This week’s media briefing will show how Financial Times, Immediate Media and Reuters can use AI tools to supplement journalism.
AI Assist Newsroom
The AI-assisted newsroom has been back for a while.
When dismissed as an error-prone novelty or a complete threat to newsroom work, publishers are now actively embracing AI-powered tools to support everything from transcription and translation to background research, SEO optimization, press release summaries, headline selection, and article drafting. This quiet adoption marks a major change as news organizations face relentless pressure to do more with less. AI is not a replacement for journalists. They are quietly becoming their partner.
“We really want to empower journalists and make sure they own their future. The future is something that’s not happening to them,” Jane Barrett, head of AI strategy at Reuters, told Digiday. The news organization, which rigorously trained 26,000 global journalists in using AI, tested it in the newsroom in April this year, then deployed a series of AI video production tools to publisher and broadcaster clients this April.
Last month, Reuters, The Independent, The Washington Post, and News Quest roared about how to further align strategies that evolve with the rise of generated AI in a competitive news environment. The initiative includes the addition of AI Assist Reporters to the newsroom, updating AI-powered content management systems, new proprietary AI tools, and fully AI-generated news products like The Independent’s Bulletin.
It’s one thing for publishers to try out AI tools in small newsroom trials, but scaling them across their editing work is a much bigger lift. New workflows, staff training and cultural change are needed. Still, this leap is happening more and more as publishers look to root journalism in the future and chase efficiency and personalization.
The Financial Times uses computational techniques to identify important stories that may otherwise not be told. Last week, he used AI to classify 10,800 complaints from Tesla customers, resulting in reporters writing a story about how Elon Musk’s government-efficient mass shootings disproportionately hit staff assessing the risk of self-driving. Last year, I analyzed 36,000 images using a machine learning image recognition tool and first used the same technique to find missing Ukrainian children on Russian adoption sites.
Like Independent’s Bulletin service, FT helps you create secondary content using AI. A short summary of articles reviewed by the editor before publication. We will automate this test, expanding it to approximately 5% of articles and monitor the impact on reader engagement.
“We cannot compromise on journalist integrity. Journalists are reported, written and created by journalists, but the newsroom is also innovating and experimenting,” said Matthew Garrahan, head of FT’s digital platform.
Meanwhile, Agent AI is still in its early and more popular among AD agencies and ad technology vendors, but it has gained more traction among publishers among others who experiment with use cases and already assimilate Agent AI as an efficiency tool.
For now, publishers’ attention is primarily focused on improving efficiency and productivity, but it has changed to embrace the way reporters unlock new ways to conduct investigative journalism, according to Joanna Levesque, managing director of FT consulting arm FT strategies. “I think it’s mature enough to have a publisher coming,” she said.
What I’m thinking is that publishers can’t afford to keep AI at arm’s distance. Referral traffic has long been a volatile source of viewers for publishers, but the rise of AI platforms and response engines has threatened to make that issue even worse as they are increasingly providing content without urging users to click through.
“In this new world of AI, distribution channels are changing, as they did on social media, so we really have to think about how we are ready to enter these new distribution channels, find new audiences and prove the relevance of the value of utility and the fact-based, unbiased news.
Handing over grant work to AI – Publisher’s Productivity Promise
This conversation has turned into a more measured acceptance than AI replacing journalists and reconstructing editorial roles. Ideally, release reporters to focus on deeper research work. This kind of high value journalism is becoming even more important as publishers try to create enough engaging content to drive clicks from the AI response engine.
Last month, Reuters journalists used AI video tools to transcribe 70 minutes of content in 70 languages across the newsroom, according to a Reuters spokesman.
“You can work faster for journalists. You don’t have to work in the scary late-night hours because something happens suddenly in your language,” Barrett said.
The use of generator AI tools will help reduce stress levels in the Reuters newsroom, Barrett said. She acknowledged that the roles of junior reporters are significantly different from those years ago, but have not hindered their development and merely restructured the requirements for those roles. “There are a few jobs that change,” Barrett admitted.
But for others, there will probably be a cut. One publisher executive who agreed to speak anonymously said he hopes to reduce the population of several people a year as a result of the increased efficiency of the AI tools. But that same executive said this was not an overall concern for journalism, but reporters were released to spend more time on investigative journalism.
Barrett claims that AI is groaning for many roles. It traditionally mines and filters video footage in a volume of thousands of press releases per day and similar volumes to find the correct facts and source material for breaking news, summary, follow-up stories and video content.
“From my personal experience, I know that when you sit there at 7am and all the company news starts to flood you, it’s really stressful like super high adrenaline,” Barrett said.
Reuters rolled out its first set of generation AI tools last April, and two weeks ago announced a new batch of new video tools to publishers and broadcasters’ clients. This tool is designed to cut down on video production workflows. Bullett is bullish because it doesn’t use AI to generate images.
The AI assistant in Reuters CMS is the CHATGPT plugin. Editorial staff can ask questions such as if it’s too long, or if a fresh angle has been missed in the story, or how to check the angle.
There are significant changes to publishers investing in AI with their staff and product output, but this journey is unlikely to be smooth for a while. Bloomberg reportedly got off to a rocky start with an AI summary, and had to edit certain things based on details about the wrong Trump tariffs, including false numbers and false attributions.
But if anything, this kind of Snafu simply helps to highlight what United front publishers have. AI may help support human journalists, but it will never be replaced.
Home to magazine titles, including Good Food and Top Gear, Immediate Media develops a “first draft” tool for authors that connects GPT to publisher content archives, helping to create the first draft of articles, and is strictly checked by journalists. This is not intended to speed up the amount of articles that can be created, but it has allowed writers to have millions of articles created by magazine brands in AI, allowing them to do things that previously were very time-consuming, like establishing a timeline of skeletons or ensuring angles beyond titles that include Goodo Food.
These surfaced articles can supply contextually new articles. “This gives you the first draft and saves 20% to 30% of content creation time,” Fisher said. “The users don’t want to read emails written in AI, so they don’t want to read content clearly written by AI,” she added.
Of course, there is still a reason to proceed cautiously. But after years of skepticism, the newsroom is no longer just dabbing in AI. They define how it fits into the workflow. “We don’t want AI to create content. We want to help create content. Yes, that research process and that kind of framework and initial drafting are short, but it doesn’t take away from the work that the editors and editorial team do,” Fisher added.
What we’ve heard
“Are their (AI licensing deal publishers) thinking about selling their souls for lunch money? What we look like $30 million, $75 million — if you’re looking at a new way that doesn’t happen anymore in your domain, that doesn’t sound that much to me.
-An anonymous publishing executive regarding publisher licensing transactions with AI platforms.
Numbers you should know
-33.1%: Warc’s forecast amount of advertising revenue from news publishers will fall this year compared to 2019. $9 Billion: Netflix is expected to become a global advertising sales hit by 2023.
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