette.

News publishers are increasingly deciding to sign deals with AI companies over the use of their content despite early doubts and a high-profile legal case from The New York Times.

The deals commonly include the use of news publishers’ content as reference points for user queries in tools like ChatGPT (with citation back to their websites currently promised) as well as giving them the use of the AI tech to build their own products.

This page will be updated when new deals are struck or legal actions are launched relating to news publishers and AI companies (latest: Meta strikes an AI deal with Reuters while News Corp subsidiaries sue Perplexity).

OpenAI is reportedly offering news organisations between $1m and $5m per year to license their copyrighted content to train its models – although News Corp’s deal is reportedly worth more than $250m over five years.

Meanwhile Apple has reportedly been exploring AI deals with the likes of Conde Nast, NBC News and People and Daily Beast owner IAC to license their content archives, but nothing has yet been made public.

Scroll down or here are the quick links:

• Latest lawsuits: including eight Alden US dailies
• Latest deals: including Hearst, Conde Nast, The Atlantic, Vox Media, News Corp, Dotdash Meredith

Plenty of other news organisations are understood to be in negotiations with OpenAI while some, including the publisher of Mail Online, have suggested they are seriously considering their options legally.

But not all publishers want deals: Reach chief executive Jim Mullen told investors on 5 March that the UK’s largest commercial publisher is not in any “active discussions” with AI companies and suggested other publishers should hold off on deals to allow the industry to come at the issue with a position of solidarity.

He said: “We would prefer that we don’t get into a situation where we did with the referrers ten years ago and gave them access and we became hooked on this referral traffic and we would like it to be more structured. We produce content, which is really valuable, and we would like to license or agree how they use our base intelligence to actually inform the AI and the open markets. The challenge we have as an industry is that we need to be unified.

“I used to be the chairman of the NMA and if we stay together and work with it, then that’s a really strong position that we have, particularly with the Government to help us get to there. So I’m using this as a bit of a campaign, [it] only takes one publisher to break away and start doing deals and then it sort of disintegrates.”

Press Gazette analysis in February found that more than four in ten of the 100 biggest English-language news websites have decided not to block AI bots from the likes of OpenAI and Google.

If you feel there is something missing that should be included, or you want to alert us to a new development, please contact charlotte.tobitt@pressgazette.co.uk.

Suing

News Corp (versus Perplexity)

The News Corp subsidiaries that publish the Wall Street Journal and New York Post have filed a copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit against AI upstart Perplexity, which they accuse of “massive freeriding”.

The publisher is seeking massive damages and the removal of its content from Perplexity’s web index and wants its case heard at a jury trial.

News Corp has separately signed a deal with OpenAI (see below for more information). It is the first to sue Perplexity though other publishers including The New York Times have sent the AI company cease and desist letters.

Read the full story here.

Mumsnet

UK parenting forum and publisher Mumsnet has launched legal action via an initial letter against OpenAI over the scraping of its site and its more than six billion words – “presumably” for the training of large language model ChatGPT.

Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts told users: “Such scraping without permission is an explicit breach of our terms of use, which clearly state that no part of the site may be distributed, scraped or copied for any purpose without our express approval. So we approached Open AI and suggested they might like to licence our content.”

In particular, she said, Mumsnet’s content would be valuable because it could help to counter the misogyny “baked in” to many AI models.

But, she continued: “Their response was that they were more interested in datasets that are not easily accessible online.”

Roberts said what OpenAI differs from Google’s scraping of the web for search purposes because there is a “clear value exchange in allowing Google to access that data, namely the resulting search traffic… The LLMs are building models like ChatGPT to provide the answers to any and all prospective questions that will mean we’ll no longer need to go elsewhere for solutions. And they’re building those models with scraped content from the websites they are poised to replace.”

Roberts continued: “At Mumsnet we’re in a stronger position than most because much of our traffic comes to us direct and though it’s a piece of cake for an LLM to spit out a Mumsnet-style answer to a parenting question I doubt they’ll ever be as funny about parking wars or as honest about relationships and they’ll certainly never provide the emotional support that sees around a thousand women a year helped to leave abusive partners by other Mumsnet users.

“But if these trillion-dollar giants are simply allowed to pillage content from online publishers – and get away with it – they will destroy many of them.”

Roberts acknowledged it is “not an easy task” to go up against a big tech company like OpenAI but said “this is too important an issue to simply roll over”.

Responses from users on the forum contained a lot of “well done” and “good luck”.

The Center for Investigative Reporting

Non-profit news organisation The Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones (after a merger this year) and Reveal, is suing OpenAI and its largest shareholder Microsoft, it announced on 28 June.

It said the companies had used its content “without permission or offering compensation” and accused them of “exploitative practices” in a lawsuit filed in New York.

Chief executive Monika Bauerlein said: “OpenAI and Microsoft started vacuuming up our stories to make their product more powerful, but they never asked for permission or offered compensation, unlike other organizations that license our material.

“This free rider behavior is not only unfair, it is a violation of copyright. The work of journalists, at CIR and everywhere, is valuable, and OpenAI and Microsoft know it.”

She added: “For-profit corporations like OpenAI and Microsoft can’t simply treat the work of nonprofit and independent publishers as free raw material for their products.

“If this practice isn’t stopped, the public’s access to truthful information will be limited to AI-generated summaries of a disappearing news landscape.”

Eight Alden Global Capital daily newspapers

Eight daily newspapers in the US owned by Alden Global Capital are suing OpenAI and Microsoft, it was revealed on 30 April.

The newspapers involved in the lawsuit are: the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, the Sun-Sentinel in Florida, the Mercury News in San Jose, the Denver Post, the Orange County Register and the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

The lawsuit says the newspapers want recognition that they have a legal right over their content and compensation for the use of it in the training of AI tools so far.

Frank Pine, executive editor of Media News Group and Tribune Publishing Newspapers, the Alden subsidiaries that own the newspapers concerned, said: “We’ve spent billions of dollars gathering information and reporting news at our publications, and we can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the Big Tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense.

“They pay their engineers and programmers, they pay for servers and processors, they pay for electricity, and they definitely get paid from their astronomical valuations, but they don’t want to pay for the content without which they would have no product at all. That’s not fair use, and it’s not fair. It needs to stop.

“The misappropriation of news content by OpenAI and Microsoft undermines the business model for news. These companies are building AI products clearly intended to supplant news publishers by repurposing purloined content and delivering it to their users.

“Even worse, when they’re not delivering the actual verbatim reporting of our hard-working journalists, they misattribute bogus information to our news publications, damaging our credibility. We employ professional journalists who adhere to the highest standards of accuracy and fairness. They are real people who go out into the world to conduct first-hand interviews and engage in actual investigations to produce our journalism.

“Their work is vetted and checked by professional editors. The Mercury News has never recommended injecting disinfectants to treat COVID, and the Denver Post did not publish research that shows smoking cures asthma. These and other ChatGPT hallucinations are documented in our legal filings.”

The Intercept, Raw Story and Alter Net

Three US progressive news and politics digital outlets filed lawsuits against OpenAI on Wednesday 28 February.

The Intercept, Raw Story and Alter Net objected to the use of their articles to train ChatGPT. The Intercept also sued Microsoft, which has partnered with OpenAI to create a Bing chatbot.

Raw Story publisher Roxanne Cooper said: “Raw Story’s copyright-protected journalism is the result of significant efforts of human journalists who report the news. Rather than license that work, OpenAI taught ChatGPT to ignore journalists’ copyrights and hide its use of copyright-protected material.”

CEO and founder John Byrne added: “It is time that news organisations fight back against Big Tech’s continued attempts to monetise other people’s work.”

The New York Times

The most high-profile case against OpenAI and Microsoft from a news publisher so far, The New York Times made a surprise announcement in the days after Christmas that it would seek damages, restitution and costs as well as the destruction of all large language models (LLMs) trained on its content.

OpenAI and NYT had been in negotiations for nine months but the news organisation felt no resolution was forthcoming and decided instead to share its concerns over the use of its intellectual property publicly. The success of the lawsuit will depend on the US court’s interpretation of “fair use” in copyright law – assuming the companies don’t find their way to a settlement first.

OpenAI previously said a “high-value partnership around real-time display with attribution in ChatGPT” was on the cards with the NYT before the news organisation surprised it by launching the lawsuit.

The NYT said the two tech companies, which have a partnership centred around ChatGPT and Bing, have “reaped substantial savings by taking and using – at no cost” its content to create their models without paying for a licence. It added that the use of its content in chatbots “threatens to divert readers, including current and potential subscribers, away from The Times, thereby reducing the subscription, advertising, licensing, and affiliate revenues that fund The Times’s ability to continue producing its current level of groundbreaking journalism”.

In its response, filed on Monday 26 February, OpenAI argued: “In the real world, people do not use ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product” to substitute for a NYT subscription. “Nor could they. In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will.”

OpenAI accused the NYT of paying someone to hack its products and taking “tens of thousands of attempts to generate the highly anomalous results” in which verbatim paragraphs from articles were spat out by ChatGPT. “They were able to do so only by targeting and exploiting a bug (which OpenAI has committed to addressing) by using deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use,” it said.

“And even then, they had to feed the tool portions of the very articles they sought to elicit verbatim passages of, virtually all of which already appear on multiple public websites. Normal people do not use OpenAI’s products in this way.”

Getty Images

Getty Images began legal proceedings against Stability AI in the UK in January 2023, claiming that the AI image company “unlawfully copied and processed” millions of its copyrighted images without a licence through its text-to-image model Stable Diffusion.

In December, the High Court in London ruled that Getty’s case could go to trial after Stability AI failed to persuade a judge that two aspects of the claim – relating to training and development as well as copyright – should be struck out.

Mrs Justice Joanna Smith said Getty’s claim has a “real prospect of success” in relation to Stable Diffusion’s “image-to-image feature” which the photo agency claimed allows users to make “essentially identical copies of copyright works”.

Who’s signed news AI deals?

Reuters

Reuters, which has previously said it had struck a number of deals with unspecified AI companies and then signed up as a publisher partner for Microsoft’s new AI companion Copilot, has become the first news publisher to sign an AI deal with Meta.

