12 Feb AI, Robot Journalism and all Things Fungible
WHAT WORKS AND WHAT’S TO COME
THERE ARE YEARS in which the media industry is abuzz with talk of new tech and new solutions, and others in which older mediums have suddenly been imbued with new possibilities.
We’d say that this moment is a mix of the two, with product development and innovation moving so fast that it encompasses both the old and new. So as newsrooms around the world continue to innovate with podcasts and newsletters, and possibly gear up for a new pivot to video on platforms like Tik Tok, we take this chapter to look at the tech that might define the future. In order of importance these are:
Artificial Intelligence: How is it being used in newsrooms today and what for? Can AI predict user and subscriber behaviours and help automate mundane tasks so that journalists have more time to generate quality content?
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs): We’ll be honest in saying we have no idea how long this is going to last. But while the bandwagon is still gaining steam it’s worth looking at how publishers can capitalise on the demand for NFTs to generate some revenue.
Let’s get started:
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR THE SMART NEWSROOM The data that we have right from multiple surveys now is that publishers across the world are betting big on AI. There’s an interesting dynamic here a recent McKinsey report1 found that across industries 50% of companies use AI in one way or another. However, compared to other digital
media outlets like video and audio platforms, news publishers are still at a very early stage of AI adoption.
Why is this the case? We can wager fairly confidently that despite there being many different use cases for AI in newsroom operation and other aspects of media management, there is still some level of stigma or fear about the big elephant in the room proposition – can AI get so good that it will make journalists redundant? Can we get to a stage where machines will churn out news articles?
These propositions are still very far-fetched, though there have been significant advances in ‘robot journalism’ which we’ll cover later. For now, let’s pan out and look at the bigger picture.
The Journalism, media and technology trends and predictions 2022, a report written by Nic Newman for the Reuters Institute for the study of journalism surveyed 246 news leaders in 52 countries to explore the latest developments in the field and the priorities for the year ahead. Newman writes that Ai technologies are fast being seen as core to publishers’ businesses.
“Artificial intelligence technologies such as Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Natural Language Generation (NLG) have become more embedded in every aspect of publishers’ businesses over the last few years. Indeed, these can no longer be regarded as ‘next generation’ technologies but
are fast becoming a core part of a modern news operation at every level – from newsgathering and production right through to distribution,” Newman
writes.
Newman also lists out some excellent examples from 2021 on how AI has had an impact on both story production and distribution.
1 In June 2021, The Boston Globe won an investigative journalism Pulitzer Prize for Blind Spot, a story about preventable road accidents in the US. Journalists used Pinpoint, an AI tool developed by Google, to support investigative journalists to identify patterns in their data.
Despite nearly 50 years of warnings by federal safety officials, the United States has no effective national system to keep tabs on drivers who commit serious offences in another state, Brendan McCarthy Deputy Projects Editor at The Globe writes in a Google blog.
“When we launched the investigation, we hadn’t fully gotten acquainted with Pinpoint, a new Google tool where you can upload documents to easily search for names, places and more for patterns. But midway through our reporting process, we were dumping troves of files — court documents, photos, handwritten files, spreadsheets and more — into the tool, he writes.
“A couple of helpful aspects of Pinpoint are its ability to recognize text in images and organisational capabilities, like the opportunity to quickly see, and search documents for, the most mentioned names or places and connections between people. So often in journalism — especially when you are dealing with mass troves of data — you are looking for outliers. Pinpoint let us figure out what was NOT there as much as what was there.”
2 Sky News used AI to extract and clean public health data from pdfs and other previously inaccessible formats, which they then used to constantly update web pages and TV graphics across its output.
3 The Washington Post has extended its synthetic voice audio versions across all of its output, using a software called Amazon Polly, following a successful trial period within its apps.
The Post was previously using standard textto- voice conversion iOS and Android technology, but. Polly “is a better voice – it’s a smoother, more human-sounding voice,” Kat Downs Mulder, the publication’s managing editor for digital said in an interview with Press Gazette. “It still sounds like a mechanised voice, an automated voice. But I think it’s a bit smoother and more natural.”
In the 2021 edition of the Journalism, media and technology trends and predictions report, Newman refers to the Journalism AI project from the POLIS think tank at the London School of Economics which has been documenting best practice case studies in this field since the beginning of 2020. These include:
l The Peruvian news outlet Ojo Público has created a tool to spot potential patterns of corruption in government procurement contracts.
l The BBC has been testing an AI powered chatbot tool to answer questions about coronavirus using its own trusted reporting and information summarised from official sources.
l The South China Morning Post is using AI to identify look-alike audiences to help it better target new subscribers.
l The Reuters news agency used speech-totext technology to add time-coded transcripts to its entire archive of historic videos dating back to 1896 – making key moments easier to find in 11 different languages.
l The Globe and Mail in Canada has delegated many of the editorial choices on its homepage and other landing pages to an AI-based tool called Sophi
l A number of publications are using AI tools to monitor issues of gender and racial bias in output and flag results to editors. New ideas have been surfaced by AIJO, the AI in Journalism project, which is a collaboration across eight publishers and has proposed ways to understand and mitigate newsroom biases.