The deal allows Meta’s AI chatbot to use real-time Reuters content to answer questions from users about news and current events, it announced on 25 October, although it will begin only in the US.

The chatbot, which appears with the search and messaging features on Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger, will provide summaries and link out to Reuters which will be compensated when its work is used in this way.

Reuters already had a fact-checking partnership with the Facebook owner.

A Reuters spokesperson said: “We can confirm that Reuters has partnered with tech providers to license our trusted, fact-based news content to power their AI platforms. The terms of these deals remain confidential.”

A Meta spokesperson told Axios: “We’re always iterating and working to improve our products, and through Meta’s partnership with Reuters, Meta AI can respond to news-related questions with summaries and links to Reuters content.

“While most people use Meta AI for creative tasks, deep dives on new topics or how-to assistance, this partnership will help ensure a more useful experience for those seeking information on current events.”

The Lenfest Institute for Journalism

OpenAI and Microsoft are distributing $10m to The Lenfest Institute for Journalism to provide five US newsrooms with a grant to each hire a fellow to work on AI projects for two years.

The newsrooms benefiting from the initial round of funding are: Chicago Public Media, Newsday in Long Island, The Minnesota Star Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Seattle Times. Three further news organisations will receive funding in a second round.

The projects from the fellows should “focus largely on improving business sustainability and implementing AI technologies within their organisations”, Lenfest said.

OpenAI and Microsoft will also allow the publications to use their tools to experiment and develop tools to help with their local news output.

Tom Rubin, chief of intellectual property and content at OpenAI, said: “While nothing will replace the central role of reporters, we believe that AI technology can help in the research, investigation, distribution, and monetisation of important journalism.

“We’re deeply invested in supporting smaller, independent publishers through initiatives like The Lenfest Institute AI Collaborative and Fellowship, ensuring they have access to the same cutting-edge tools and opportunities as larger organizations.”

Hearst

Newspaper and magazine giant Hearst has agreed a “content partnership” with OpenAI in the US, it announced on 8 October.

Hearst said OpenAI products including ChatGPT will incorporate content from its US brands including Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Runner’s World and Women’s Health – more than 20 magazine titles and 40 newspapers in total. It does not include Hearst’s content in other countries like the UK.

Hearst said its content will “feature appropriate citations and direct links, providing transparency and easy access to the original Hearst sources” from ChatGPT.

Hearst Newspapers president Jeff Johnson said: “As generative AI matures, it’s critical that journalism created by professional journalists be at the heart of all AI products.

“This agreement allows the trustworthy and curated content created by Hearst Newspapers’ award-winning journalists to be part of OpenAI’s products like ChatGPT — creating more timely and relevant results.”

Hearst Magazines president Debi Chirichella added: “Our partnership with OpenAI will help us evolve the future of magazine content. This collaboration ensures that our high-quality writing and expertise, cultural and historical context and attribution and credibility are promoted as OpenAI’s products evolve.”

And OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said the use of Hearst content “elevates our ability to provide engaging, reliable information to our users”.

FT, Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst Mags, USA Today Network

The FT, Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst Mags and USA Today Network were named as publisher partners for Microsoft’s new AI “companion”, Copilot, at the start of October.

Those announced were existing partners of Microsoft’s MSN news licensing service but Press Gazette understands these are new deals.

Microsoft said Copilot Daily can give a summary of the news and weather using an AI Copilot Voice.

“It’s an antidote for that familiar feeling of information overload. Clean, simple and easy to digest. Copilot Daily will only pull from authorised content sources. We are working with partners such as Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst Magazines, USA Today Network and Financial Times, and plan to add more sources over time. We’ll also add additional personalisation and controls in Copilot Daily over time.”

Conde Nast

Vogue, Wired, Vanity Fair and GQ publisher Conde Nast has become the latest publisher to sign a “multi-year partnership” relating to the display of its content in OpenAI products, it announced on 20 August.

Conde Nast chief executive Roger Lynch has been outspoken about the risks generative AI poses to news businesses, telling US Congress “many” media companies could go out of business by the time any litigation passes through the courts and that “immediate action” should be taken through a clarification that content creators should be compensated for the use of their work in training.

In a memo to staff he has now said the OpenAI deal helps to make up for revenue being lost through declining search traffic.

He wrote: “It’s crucial that we meet audiences where they are and embrace new technologies while also ensuring proper attribution and compensation for use of our intellectual property. This is exactly what we have found with OpenAI.

“Over the last decade, news and digital media have faced steep challenges as many technology companies eroded publishers’ ability to monetize content, most recently with traditional search. Our partnership with OpenAI begins to make up for some of that revenue, allowing us to continue to protect and invest in our journalism and creative endeavours.”

The deal will allow OpenAI to display content from Conde Nast brands in its products, including ChatGPT and its SearchGPT AI-driven search engine prototype.

OpenAI explained what this means in a blog post: “With the introduction of our SearchGPT prototype, we’re testing new search features that make finding information and reliable content sources faster and more intuitive. We’re combining our conversational models with information from the web to give you fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources. SearchGPT offers direct links to news stories, enabling users to easily explore more in-depth content directly from the source.

“We plan to integrate the best of these features directly into ChatGPT in the future.

“We’re collaborating with our news partners to collect feedback and insights on the design and performance of SearchGPT, ensuring that these integrations enhance user experiences and inform future updates to ChatGPT.”

Lynch praised OpenAI for being “transparent and willing to productively work with publishers like us so that the public can receive reliable information and news through their platforms”.

He continued: “This partnership recognises that the exceptional content produced by Condé Nast and our many titles cannot be replaced, and is a step toward making sure our technology-enabled future is one that is created responsibly.

“It is just the beginning and we will continue what we started in Washington earlier this year – the fight for fair deals and partnerships across the industry until all entities developing and deploying artificial intelligence take seriously, as OpenAI has, the rights of publishers.”

Financial Times, Axel Springer, The Atlantic, Fortune

Financial Times, Axel Springer, The Atlantic and Fortune (as well as Universal Music Group) have agreed to license their content to generative AI start-up Prorata.ai.

Prorata says it has a proprietary algorithm that can work out how much of various publishers’ content is used in an answer and share revenue accordingly. When it launches its own chatbot this autumn, it says, it will share 50% of the revenue from subscriptions with content creators.

Read our full story about Prorata’s plan here.

Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune and WordPress owner Automattic

Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune and WordPress.com owner Automattic have become the first publishers to sign up to a revenue-sharing deal launched by AI search chatbot Perplexity.

When Perplexity introduces advertising via sponsored related questions within the next few months, signed-up publishers will be able to share the revenue generated by interactions where their content is referenced.

The programme also gives them access to analytics platform Scalepost.ai to see which of their articles show up frequently in Perplexity answers that get monetised, access to Perplexity tech to create their own custom answer engines for their websites, and one year of Perplexity Enterprise Pro for all employees for a year.

Read our full story about the revenue-sharing programme, and Perplexity’s view on its relationship with publishers, here.

Time

Time has signed a “multi-year content deal and strategic partnership” with OpenAI, it revealed on 27 June.

The deal will give the ChatGPT creator access to Time’s 101-year-old archive and its current reporting to give up-to-date answers to users (with a citation and a link back to the website).

Time will also have access to OpenAI tech to build its own products and provide feedback to the tech company on the delivery of journalism through its tools.

Time chief operating officer Mark Howard said: “Throughout our 101-year history, Time has embraced innovation to ensure that the delivery of our trusted journalism evolves alongside technology. This partnership with OpenAI advances our mission to expand access to trusted information globally as we continue to embrace innovative new ways of bringing Time’s journalism to audiences globally.”

OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said the deal supports “reputable journalism by providing proper attribution to original sources.”

Vox Media

Vox Media has signed a “strategic content and product partnership” with OpenAI that means content – including archive journalism – from its brands including Vox, The Verge, Eater, New York Magazine, The Cut, Vulture and SB Nation will be surfaced on ChatGPT and also that it can use OpenAI’s tech to develop audience-facing and internal products.

The publisher said it will use OpenAI tech to create stronger creative optimisation and audience segment targeting on its first-party data platform Forte, which is used across all Vox Media sites and on its ad marketplace Concert.

It will also use OpenAI tools to match people with the right products on its search-based affiliate commerce tool The Strategist Gift Scout.

Vox Media co-founder, chair and chief executive Jim Bankoff said: “This agreement aligns with our goals of leveraging generative AI to innovate for our audiences and customers, protect and grow the value of our work and intellectual property, and boost productivity and discoverability to elevate the talent and creativity of our exceptional journalists and creators.”

The Atlantic

The Atlantic also announced on 29 May it has signed a “strategic content and product partnership” with OpenAI meaning its articles will be discoverable within ChatGPT and the AI giant’s other products, with these results providing attribution and links to its website.

The partnership also means The Atlantic “will help to shape how news is surfaced and presented in future real-time discovery products”.

The companies are also collaborating on product and tech, with The Atlantic’s product team given “privileged access” to OpenAI tech to give feedback and help shape the future of news in ChatGPT and other OpenAI products.

The Atlantic said it is currently developing an experimental microsite called Atlantic Labs “to figure out how AI can help in the development of new products and features to better serve its journalism and readers”. It will pilot OpenAI’s and other emerging tech in this work.

Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of The Atlantic, said: “We believe that people searching with AI models will be one of the fundamental ways that people navigate the web in the future.”

He added that the partnership will mean The Atlantic’s reporting is “more discoverable” to OpenAI’s millions of users and give the publisher “a voice in shaping how news is surfaced on their platforms”.

OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said: “Enabling access to The Atlantic’s reporting in our products will allow users to more deeply interact with thought-provoking news. We are dedicated to supporting high-quality journalism and the publishing ecosystem.”

[Read more: What’s next for The Atlantic after reaching profitability and 1m subscribers]

WAN-IFRA

The World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) has announced a partnership with OpenAI for a programme, Newsroom AI Catalyst, designed to “help newsrooms fast-track their AI adoption and implementation to bring efficiencies and create quality content”.

The project will work with 128 newsrooms in Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and South Asia providing expert guidance with funding and technical assistance from OpenAI.

Each team will receive three months of learning modules, hands-on workshops, a mini hackathon, and a showcase. They will go back to their newsrooms with a clear plan on how to roll out AI.

Vincent Peyregne, chief executive of WAN-IFRA, said: “News enterprises across the globe have come under pressure from declining advertising and print subscription revenues. The adversity confronting news leaves communities without access to a shared basis of facts and shared values and puts democracy itself at risk.

“AI technologies can positively influence news organisations’ sustainability as long as you quickly grasp the stakes and understand how to turn it to your advantage.”

He added that OpenAI’s support will “help the newsrooms through the adoption of AI technologies to provide high-quality journalism that is the cornerstone of the news business”.

OpenAI’s chief of intellectual property and content Tom Rubin said the programme is “designed to turbocharge the capabilities of 128 newsrooms” and he wants to help “cultivate a healthy, sustainable ecosystem that promotes quality journalism”.

News Corp

News Corp has signed a deal that includes the use of content from many of its major newsbrands in the UK, US and Australia in OpenAI’s large language models, it was announced on 22 May.

The partnership covers content from The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, Investor’s Business Daily, FN, and the New York Post in the US; The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun in the UK; and The Australian, news.com.au, The Daily Telegraph, The Courier Mail, The Advertiser, and the Herald Sun in Australia.

The Wall Street Journal put a value on the deal of more than $250m over five years.

News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson described OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his team as “principled partners… who understand the commercial and social significance of journalists and journalism.

“This landmark accord is not an end, but the beginning of a beautiful friendship in which we are jointly committed to creating and delivering insight and integrity instantaneously.”

Dotdash Meredith

Dotdash Meredith, which publishes more than 40 titles including People, Instyle and Investopedia, on 7 May signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI that will see its content and links surfaced in ChatGPT responses.

OpenAI will incorporate real-time information from Dotdash sites into ChatGPT’s responses to queries and will use the publisher’s content to train its large language models. Dotdash meanwhile will receive assistance from OpenAI in developing both consumer-facing AI products and its AI-powered contextual advertising tool, D/Cipher.

B2B giant Informa

Business information giant Informa announced a non-exclusive Partnership and Data Access Agreement with Microsoft (the main backer of OpenAI) in a trading update on 8 May. There has been an initial fee of $10m+ and then three more recurring annual payments.

Informa said the deal covers:

“Improved Productivity: Explore how AI can enable more effective ways of working at Informa, streamlining operations, utilising Copilot for Microsoft 365 to enable Colleagues to work more efficiently, and enhancing the capabilities of Informa’s existing AI and data platforms (IIRIS);

“Citation Engine: Collaborate to further develop automated citation referencing, using the latest technology to improve speed and accuracy;

“Specialist Expert Agent: Explore the development of specialised expert agents for customers such as authors and librarians to assist with research, understanding and new knowledge creation/sharing;

“Data Access: Provide non-exclusive access to Advanced Learning content and data to help improve relevance and performance of AI systems.”

Informa said the deal “protects intellectual property rights, including limits on verbatim text extracts and alignment on the importance of detailed citation references”.

Axel Springer (again)

Following its deal with OpenAI (see below) Axel Springer has announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft covering AI, advertising, content and cloud computing.

On AI, they will partner to develop new AI-driven chat experiences to inform users using Axel Springer’s journalism.

They added: “In addition, Axel Springer will leverage Microsoft Advertising’s Chat Ads API for generative AI monetisation.”

Their existing adtech collaboration will be expanded from Europe into the US to encompass Politico, while users of Microsoft’s aggregator Start-MSN will have access to more premium content from Axel Springer’s brands. Finally the publisher will migrate its SAP solutions to Microsoft Azure.

Axel Springer chief executive Mathias Dopfner said: “In this new era of AI, partnerships are critical to preserving and promoting independent journalism while ensuring a thriving media landscape.

“We’re optimistic about the future of journalism and the opportunities we can unlock through this expanded partnership with Microsoft.”

Microsoft chairman and chief executive Satya Nadella added: “Our expanded partnership with Axel Springer brings together their leadership in digital publishing with the full power of the Microsoft Cloud — including our ad solutions — to build innovative AI-driven experiences and create new opportunity for advertisers and users.”

Financial Times

On 29 April the Financial Times became the first major UK newsbrand to announce a deal with OpenAI.

The partnership involves up-to-date news content and journalism from the FT archive, meaning it is likely to assist with both real-time queries on ChatGPT and its continued training.

FT Group chief executive John Ridding said: “This is an important agreement in a number of respects.

“It recognises the value of our award-winning journalism and will give us early insights into how content is surfaced through AI… Apart from the benefits to the FT, there are broader implications for the industry. It’s right, of course, that AI platforms pay publishers for the use of their material.”

Le Monde and Prisa Media

OpenAI announced on 13 March it had signed deals with French newsbrand Le Monde and Spanish publisher Prisa Media, which publishes El País, Cinco Días, As and El Huffpost.

The deals will mean ChatGPT users can surface recent content from both publishers through “select summaries with attribution and enhanced links to the original articles”, while their content will be allowed to contribute to training OpenAI’s models.

Le Monde chief executive Louis Dreyfus said: “At the moment we are celebrating the 80th anniversary of Le Monde, this partnership with OpenAI allows us to expand our reach and uphold our commitment to providing accurate, verified, balanced news stories at scale.

“Collaborating with OpenAI ensures that our authoritative content can be accessed and appreciated by a broader, more diverse audience… Our partnership with OpenAI is a strategic move to ensure the dissemination of reliable information to AI users, safeguarding our journalistic integrity and revenue streams in the process.”

Carlos Nuñez, chairman and chief executive of Prisa Media added: “Joining forces with OpenAI opens new avenues for us to engage with our audience. Leveraging ChatGPT’s capabilities allows us to present our in-depth, quality journalism in novel ways, reaching individuals who seek credible and independent content.

“This is a definite step towards the future of news, where technology and human expertise merge to enrich the reader’s experience.”

Reuters

Thomson Reuters chief executive Steve Hasker told the Financial Times that the company had struck “a number” of deals with AI companies looking to use Reuters news content to train their models but he did not give any further details about who was involved in the deals or for how much.

He did say that “there appears to be a market price evolving”, adding: “These models need to be fed. And they may as well be fed by the highest-quality, independent fact-based content. We have done a number of those deals, and we’re exploring the potential there.”

However away from the Reuters news part of the business Thomson Reuters is suing Ross Intelligence for allegedly unlawfully copying content from its legal research platform Westlaw to train a rival AI-powered intelligence platform.

Unknown independent publishers

A handful of unnamed independent publishers are taking part in a private programme with Google, according to Adweek, which will see them paid a five-figure annual sum to take part in a trial of a new AI platform.

The publishers are reportedly expected to produce a certain number of stories for a year and provide analytics and feedback in exchange.

Reddit

Social media platform Reddit has signed a deal allowing its content to be used by Google in the training of its AI tools. Reuters reported that the deal is worth around $60m per year.

Although not a news organisation, the Reddit deal is still a content licensing deal. There is also likely to be news media content copied within Reddit posts from users on the platform which could therefore fall within the remit of the deal.

Semafor (sort of)

Ben Smith and Justin B Smith’s start-up Semafor has secured “substantial” Microsoft sponsorship for an AI-driven news feed, although this was not built by the tech giant but by the newsroom itself.

The deal, announced in February, will see Microsoft help Semafor refine the tool and makes the digital outlet one of the first newsrooms to heavily involve ChatGPT in their workflow.

Although not a content deal as such, the agreement indicates a level of co-operation rather than acrimony.

Axel Springer

In December Politico, Business Insider, Bild and Welt owner Axel Springer agreed a partnership with OpenAI that would see its content summarised within ChatGPT around the world, including otherwise paywalled content, with links and attribution. Axel Springer’s content is permitted to be used to train OpenAI products going forward.

Axel Springer can also use OpenAI technology to continue building its own AI products.

Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner said: “We are excited to have shaped this global partnership between Axel Springer and OpenAI – the first of its kind. We want to explore the opportunities of AI empowered journalism – to bring quality, societal relevance and the business model of journalism to the next level.”

American Journalism Project

In July 2023 OpenAI committed $5m to the American Journalism Project, a philanthropic organisation working to support and rebuild local news organisations, to support the expansion of its work. It also pledged up to $5m in OpenAI API credits to help participating organisations try out emerging AI technologies.

American Journalism Project chief executive Sarabeth Berman said: “To ensure local journalism remains an essential pillar of our democracy, we need to be smart about the potential powers and pitfalls of new technology. In these early days of generative AI, we have the opportunity to ensure that local news organisations, and their communities, are involved in shaping its implications. With this partnership, we aim to promote ways for AI to enhance—rather than imperil—journalism.”

Associated Press

OpenAI and Associated Press signed a deal in July 2023 that allows the AI company to license the news agency’s content archive going back to 1985 for training purposes.

The companies said they are also looking at “potential use cases for generative AI in news products and services” but did not share specifics.

Kristin Heitmann, AP senior vice president and chief revenue officer, said: “We are pleased that OpenAI recognises that fact-based, nonpartisan news content is essential to this evolving technology, and that they respect the value of our intellectual property. AP firmly supports a framework that will ensure intellectual property is protected and content creators are fairly compensated for their work.”

One professor told AP the deal could be particularly beneficial to OpenAI because it would mean they can still use a wealth of trusted content even if they lose other lawsuits and are forced to delete training data as a result, from The New York Times for example.

Shutterstock

In July 2023 Shutterstock expanded its partnership with OpenAI with a six-year agreement allowing access to a wealth of training data including images, videos, music and associated metadata.

For its part, Shutterstock gets “priority access” to new OpenAI technology and can offer DALL-E’s text-to-image capabilities directly within its platform.

The post Who’s suing AI and who’s signing: Publisher deals vs lawsuits with generative AI companies appeared first on Press Gazette.

Press Gazette has ranked the biggest UK and US news publishers on Instagram with four achieving follower-counts above ten million.

We looked at the news publishers from our top 50 UK and US website rankings to compile our new research.

Two publishers – BBC News (27.8 million) and CNN (20 million) – are above the 20 million mark. When Press Gazette last ranked publisher Instagram accounts (in June 2023) BBC News had 7.4m followers on the platform and CNN 4.2m.