The current state of AI adoption Narrowing in further from Newman’s examples, many of which one could see as more advanced uses of AI, a survey published in February 2022 by the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) in collaboration with the Germanybased consulting firm Schickler, decided to look at the current state of AI adoption in newsrooms by narrowing use cases to reader revenue and editing.
In general, the survey, conducted across 2021, found that more than 75 percent of publishers say AI will play a crucial role in the success of their business within the next three years. A more striking insight was that the use of Ai was not just restricted to larger newsrooms with deeper pockets, or the oft-cited publisher examples in Europe or the U.S. who pop up in discussion about innovation.
“In fact, as we saw in this year’s World Press Trends survey the gulf in the importance (and planned investment) attributed to Automation, AI and Machine Learning is more striking, and perhaps, surprising, i.e. developing countries place a huge importance compared to developed countries, “the report states.
This is a trend confirmed by other research as well. In July 2021, a report jointly prepared by International Media Support, The Fix and El Clip, aimed to specifically address this gap in our understanding of AI application in newsrooms around the world. It focuses on media houses using varying degrees of AI, ML and Data Processing as part of their core business operations in 20 countries in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. The data was collected via deep dive case studies of 44 media outlets and over 33 hours of interviews with experts.
The report management of paywalls and subscriptions are the most widely used AI applications in both regions but while the use of AI/ML is not limited to large, corporate media budgets and market realities can make stark differences. The report finds that attracting specialist talent and skills is a barrier to further adoption and growth and more collaborative approaches between media, research institutions, or third-party solutions needs to be encouraged.
Still, as the WAN-IFRA report finds, the exciting news is that the near taboo that was once associated with AI as it pertains to journalism is clearly fading.
“It sounds like a cliche, but it is true: the advantage of automating mundane processes allows journalists to focus more on their core principles of creating quality content. But increasingly as the surveys showed, the intelligence side of AI is also winning over editors and journalists as it pertains to reader revenue strategies,” the report states.
“A lot of analytics tools inform the newsroom about what stories are trending and when, but many of the AI tools already on the market and in practice today help to predict more accurately which stories will be read, and more importantly, which stories will convert and retain based on historical data around subscriptions and engagement.
WAN-IFRA also highlights some recent case studies, giving more insight into the specific use cases for AI that publishers are identifying.
AN ALGORITHM TO DEFINE READER ENGAGEMENT The Norwegian publisher, Amedia, the country’s largest publisher of local media titles which reaches 2.4 million readers daily across all platforms wanted to understand the kind of consumption behaviour on a digital news platform characterises a happy and satisfied customer? Answering this question is easier said than done. Of course it can be key to designing new products and a guide to what kinds of content to focus on.
Amedia handed over this decision to a machine learning algorithm, letting the algorithm select the best combination of metrics. The algorithm takes up to 70 reader behaviour statistics as an input and distils them into a single number that best predicts how likely a reader is to stay loyal to the product. At Amedia they call this number the “Engagement Index.”
A particular benefit of the Engagement Index, according to the WAN-IFRA report is that it separates the product’s and content’s influence on reader loyalty from other external factors such as personal preferences or subscriber tenure. In other words, it captures those factors that are currently affecting reader loyalty – and that are under the publisher’s control.
APAYWALL THAT PREDICTS USER BEHAVIOUR We’ve made mention of this innovation before from Canada’s The Globe and Mail. In recent years the publisher has committed itself to AI, developing a range of tools and products under the name Sophi.
Perhaps the most cutting edge is a fully dynamic, personalised real time system that decides when, or even if, to show a paywall. The unique thing about this paywall is that it knows when to give up rather than alienate visitors. Here’s how Sonali Verma, senior project manager at The Globe and Mail, described it at the Online News Association conference last year: A reader who reads mostly general news and recipes might be less likely to subscribe than one reading a lot of business-related content. Still, Sophi might present this general news reader with a paywall.
If they don’t reach for their wallet, the model won’t hit them with the same message again. Instead, Sophi might pivot, and try asking the reader to register with an email instead. Sophi uses analytics to make decisions that balance the potential for ad revenue against the potential for subscriber revenue. Some readers might never encounter a paywall (Verma mentioned a hypothetical visitor who primarily reads car reviews — a strong source of ad revenue) while others might see one every time they visit the site.