The top two on Instagram are followed by the New York Times (18.2 million) and People (13.6 million).

In comparison, only one news publisher (Daily Mail) from the two top 50 lists has topped ten million on Tiktok, the newer platform.

Ladbible does not feature in the latest ranking because it has it has fallen out of the list of the top 50 news websites in the UK. It currently has 14.1 million followers to its biggest Instagram account. Cosmopolitan, The Daily Wire, The Verge, NME, Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit similarly have fallen out of our top 50s so do not eapp

Excluding the impact of Ladbible’s removal, the top seven remain the same – but The Guardian (5.8 million followers) in eighth place has overtaken Buzzfeed and Unilad (both 5.7 million).

The fastest-growing Instagram account over a two-year period was the New York Post, increasing by 74.7% since 2022 to 1.2 million.

It was followed by Healthline Media (up 60% since 2022 to 1.3 million) and UK tabloid the Mirror (up 57% to 441,000).

Four news publishers on our list saw their Instagram followings decline since June 2023: Buzzfeed (down 7%), sister publication Huffpost (3% to 3.2 million), Unilad (down 2%) and The Daily Beast (down 2% to 452,000).

Since June 2023 only, the Mirror was the fastest-growing (up 45%) followed by ITV News (up 34% to 512,000) and the New York Post (up 32%).

But the follower count for BBC News increased the most in absolute terms (2.1 million) since last year - almost double the next largest growth seen by Fox News (up 1.2 million to 9.4 million).

Four added at least one million followers to their counts - also including the New York Times and People.

The percentage of people saying they use Instagram for news has risen from 2% in 2014 to 15% this year in 12 key markets surveyed by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (UK, US, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Australia, Brazil and Ireland.

It remains behind Facebook, Youtube and Whatsapp in importance but has overtaken Twitter/X and is still ahead of Tiktok and Snapchat.

The post Two news publishers have 20m+ Instagram followers: Leading UK and US titles ranked appeared first on Press Gazette.

The Associated Press has revealed how it is moving away from reliance on its core business of licensing content to publishers.

In 2023, 82% of AP’s revenue came from content licensing with 5% from its software solutions business AP Workflow Solutions, 4% from its business providing broadcast facilities and journalists to global broadcasters, and 9% from other streams.

US newspapers originally made up 100% of AP’s revenue when it launched 178 years ago with just five member titles.

“We are a majority content licensing business still, but US newspapers represent just about 10% of our total revenue,” Kristin Heitmann, SVP and chief revenue officer at AP, told the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Copenhagen last week.

“I say that just to emphasise that throughout our history we’ve had to evolve.”

Associated Press content revenue: Gannett and McClatchy pull back

She said AP is currently “in the midst” of another evolution “as the media industry is facing significant pressure. And for the AP, while content licensing will always be our core we are facing headwinds in that part of our business as the media sector, which is our primary customer, is being consolidated and disrupted.

“We’ve had to look at new revenue sources to maintain, and grow, our revenue and as an independent not-for-profit… everything we make goes back into our newsroom. We are not a public company, we do not have a family trust, we do not have a billionaire benefactor, although many days I think we all wish we did have a billionaire benefactor.

“We can only spend what we make. And so that makes it essential that we diversify to continue to enhance the news report and invest back into the business.”

Already this year two major US regional news publishers, Gannett and McClatchy, have ended their use of AP wire content although both will continue to use its elections data.

Heitmann said: “Gannett and McClatchy are important customers for the AP and we never like to lose customers. We are in contract through the end of this year and hope they remain customers of ours for many years to come – and certainly will in some way through the election and beyond in other services we provide.”

She added that “thousands of media” around the world use AP content and they “sometimes test not using us and come back. If that’s the case with Gannett and McClatchy, we have an open door…”

But she said it was “not as big of a catastrophe as it would have been when US newspapers were 100% of our revenue so it just highlights, I think, the importance of diversifying your revenue”.

Four key areas of AP revenue diversification: services, ads, AI licensing, philanthropy

Heitmann referenced four areas of AP’s business that are examples of its diversification efforts: services, direct-to-consumer and digital advertising, generative AI and data licensing, and philanthropy.

The newest revenue stream to emerge is AI licensing: AP signed a deal with OpenAI last July allowing the tech company to use its archive going back to 1985 for training purposes, and Heitmann said more partnerships are being pursued.

“We wanted to establish first that training licences are required, that it is not fair to just use our content to train generative AI systems, and that content creators must be compensated,” she said, adding: “So since that first deal, we’ve continued to pursue other deals in the space and are encouraged by the opportunities ahead.

“We’re particularly encouraged by the opportunity for fact-based news organisations to help improve the results of generative AI models which today we all experience as users being rife with misinformation.”

Digital advertising and direct to consumer

Heitmann said AP has had a digital advertising business for almost ten years “but we didn’t invest in it. It actually kind of happened by accident.”

They began to invest in it a year ago, including by relaunching the consumer website and app AP News as “the foundation for a digital advertising business”.

Heitan said: “Digital advertising is a major revenue source for most media organisations but historically it hasn’t been for the AP. And while we don’t anticipate digital advertising ever being more than about 10% of our total revenue, we have a lot of room to grow here.”

AP has also expanded into consumer donations, which it launched in a “light touch way” at the end of 2023 and then expanded to enable recurring donations this year.

“Direct to consumer overall is an area that will continue to see us experiment in and expand,” Heitmann said. “We’ve had a tremendous amount of success in a short amount of time and are taking those learnings to benefit all of our B2B customers as well.”

In philanthropy, Heitmann claimed this type of funding for journalism in the US has almost doubled to $322m over the past ten years.

AP began fundraising around certain content areas such as climate, education and democracy about five years ago but saw a further opportunity to grow by creating an affiliated 501(c)(3) division – a type of US non-profit company xempt from federal income tax.

Heitmann said this would enable AP to “fundraise at much larger levels”. This has been established in the past month and active fundraising around it will begin this summer.

Experimentation is ‘how we’ll continue to persist’

Of the services businesses, Heitmann said they “tap into the rich history of the AP and lean into our strengths as a breaking news business”.

They include AP Workflow Solutions, formerly known as ENPS, a software solutions business for broadcast customers in more than 60 countries.

AP360 enhances the offering of global media clients by providing them with AP journalists as well as provide corporate customers with production services – for example, hosting online live auctions for Sotheby’s.

AP also has content services, for example creating press releases for corporate clients, AP Stylebook training for PR professionals, and election services through which AP is a key source declaring winners in US ballots.

Heitmann said: “So in summary, we have a number of different revenue diversification efforts underway… not all of these are going to work, and they’re certainly not all going to work at the same time, so it’s for us and for everyone in the media sector to continue to build out a diversified portfolio.

“We have to experiment, we have to innovate – it’s how the AP has persisted for over 200 years and it’s how we’ll continue to persist.”

The post Advertising, philanthropy and AI: How the AP is diversifying its revenue streams appeared first on Press Gazette.

Five international news agencies have removed a photo issued by Kensington Palace of Kate, Princess of Wales, and her children over accusations it had been “manipulated”.

Kate has since apologised, saying in a statement: “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day. C.”

The handout image, which was also shared by Kensington Palace on social media, has been widely used by news media.

Associated Press (AP), Agence France Press (AFP), Getty and Reuters all killed the image late on Sunday. They were followed by major UK agency PA Media on Monday morning.

Kensington Palace published the photo on Sunday morning to mark Mother’s Day and said it had been taken by Prince William earlier in the week.

It came days after a paparazzi photo of Kate, who has not been seen in public since December and who had abdominal surgery in January, was published by celebrity news website TMZ but not used by UK publishers apparently out of respect for her privacy.

The new photo of Kate and children George, Charlotte and Louis was closely scrutinised on social media on Sunday with people noticing inconsistencies that suggested the photo may have been altered in Photoshop or using another editorial tool.

Clause 1 (accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice, by which most of the UK’s biggest news organisations are regulated, states that publishers “must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information or images”.

UK news agency PA Media said on Sunday it had not withdrawn the picture but was seeking urgent clarification from Kensington Palace about the concerns raised about manipulation. But on Monday morning it took down the image after receiving no response.

It said: “Like other news agencies, PA Media issued the handout image provided by Kensington Palace of the Princess of Wales and her children in good faith yesterday.

“We became aware of concerns about the image and we carried a report about it last night, and made clear that we were seeking urgent clarification about the image from Kensington Palace. In the absence of that clarification, we are killing the image from our picture service.”

Reuters said it had withdrawn the picture “following a post-publication review” and it was “reviewing the matter”.

It reported that its picture editors “said part of the sleeve of Kate’s daughter’s cardigan did not line up properly, suggesting that the image had been altered”.

It added that the Reuters Handbook of Journalism says Photoshop should only be used “in very limited matters”. “We use only a tiny part of its potential capability to format our pictures, crop and size them and balance the tone and color,” it says.

AP said the image was “pulled from circulation” because it “appeared to have been manipulated”.

It added: “While there was no suggestion the image was fake, AP pulled the photograph from circulation because it did not meet its photo standards.”

AP said its “editorial standards state that images must be accurate. AP does not use altered or digitally manipulated images.

“AP’s news values and principles explain that minor photo editing, including cropping and toning and color adjustments, are acceptable when necessary for clear and accurate reproduction and should maintain the authentic nature of the photograph.

“Changes in density, contrast, color and saturation levels that substantially alter the original scene are not acceptable. Backgrounds should not be digitally blurred or eliminated by burning down or by aggressive toning. The removal of ‘red eye’ from photographs is not permissible.”

Its “kill notification” told clients: “At closer inspection it appears that the source has manipulated the image.”

AFP’s own notice said: “Due to an editorial issue this photo… has been withdrawn from AFP systems and may no longer be used in any manner. Please immediately remove it from all your online services…”

Royal sources told PA that Kate made “minor adjustments” to the photo and that she and the Prince of Wales had wanted to offer an informal picture of the family together for Mother’s Day. Kensington Palace has said it will not issue the original unedited photo.

This is the original image as posted on Instagram:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The Prince and Princess of Wales (@princeandprincessofwales)

The post Kate apologises after five news agencies withdraw manipulated family photo appeared first on Press Gazette.

At the Future of Media Technology Conference 2022, there were no mentions of generative AI.

By contrast, this year there were two panels explicitly devoted to the subject and countless more discussions throughout the day.

Executives and journalists from publishers and vendors including ITN, Sky News, The Guardian, AP, Future, Bauer, GB News, Mediahuis, ArcXP and Affino shared how they have begun to use generative AI and what they see in the immediate future.

Generative AI as a productivity ‘co-pilot‘

Future chief executive Jon Steinberg said his company had experimented with generative AI by creating chatbots that have read the entirety of a site, for example computing product review title Tom’s Hardware, and allowing users to ask questions such as “What CPU is ideal for this computer case?”

“So there’s no hallucination, there’s no false data,” Steinberg said. “It’s read expert content and it’s coming up with a result from that.”

Future has also been using generative AI for productivity enhancement as “an editorial co-pilot”.

“We are not having AI write articles,” Steinberg said. “We’re having AI assist editors in pulling together things like product specifications, or editing video to different formats so that we can take video that’s on the site and post it to social.”

However, asked what opportunities he sees in ChatGPT he said: “To be honest, I see more opportunities in social right now.

“We have 180 million social followers. We’ve done relatively little to monetise in that place. It’s a diversification away from Google and it presents opportunities for us to create short-form video, a lot of which we can repurpose from video we’re already creating on the site.”

Steinberg added that he wasn’t convinced generative AI represents a threat to the core of the publishing model.

“I don’t see a world where AI replaces writers… We test mattresses. We test TVs. We test graphics cards. We test all these products and then write reviews about those products. Until the AI sprouts arms and is able to actually test the product, the bulk of what it’s going to be doing is what one of our writers calls a plagiarism stew.”

Matt Monahan, chief technology officer of CMS company ArcXP, suggested that focusing on generative AI’s productivity enhancement potential “maybe undersells it a little bit. Because even today, things like copywriting, copy editing, for instance – there’s a lot that these models are capable of today.

“And that doesn’t mean creating original content, that doesn’t mean editing. But we all employ people who do those tasks today.

“So it is something that people need to be considering right now… You need a real strategy around the question of: do we send our content to OpenAI or not… internally, companies need to develop a core competency around understanding this technology and being prepared for it.”

Trui Lanckriet, the head of data and insights at Mediahuis, told a later panel: “I think I don’t really agree that [generative AI is] all about simplifying the things that you’re already doing.

“I think we need to look at that technology as something that creates new kinds of value, new kinds of opportunities because it can be automated.”

[Read more: How Mediahuis is easing generative AI into its newsrooms]

How AI bots can preserve institutional memory

Markus Karlsson, chief executive of Affino, a business platform for media companies, said his company had implemented “when, why and how” bots to keep track of their own activity.

He said: “We’ve got the release bot, which is ‘when’ – so whenever we need to know something like when did we do something, we go and ask the when bot, because it’s bloody brilliant. It tells you exactly: ‘You did this three years ago; this is what you did.’

“We’ve got the why bot, which looks into all the specifications that we used to develop a product and it tells us why we made all those decisions, which is really useful – especially if the teams have evolved and people’s roles have evolved…

“And we’ve got the how bot, which is the one that tells us how to use our software. Now we used to tell our customers how to use the software – but one of the big things as a tech provider and working with media companies is that we will often work with half a dozen different teams over ten years.

“So getting the institutional knowledge into AI so that they are long-term support, the ‘AI factory concept’ – every organisation should be doing that.”

A/B testing of marketing copy

Asked how some of ArcXP’s clients have been using generative AI, Monahan said he had “seen a lot of good work around testing of copy”, but not purely on the editorial side.

“I’ve seen a bunch of examples of publishers who are using gen AI to create copy for their marketing pages for digital subscriptions, campaigns, call to action…

“And what you can do with that is you can create many, many, many different pieces of copy and content for those marketing pages, test them side by side at a scale that, frankly, is pretty difficult to do with human marketers.”

Similar to Future’s chatbots trained on expert content, Monahan said he’d seen “a lot of good experiments with private LLMs [large language models] happening among our customers today…

“We make it very simple to get your content to some of these platforms, to be able to augment the content of the metadata.”

Translations and monetising or reopening archival content

Monahan also touted generative AI’s use in translating content, saying “some specific subsets of the older LLMs are getting pretty good at quality translations.

“It doesn’t eliminate the need for human review of that content and editing it finally, but you can do a lot of that much faster than you used to in the past.”

ITN’s director of technology, production and innovation Jon Roberts said: “Our education business is using generative AI to repurpose content not just in a different language, but in level two French in a way that is really complex for people and [the AI] just eats it up.

“[In] our sports business, we’ve just run multi-language news bulletins from the World Athletics Championship in Budapest. That would have been cost-prohibitive before – we were now able to produce eight different language versions.”

Affino’s Karlsson described a leap his company had seen in ChatGPT’s ability to translate technical materials into less widely spoken languages.

“One of our clients is Iceland’s state electricity, and they’ve got very complex workflows. And they spend all their time trying to communicate these workflows internally and externally.

“We plugged it into ChatGPT 3.5 to try and provide meaningful instructions. It didn’t understand Icelandic and it didn’t use the right words to communicate it. We plugged it into ChatGPT 4 – it nailed it…

“A six-month progress in AI has [seen it go] from not really being able to communicate well around a technical subject in a language spoken by half a million people to nailing it. It’s really dramatic… That’s why I’m feeling pretty confident that AI is going to be a much bigger part of the whole equation than we think in the room today.”

More broadly, Karlsson said that “a lot of organisations have a lot of content that they haven’t been able to effectively convert into good data products with subscriptions. Now’s your chance.

“Start exploring that. I think all of a sudden there’s loads of opportunities for organisations to start monetising their content and media archives in ways that were really quite unimaginable.”

Derl McCrudden, AP’s vice president of news and head of global news production, said the agency has used AI to make old parts of its media archive that had been poorly-tagged accessible again.

“Anyone who’s spent any time clicking around a photo or a video archive will know how shocking the record-keeping is before a certain amount of time.”

AP has a bot named Merlin, which McCrudden said has “crawled our photo archive and it’s crawled our video archive. And you can now search through our library system for stuff that was not captured in the metadata by the human at the time that it was put into the archives.

“And it is phenomenal… it’s opening up a very rich archive to fresh eyes with the right search terms. In a way it’s kind of like fracking… We knew it was there but it’s very hard to find, and the AI has just solved it very quickly.”

Building the bones of formulaic articles – and, coming soon, converting digital pages to print

Bauer Media’s UK publishing chief executive Chris Duncan said his business has found that “where there are consistent layouts… you can use AI to create – not a whole article, and we would have the same view that there always has to be some kind of human editing task, but you can get an awfully long way in a very short amount of time in terms of creating the next the next barebones article.”

Cesare Navarotto, the chief product officer of CMS company Atex, said some of the company’s print customers “dream of systems that would be able to produce their print pages automatically starting from the digital content”.

He said they were 80% of the way toward making this possible, with much of a print page simple to populate from its digital counterpart. The business next plans to build non-generative AI tools that can automatically lay out a page “and shorten or lengthen text to make it fit better”, while highlighting what changes have been made so a sub-editor can check them.

Asked how far away this future was, Navarotto said it would be “the next iteration of the product basically”.

But using generative AI in live news coverage is still a way off, editors say

Speaking during a session on live news coverage, Sky News head of digital output Nick Sutton said the broadcaster had found some use in AI for fielding audience questions.

“What we’ve started doing is using an AI to sort of group some of those questions together so you can see what are the main topics that are of interest to users… because so many hundreds of questions are being submitted,” he said.

Like others, Sutton said Sky has been using AI for transcription and some image and headline testing. But when it came to writing even summaries of Sky News’ own content, he said they fell short: “We’ve experimented a little bit with summarisation, but I just think even when you’re giving it just the blog’s content to summarise, it can still have hallucinations.”

The Guardian’s head of digital (live) Claire Phipps said the same: “Reliability, verification, trust… I feel like we’re nowhere near being comfortable on those things in terms of generative AI.

“Whether we can use it to synthesise our own reporting… felt like more of a possibility”, she said, but “it’s not there yet, even if you ask it to do something on your own blog”.

Meanwhile AP’s McCrudden said that on SEO editing “we’re going to keep a human in the loop for the foreseeable future because our accuracy is our reputation, and the moment we lose that, we can’t get it back”.

And Tom Pollard, a senior producer and director at GB News, said that “we’ve got the ability to use a ChatGPT thing to write scripts, but it’s just got more drawbacks than positives… In the end you probably have to go through and just rewrite it anyway.”

AI and news publishers vs OpenAI and Google

On the matter of copyright issues arising from language models being trained on publishers’ content, Future’s Steinberg said “there’s a real discussion that needs to be had between publishers and Google, and OpenAI to a lesser extent”.

He said it was “really a conundrum” whether to block web crawlers that might scrape a site’s content because “you’re basically cutting off your traffic if you decide that you want to block the Google crawlers”.

[Read more: News publishers divided over whether to block ChatGPT]

Bauer’s Duncan said he thought regulation would be key to addressing the copyright issue.

“The idea that there will be a big cheque, fairly allocated to represent the true value of the content that’s being used – it’s never happened in history and I doubt it will.

“So we’re going to have to work, probably for quite a long time, to establish a framework… It will take, I think, the regulatory side a long time to catch up. And as publishers, we have to do what we’ve always done, which is: make very clear to regulators and government the argument we need to make, while making the best commercial outcomes that we can in the short term.”

Hearst UK’s chief transformation officer Elizabeth Minshaw added: “We need to learn from the past… I think we need to come up with something that’s mutually beneficial and no longer that antagonistic relationship… Is that a big cheque? I don’t know. But maybe it’s a different type of licensing agreement that’s working with, rather than against.”

The post Editorial ‘co-pilots’ and monetising archives: Generative AI in action at ITN, Future, Bauer, AP and others appeared first on Press Gazette.

Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022 there has been a flurry of activity around generative AI and journalism.

First, a period of quiet experimentation and the writing of guidelines. Now, many are slightly more vocal on their plans for the new technology – whether they are planning to incorporate it into editorial workflows, like Gizmodo, or not, like The Guardian.

And, most recently, news and picture publishers are beginning to make licensing deals with AI companies while others continue to ponder whether to litigate or negotiate over the use of their content to train generative AI model.

In August, ChatGPT owner OpenAI gave website publishers the ability for the first time to opt out of their content being used to train AI tools. Some jumped at the chance to block the tech, but others are wary of creating a barrier that could halt any chance of them being paid for the value their content creates for companies like OpenAI.

Here we have created a round-up of the latest deals, legal threats, guidelines, and uses of generative AI in journalism.

More Press Gazette coverage on generative AI and journalism (from most recent):

• National World debuts AI-generated weather presenter on London site
• Norway’s biggest daily doubles audio audience with AI-voiced articles
• Major news publishers block the bots as ChatGPT starts taking live news
• Trust-focused Money Saving Expert builds AI chatbot but warns users it ‘may cock up’
• Survey reveals global newsroom adoption of AI at early stage but set to increase
• Editorial ‘co-pilots’ and monetising archives: Generative AI in action at ITN, Future, Bauer, AP and others
• How Buzzfeed is using AI to boost engagement as social traffic wanes
• Swedish daily Aftonbladet finds people spend longer on articles with AI-generated summaries
• Sky News identifies the major ‘red flag’ around AI-powered news reporting
• Why action is needed to save quality news from destruction by AI and big tech
• Generative AI and The Guardian: ‘What we do can’t be reproduced synthetically’
• How Mediahuis is easing generative AI into its newsrooms
• News execs fear ‘end of our business model’ from AI unless publishers ‘get control’ of their IP

Publishers mixed over blocking ChatGPT

At the start of September The Guardian became one of the first major publishers to publicly announce it has blocked ChatGPT from trawling its content.

OpenAI first made this option available in August although publishers cannot remove material that has already been scraped to train ChatGPT.

A spokesperson for Guardian News and Media said: “The scraping of intellectual property from the Guardian’s website for commercial purposes is, and has always been, contrary to our terms of service. The Guardian’s commercial licensing team has many mutually beneficial commercial relationships with developers around the world, and looks forward to building further such relationships in the future.”

Guardian reporter Rob Davies said he was “pleased about this, given that ChatGPT made up a fake article by me and put my byline on it. Always hungry for bylines but there are limits.”

ChatGPT has been found to have referenced articles supposedly by The Guardian, with bylines from named journalists, in response to prompts made by members of the public. The errors were discovered after those researchers and students got in touch with the publisher which, after trawling the archives, found the stories never existed.

A number of other websites and publishers that have chosen to block OpenAI from using their content have been revealed by Originality.AI, an AI detector for publishers.

They include: The New York Times and sister title The Athletic, CNN, Bloomberg, Insider, The Verge, PC Mag, Vulture, Mashable, Times of India, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Bustle, Vox, Lonely Planet, Hello!, Axios, France 24, and the New York Daily News.

However Sajeeda Merali, chief executive of the Professional Publishers Association which represents specialist publishers, told Press Gazette there are potential downsides to publishers from making this decision.

“[If] ChatGPT is to continue to grow and become an entry point for digital information in the same way that Google search is at the moment then opt-out isn’t really a viable option.

“What we don’t want to do is create barriers to negotiating the right terms with ChatGPT and we certainly don’t want them to be able to say that ultimately publishers can choose to do what they want.”

New York Times legal threat against OpenAI

After weeks of contentious licensing discussions between The New York Times and OpenAI, the news publisher is now reportedly considering legal action.

The publisher believes it should be paid for the use of its original reporting in the training of OpenAI’s tools.

Of the potential outcome of a court case, NPR explained that “if a federal judge finds that OpenAI illegally copied the Times’ articles to train its AI model, the court could order the company to destroy ChatGPT’s dataset, forcing the company to recreate it using only work that it is authorized to use”.

The New York Times has at the same time decided not to join a coalition of other publishers, likely to also include Axel Springer and News Corp, who want to benefit from jointly negotiating with AI companies about potential compensation for the use of their content.

Deals between generative AI companies and publishers

The Associated Press and Shutterstock are, to date, the only major news companies to have agreed deals with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

The Associated Press has signed a two-year deal that will let OpenAI train its generative AI tools on the news agency’s historical content.

AP said the deal showed OpenAI respected the value of their intellectual property. A number of other news publishers are said to be in discussions about similarly receiving payment for the use of their content in the training of AI tools.

The deal, which follows a similar arrangement between OpenAI and picture agency Shutterstock (see below), allows OpenAI to license part of AP’s text archive while the agency can “leverage OpenAI’s technology and product expertise”.

They said they would together look at potential uses for generative AI in news products and services. However AP made clear it is not using generative AI in its news stories.

Kristin Heitmann, AP senior vice president and chief revenue officer, said: “Generative AI is a fast-moving space with tremendous implications for the news industry. We are pleased that OpenAI recognizes that fact-based, nonpartisan news content is essential to this evolving technology, and that they respect the value of our intellectual property.

“AP firmly supports a framework that will ensure intellectual property is protected and content creators are fairly compensated for their work. News organizations must have a seat at the table to ensure this happens, so that newsrooms large and small can leverage this technology to benefit journalism.”

Days earlier, photo agency Shutterstock signed a new six-year agreement with OpenAI, allowing the ChatGPT creator to use its data for training.

The deal gives OpenAI access to Shutterstock’s image, video and music libraries and associated metadata as training data, while Shutterstock gets priority access to the latest OpenAI technology and will continue to incorporate DALL-E’s text-to-image generator tool in its website as well as add the ability for customers to edit and enhance any picture in its library.

Will other deals be struck between ChatGPT and publishers?

Some of the world’s biggest news publishers are in discussions over potential licensing payments for the use of their content by AI companies.

News Corp, Axel Springer, The New York Times and The Guardian have all met at least one of OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Adobe, the Financial Times reported in June.

Chris Moran, head of editorial innovation at The Guardian, noted in an interview with Press Gazette that the newsbrand has “operated an open platform for a number of years, an API, which people can absolutely pay for to get a stream of our content in a legitimate way to build a business on. But none of these companies have been to us to ask to use that and that in itself is interesting. So, yes, we are thinking about what the value of our content is in this environment.”

News Corp CEO Robert Thomson has also called for compensation to publishers for their content being harvested and scraped to train AI engines, as well as for the information snippets in AI-powered search results that “contain all the effort and insights of great journalism but designed so the reader will never visit a journalism website”.

He said he wants as many media companies as possible to derive value and that it should not be solely a sweetheart deal for the biggest publishers.

Round-up of generative AI in journalism guidelines/principles

Many major publishers have published versions of their guidelines or principles about how they will think about the potential uses of generative AI in their newsrooms.

Common themes, as assessed by two academics, include oversight – making sure humans have the final say on all content, transparency – so that any uses of AI are clearly labelled to readers, and citing what the strategic intentions of any use would be, including boosting efficiency so that journalists can spend more time on original work.

• Aftonbladet
• Associated Press – although it has a licensing deal with OpenAI, it says that while “staff may experiment with ChatGPT with caution, they do not use it to create publishable content”.
• BBC
• CBC News
• CNET – clarifying its policy in June to say it would not create full stories using AI using its in-house tool Responsible AI Machine Partner following errors being discovered in more than half of its earlier, quietly-published AI-written stories.
• Financial Times
• The Guardian
• Insider
• Mediahuis
• Reuters
• Swedish Radio
• The Telegraph (via Press Gazette report)
• William Reed
• Wired

Latest generative AI experiments and launches in news publishing

Newsquest and Gannett

UK regional publisher Newsquest hired its first “AI-powered” reporter in June with the remit to expand the use of AI tools, including to create local content.

In the advert for another “AI-assisted” reporter role in August, the publisher said the journalist, whose work would focus on its newsrooms around Oxford, would be “at the forefront of a new era in journalism, utilising AI technology to create national, local, and hyper-local content for our news brands, while also applying their traditional journalism skills”.

In the US, Newsquest’s parent company Gannett paused the use of a generative AI tool named LedeAI to write high school sports reports after a number of “major flubs”, as CNN described them, in articles published by a number of its local titles.

The articles had been criticised for being repetitive, “lacking key details”, and sounding like they were written by a computer that had no knowledge of sports. CNN pointed to one example, which read: “The Worthington Christian [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeated the Westerville North [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]] 2-1 in an Ohio boys soccer game on Saturday.” That article has since been amended.

A Gannett spokesperson said: “In addition to adding hundreds of reporting jobs across the country, we are experimenting with automation and AI to build tools for our journalists and add content for our readers. We are continually evaluating vendors as we refine processes to ensure all the news and information we provide meets the highest journalistic standards.”

Axel Springer

Axel Springer has created a global generative AI team drawn from editorial, product, tech and business who will lead its efforts on identifying and leveraging the potential uses of AI.

It is one of several developments at the publisher since mid-June signalling its appetite for moving quickly in this area. It has also created news plugins for ChatGPT in the OpenAI store for German news media brands Bild and Welt, meaning users can ask questions to find out the latest news if they have a ChatGPT Plus subscription.

Bild’s deputy editor-in-chief Timo Lokoschat said: “Artificial intelligence not only supports journalistic work, but also creates new access for our readers…”

Axel Springer also made headlines when it announced plans to make about 200 people redundant at Bild in a digital-only transition that would involve an “AI offensive”.

Staff were told in an email that this would mean “the functions of editorial managers, page editors, proofreaders, secretaries and photo editors will no longer exist as they do today”.

Chief information officer Samir Fadlallah subsequently told Reuters the changes would have positives for journalists: “For newsrooms, AI opens up new paths and freedoms. Journalists can outsource tedious work to AI and devote more time and energy to their core tasks… We see great potential in generative AI to provide our readers and users with even more attractive and individually tailored products.”

Gizmodo

Technology website Gizmodo published an inaccurate AI-generated article about Star Wars and staff were vocal in their displeasure.

The article, bylined Gizmodo Bot, was headlined: “A Chronological List of Star Wars Movies & TV Shows.” However the list was not in chronological order. It has since been amended.

Gizmodo deputy editor James Whitbrook explained on Twitter that the article had been published by someone outside of editorial, adding: “No one employed at [entertainment vertical] io9 or Gizmodo looked at or interacted with the piece at any point of its creation prior to or after its release.”

Gizmodo Media Group Union claimed that the AI rollout had been “pushed by” the company’s chief executive, editorial director and deputy editorial director.

Whitbrook wrote that the article “rejects the very standards this team holds itself to on a daily basis as critics and as reporters.

“It is shoddily written, it is riddled with basic errors: in closing the comments section off, it denies our readers, the lifeblood of this network, the chance to publicly hold us accountable, and to call this work exactly what it is: embarrassing, unpublishable, disrespectful of both the audience and the people who work here, and a blow to our authority and integrity.

“It is shameful that this work has been put to our audience and to our peers in the industry as a window to G/O’s future, and it is shameful that we as a team have had to spend an egregious amount of time away from our actual work to make it clear to you the unacceptable errors made in publishing this piece.”

Man of Many

Australian men’s lifestyle website Man of Many has launched an AI chatbot called Ask MoM, developed with Chatling.ai.

The publisher said the chatbot, which will only deliver information that has been published on the Man of Many website, was “designed to offer personalised, instant responses to user queries, reducing search fatigue and significantly improving reader engagement”.

Man of Many also claimed to have been the first major publisher to have launched a ChatGPT plugin in the OpenAI store, having gone live ahead of Axel Springer.

Users need a ChatGPT Plus subscription to access it, but can interact with Man of Many content in a conversational way, asking questions on topics like products, culture and style.

The publisher said the tool is also designed to drive traffic back to the site by offering previews of content and suggesting users click through for the full thing.

Reuters

International news agency Reuters has added AI-powered discoverability features to its video content on its content marketplace Reuters Connect.

It said AI would apply automated transcripts, translation and identification of public figures to Reuters video content and make it easier for clients to find what they need.

Reuters said its applied innovation team built the features by “finely tuning machine learning models to consistently produce the highest quality automated analysis of Reuters video”.

Shutterstock

Ahead of its deal with OpenAI, Shutterstock announced it would fully indemnify its Enterprise customers for the license and use of generative AI images on its platform.

It said: “Shutterstock will fulfill indemnification requests on demand via human review with the intent to protect its customers against potential claims related to their use of generative AI images created and licensed on shutterstock.com.”

General counsel John Lapham said: “We’re at an inflection point in the use of generative AI technology as business professionals are seeking more assurance around their rights to legally use AI-generated content, and creators of original content want to ensure their work is fairly licensed for use.

“We have always sought to manage risk for our customers and are uniquely positioned to bring a commercially viable image generator to market and indemnify its outputs, because of our relationship with artists and intimate understanding of the complexities of licensing.”

Taboola

Taboola has made its generative AI capabilities, which include creating copy and content for ads, available to all its advertisers who run campaigns in English.

The AI-powered content recommendation engine said it has carried out a successful beta test in which some brands “more than doubled the click through rate for their campaigns when measured against evergreen campaigns – driving more customers, improving efficiency and refining their long-term advertising strategy based on Taboola’s AI-driven suggestions”.

The platform said the tech would help advertisers produce original titles, headlines and images leveraged on best practice as it would learn from previous successful campaigns.

Taboola’s chief executive Adam Singolda said it had become clear “generative AI is an important next step for every advertiser”.

Buzzfeed

In March, Buzzfeed used generative AI to create 44 travel guides which were widely derided as bland and formulaic. Futurism described the articles as “comically bland”. They appear here under the headline: “As told to Buzzy the Robot“. Buzzfeed uses ChatGPT technology under licence to power personalised quizzes.

Future

Future is using OpenAI technology to power a chatbot which answers questions about content on the technology site Tom’s Hardware.

Reach

Reach is running a beta experiment in My News Assistant, an AI-powered website that aggregates the thousands of articles published daily across Reach’s more than 80 online brands.

Aftonbladet

Sweden’s largest daily newspaper Aftonbladet has tested news stories “rapped” by an AI service at the suggestion of a youth panel.

Despite what he called the “rather cringey” result, Aftonbladet’s deputy editor-in-chief Martin Schori said the paper hoped to “provoke a debate” about creating news content that appeals to younger audiences.

Listen to Press Gazette’s podcasts on the topic of generative AI

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As the BBC reviews its staff social media guidelines following Gary Lineker’s suspension, Press Gazette has analysed how other publishers seek to protect themselves.

Press Gazette looked at social media guidelines from: The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, ITV, Channel 4, Associated Press, CNN, DMGT and the BBC.

Common social media rules for journalists

Some social media advice to journalists is universal among publishers. Variations upon “only post what you would publish or broadcast” appeared in almost every set of guidelines.

So too did the rule that journalists, particularly those on the news side, should refrain from posting political opinions.

Where there was difference on this point related to the scope of that impartiality. Channel 4 advises staff: “You should avoid making statements that could be perceived as taking a position on a political issue of the day.”

CNN is more specific: “You are prohibited from sharing opinions or grievances on causes, movements, issues, people, politicians, governments, companies or organisations that we cover.”

And the Associated Press goes even further: employees are allowed to “root for teams or make general comments about elements of popular culture” – but not to jeer other teams. (AP sports and entertainment journalists do not even have the former luxury, being directed to not “show favour to” anything within their area of coverage.)

The BBC warns against a frequent feature of journalist Twitter biographies: notes along the lines of “my views, not the BBC’s”. The broadcaster says those disclaimers are ineffective and “should not be used”.

Most publishers advise that staff who have posted something inaccurate should delete the offending content and immediately follow up with an acknowledgement of the error. A notable exception was CNN, which recommends in guidelines from 2020 that staff who have made a mistake contact their manager and the outlet’s PR team before acting. The New York Times, meanwhile, requires the acknowledgement of errors, but not necessarily the deletion of mistakes.

One common rule prohibited criticising colleagues on social media. The requirement appeared in the guidelines for The New York Times, The Guardian and The Washington Post, all of which have suffered high-profile online disputes between colleagues.

Another recurring rule was, in the NYT’s phrasing: “We strongly discourage our journalists from making customer service complaints on social media.”

Advice which seemed to be common to most publishers included:

• Don’t show an opinion on anything your organisation covers
• Don’t post what you wouldn’t publish
• Pause before you post
• Don’t breach your company confidentiality requirements (i.e. keep things said in conference or an internal meeting confidential)
• Delete inaccurate tweets, swiftly follow up with a correction
• Don’t criticise colleagues publicly
• Don’t respond to aggressive tweets
• When you respond to non-aggressive tweets, be polite
• Don’t post news stories to social media before your publication has put them out
• Don’t lobby.

Should journalists be on social media in the first place?

The most notable difference in approach was between publishers who actively encouraged their journalists to be on social media and those who wanted them off.

Mail, i and Metro publisher DMGT, for example, recommends: “We actively encourage you to take part in the social conversation, be proud of achievements and share experiences.”

The Associated Press says its journalists are “encouraged to maintain accounts on social networks”, but that “no AP employee is required to post content on social media”.

On the other end of the spectrum, The Guardian tells staff they are neither expected to be on social media nor to have a following there, and they are advised to take breaks from the platforms. Employees are encouraged to delete old posts, and may expense the Tweetdelete service to do so if they wish.

The New York Times agrees. Former executive editor Dean Baquet emailed staff last year saying the paper supports any staff who decided to “step away” from social media, and actively asked those staying to “meaningfully reduce how much time” they were online.

There is some variation between newsrooms as to how staff should deal with aggressive social media comments. Most encourage non-engagement, blocking or muting. AP suggested however that it can be appropriate if a commenter is spreading false information.

The Guardian specifically advises staff not to “retweet or quote offensive comments about yourself or others, even if your intention is to show your disapproval”.

The New York Times suggests that when engaging with critics, journalists should “not imply someone hasn’t carefully read your work”.

But CNN has less tolerance for the haters, advising journalists that if they are “attacked, trolled or challenged” they should not respond.

‘Don’t post pornography’

Beyond the above, the guidelines are a widespread mix of advice, some of them specific to particular newsrooms but others are potentially of use more widely.

The Guardian, for example, advises its staff “don’t post late at night” and “don’t post while emotional”. The BBC, similarly, recommends its staff not to “post when your judgement may be impaired”.

CNN says don’t post pictures of the newsroom. ITV says don’t post pornography.

The BBC, having perhaps the lengthiest guidelines of any publisher examined by Press Gazette, had several pieces of advice not present in other rule sets.

“Use of emojis can – accidentally or deliberately – undercut an otherwise impartial post,” the corporation advised. It also recommended staff “avoid ‘virtue signalling’,” which it defines as “retweets, likes or joining online campaigns to indicate a personal view”.

In addition, the BBC advises staff:

• not link to anything they haven’t read fully
• not to offer judgements beyond their specialism
• to assume anything they say will be viewed critically
• assume anything they post to a private account is effectively public
• and to note there is no difference between a personal and official account.

The AP’s similarly exhaustive list recommends AP managers “should not issue friend requests to subordinates” – but friend requests among similarly senior staff are fine.

And more darkly it states: “Employees should not post about a missing or detained AP staffer without clearance from senior AP managers.

“Social media posts can unwittingly put colleagues at risk and jeopardise company operations continents away.”

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Associated Press journalists who stayed in Mariupol to report on Russia’s siege of the Ukrainian city last year saved “tens of thousands of lives”, it has been claimed.

Two of the AP team, the only journalists for an international news organisation who stayed in Mariupol amid a communications blackout in the city soon after the war began last year, were recognised at the RTS Television Journalism Awards on Wednesday night.

Producer Vasilisa Stepanenko was named Young Talent of the Year while video journalist Mstyslav Chernov, who himself won best young talent in 2015, was awarded Camera Operator of the Year.

They, along with photographer Evgeniy Maloletka, spent 20 days documenting the Russian bombing before they were helped to escape in fear of Russian soldiers targeting them.

Chernov was not present at the awards, as he was filming near Bakhmut as a battle for the city raged on.

Derl McCrudden, AP’s vice president for global news production, accepted the award on his behalf and described an “extraordinary” message AP received from a special adviser to the now-exiled mayor of Mariupol in January this year.

“He thanked us for their work and he told us that AP’s coverage of Mariupol became a central point in the negotiations with Russia over the opening of humanitarian gate corridors for the civilian evacuation of the city. He said, without exaggeration, you saved several tens of thousands of civilians and it’s difficult to overestimate your personal contribution here.

“It’s a rare moment where journalism has a real and substantive impact,” McCrudden said.

In his own speech, sent to McCrudden to read out, Chernov said he “felt terrible” when picking up his previous award in 2015 because he felt he should have been filming the Russian bombing of Ukraine going on at the time.

“I blamed myself for not being there and not filming it,” he said. “Today, those same Russian forces are bombing and trying to take the city of Bakhmut… Nine years have passed. Nine years of fighting and seemingly nothing has changed. But thanks to the work of international and Ukrainian journalists, the world is finally seeing the truth, the true face and scale of this invasion.”

Stepanenko was present at the awards to receive her recognition and received one of only two major standing ovations of the night (the other belonged to Jeremy Paxman collecting his Outstanding Contribution Award).

Stepanenko described being in Mariupol near the start of the invasion with people coming up to her and her team, having seen their flak jackets identifying them as press, asking for information.

“But we had no information. At that moment, I understood that information is even as important as food.”

Others recognised for their work in Ukraine included CNN International with the Breaking News award, BBC News for News Coverage – International, Sky News chief correspondent Stuart Ramsay who was named Network Television Journalist of the Year, and BBC News presenter Clive Myrie who received the Network Presenter of the Year prize.

After thanking colleagues, Myrie said: “I’d also like to thank the people of Ukraine because they have opened up their hearts to so many of us in this room to chronicle this horrible war of choice and I pay tribute to them.

“I’ve heard a lot over the last year about spheres of influence and great power rivalries, and Putin has to be let down with a bit of dignity and don’t upset Biden. All this kind of stuff – professors, politicians, lecturers, everybody. But what I hear not enough are the voices of Ukrainian people. What do they actually want? And, frankly, I think that’s bullshit. I think we need more of that.

“And their country is not just a plaything for superpowers. It’s a country in which they live and they work and they breathe and they rear their children and they have lives and we need to hear more of what they want out of all this. So this is for them.”

Ramsay, who was shot in an ambush of his team in the first week of the war last year, paid tribute to the colleagues who were with him at the time including producer Dominique van Heerden and camera operator Richie Mockler.

Ramsay said that in the absence of an RTS award for producers, he would share with Van Heerden.

“She is a stickler for truths and facts and lectures me often about how it’s got to be right, it’s got to be right, it’s got to be right as if I wouldn’t want to get it right, he said. “But in this modern era of fake news, attention to detail is more important than I think it’s ever been.”

He also paid tribute to the people of Ukraine, including those who stayed behind to work as fixers, drivers and translators, saying journalists “owe [them] so much for our news coverage”.

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Use newsroom automation to get journalists doing more “robust reporting” – but “do not automate a bad process”, publishers and experts in the use of newsroom AI have said.

Attendees at Press Gazette and United Robots’ webinar “News automation: Winning robot journalism strategies for 2023” on 12 October heard from leaders in the field that the key to automation success is knowing in advance where you need it most – and acknowledging that AI can only take you 80% of the way with certain stories.

But once the automation is off the ground, journalists, rather than losing their jobs, are freed up to do more interesting and informative work.

There were, however, some differing views on how open publishers need to be about automation and some opposition to the phrase “robot journalism”.

‘I don’t call it robot journalism’

Press Gazette editor-in-chief Dominic Ponsford asked panellist Thomas Sundgren, the chief commercial officer at United Robots, what we mean when we talk about AI, robots and automation.

Sundgren explained that the sort of AI popularised by science fiction – or latterly, language programme GPT-3 – isn’t necessarily useful to publishers.

“Most newsrooms and most suppliers don’t want to apply that pure machine learning tech into automated content for a newsroom,” he said. “And the reason is, basically, that machine learning is meant to constantly change and learn, and change output based on learning…

“Sometimes that could produce a radically different output format, when it comes to editorial texts, because that’s what it’s meant to do. And most readers and newsrooms actually want a predictable format.”

Cynthia DuBose, the vice president for audience growth and content monetisation at US local media group McClatchy, echoed Sundgren’s point.

“I don’t call it robot journalism at all. I think when it comes to local news, I define AI for local news as information. It’s data that our readers want to know – whether it’s weather, high school sports, real estate prices. And it allows us to add a layer of information back to what we’re offering our community.”

McClatchy has been using automation to handle parts of its real estate reporting, for example doing the grunt work processing reams of property sales and pricing data.

DuBose said: “For us, we use the term ‘AI articles’. We don’t use robot journalism. Our journalists are continuing to create journalism. And that’s something that I think McClatchy has been very clear about – we don’t believe that AI or the robots can do what our reporters do.”

What newsrooms can do with automation

Aimee Rinehart, who leads the local news AI initiative at Associated Press, said AP had used a similar approach with earnings reports and their journalists “can now do more robust reporting and leave the data to the machines”.

She said: “Since 2014, we pioneered natural language generation with earnings reports – so taking data in a spreadsheet from quarterly earnings and creating articles based on that. And so each cell has an ‘if-then’ – so if the price went up, this is the language [you tell it to use]…

“And we went from doing 300 earnings reports every quarter to 3,000. And the journalists that we had reporting on this said that they [had] felt like robots, actually, by doing 300 earnings reports, and they are able to now do analysis.”

Rinehart told the webinar: “No one lost their jobs during that [implementation]. In fact, people said that their jobs became better, more interesting. And they were able to write analysis pieces around what those earnings reports collectively or by sector meant.”

Pete Clifton, the editor-in-chief at PA Media, said his organisation had used automation to localise data reporting.

When the Office for National Statistics publishes a major data release, Clifton said automation allows PA “to scale up, to provide 300 localised versions on a story like that.

“Whereas we would previously have done one national view, we might have done a couple of breakouts on a particular talking point in one region, but we would never have been able to provide that level of detail for that many different local authorities or towns or health authorities and so on.”

How to make the most of automation

DuBose explained that when McClatchy was figuring out how to apply automation to its work they “identified areas where we had an audience demand for basic information. We recognised in many of our markets, pretty much all of them, there’s a big appetite for timely and accurate real estate information.

“Then we looked for opportunities to produce content at scale… We looked for structured data that was available across all regions, which also made the implementation much more feasible. And in this case, that was real estate transactions.”

Asked by Ponsford whether the implementation had driven an increase in revenue, DuBose said: “We are seeing an increase in audience reach.”

Another theme that recurred was the importance of humans to make the automation work.

Rinehart from AP said: “When we are talking with local newsrooms, and we’re talking about implementing solutions for things that don’t always have that reliable structured data, we say that AI can take you 80% of the way there. And then that other 20% has to be a human.”

Despite that, she confirmed to Ponsford that AP is so confident in its models that its automated earnings release digestions go straight onto the wire without human checking.

Clifton emphasised that the capable team of data journalists at PA had been crucial to the company’s implementation of automation. On part-automated PA articles he said: “Often it’s bylined by one of the data journalists who’s overseen the end-to-end process, which has included plenty of automation along the way, but they’ve put in a fair amount of the grunt work as well.”

How open should you be about your use of automation?

That point on bylines formed one of the few differences of opinion among the panellists. Whereas PA does not typically announce the involvement of automation in its articles, McClatchy is open about it.

Clifton said: “I don’t think there are many examples where publishers are racing to put up stuff [where] they’re proudly saying ‘this is completely automatically generated, and there’s been no intervention at all’… The formats might change, and it might really unnerve the readership.”

He said he has had discussions with customers over automating sports content, but found clients preferred the idea of a human writing it. Nonetheless, he felt “you need to hold the hand of customers to let them know what it is they’re actually getting, and to know that it’s being done responsibly… but the net result is something that they’ll feel comfortable with”.

At McClatchy, DuBose explained: “We have bylines that show the stories were generated by a bot… And then we have a note that really explains how the information came to be, where the information came from.

“And we have an email address that we use for feedback. We really wanted to be transparent.”

DuBose suspected McClatchy’s openness had helped its sites perform better on Google.

“We have not seen any penalisation… Google wants [automated content] to be identified, which we do, and we feel we do very well – with the bot byline, with the footer that we have on the bottom, and also [making sure it’s] not repetitive.”

Keeping on Google’s good side

Ponsford asked the panellists how Google would take to widespread automation, given its recent emphasis on boosting original content.

[Read more: ​​Google’s latest core algorithm change hits major news publishers harder than ‘helpful content’ update]

DuBose said: “Last week we had a hurricane – we were [covering] the weather. That story was number one in one of our sites through Google. And it was just a predictive [article] – it was a report of ‘This state could be in the path’…

“So I think there are a few things that when you are setting up your template, you want to make sure that you are looking to have not every article be exactly the same, you want to make sure that you’re being transparent about who is writing and how this was written.”

Sundgren, of United Robots, added: “What Google does to penalise automated or bot-generated content, it’s exactly what Cynthia says. It is repetitive, short text snippets meant to just be put out there in volumes just to attract SEO.

“And Google are smart enough of course and good enough to differ that kind of dirty bot content from automated editorial content as we do it.”

Tips for success: Define the gaps in your reporting

Asked for any other advice for newsrooms hoping to implement automation, DuBose said: “Make sure you’re doing that in a topic in an area that is going to appeal to your audience. It doesn’t make sense to spend the time to automate to have additional articles, if that is not a topic that resonates with your communities.”

Rinehart advised that tech wasn’t necessarily always the answer.

“You don’t always need a tech solution. But I will say as you think about what could solve a problem, you will probably discover you have just a bad process. So do not automate a bad process.”

And Sundgren said: “It is about defining the gaps in reporting that you think you have and that you need to fill to be able to satisfy [your] audience, give them better information, cover new stuff.”

Picture: Shutterstock

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