The Globe and Mail has credited Sophi with helping it achieve a 51% increase in subscriptions as against its old paywall which was a hybrid approach. In April 2021, the company reported that it had 170,000 digital-only subscribers.
The paper also uses AI in many other ways that indirectly drive subscriptions and registrations. For instance, natural language processing is used to select stories to put outside the paywall. In fact, a Sophi tool decides where to place 99% of all digital content across The Globe and Mail’s properties, Gordon Edall, Vice President, Sophi, told WANIFRA. “Our work on Sophi Site Automation… is probably where we have had the biggest impact, as we have been able to let the newsroom continue to do its work but use the machine to more effectively drive performance of that content without putting the brand at risk.
Sophi is also helping publishers around the world who can purchase the AI tools from The Globe and Mail. The South African news website News24, which launched a freemium paywall in August of 2020, decided to use the tech to get directly involved in ranking news stories, prioritising times to publish, and conversion
predictions. With its help, News24 reached 45,000 subscriptions in just over one year’s time, Adrian
Basson, Editor-in-Chief of News 24 told WANIFRA.
A PREDICTIVE SCORE TO HELP RESURFACE AND REPUBLISH ARCHIVE CONTENT A collaborative research project between Ouest- France, the country’s largest newspaper, and the companies Twipe and Syllabs resulted in the creation of an internal search engine based on a predictive score that helps the newspaper surface, republish, and monetise archival content.
The collaboration resulted in the creation of a “content monetisation predictive score,” assigned to each of the more than 30 million articles in the Ouest-France content archive and designed to assess an article’s potential to generate page views.
“Initially, we had three goals in mind,” Jean- Pierre Besnard, Project and Incu- bation Manager at Ouest France, told WAN-IFRA. “The first was to consider it from a page views angle, the next was engagement, and the last was subscriptions. We could imagine three algorithms on three of these points of view, but we only had time for the first one.”
The partners also built an internal search engine tool based on the predictive score, which surfaces articles from the archive, allowing journalists to select and re- publish them with just a few clicks.
A DATA-DRIVEN PLAN TO PREDICT CHURN Mediahuis, headquartered Mediahuis, headquartered in Belgium, set itself the goal of implementing a fully automated datadriven
customer journey with the aim of increasing revenue and reducing churn. The company wants to target its potential and existing customers with the best registra- tion offer, the best sales offer, and the best retention journey in an automated, efficient, and personalised manner.
The adopted a data-driven approach, using a churn propensity prediction model developed inhouse, incorporating machine learning, Mediahuis is targeting a selection of existing customers who seem likely to churn but worthwhile to keep, and who could potentially be persuaded to stay on.
In addition to its churn prediction model, Mediahuis started working on a propensity to buy model a few months ago to be able to predict whether someone will buy a subscription and what type of subscription they will buy in the next month.
AUTOMATING THE MUNDANE Moving on from the WAN-IFRA report, thereare examples where AI is particularly useful in eliminating the time required to do grunt work in newsrooms. Some newsrooms have already adopted or tested AI-based transcription technology. At KSAT-TV in Texas, News Director Bernice Kearney called the transcription tool Trint “a game-changer,” especially during the pandemic when most civic meetings have been recorded. Oregon Public Broadcasting also uses transcription, and Chief Content Officer Morgan Holm describes transcription as something that makes newsgathering more efficient, allowing the newsroom to put more resources “into the human part of newsgathering.” Additionally, some newsrooms want to take transcription further by automating alerts of potential newsworthy topics discovered in transcripts.
AI IS GTOWING INGREASINGLY FLUENT What are the other types of stories for which AI can be applied, and can machines do it alone? Take the example of the Wall Street Journal, which has begun to generate AI narratives on the biggest markets in the U.S. and Europe. For this they partner with a company called Narrativa which has an AI system called Gabriele.
“We couldn’t be more satisfied with the result; news articles generated by Narrativa are featured on the front page of the American website,” a post from the company said. Narrativa generates two types of news articles for The Wall Street Journal:
1 Information on the state of financial markets in the United States, Europe and Asia.
2 Consumer price index and producer price index (CPI and PPI).
“Our artificial intelligence system serves up the information quickly and then WSJ professionals then analyse it in terms of the impacts that a particular fall or rise in the stock market will have for the financial world.”
“But this isn’t a tool to replace editors,” the post adds. On the contrary, artificial intelligence is the perfect ally to support their work, using a combination of technology and research.”
More and more companies, Narrativa says, are waking up to the potential artificial intelligence and natural language generation (NLG) as superior support tools that improve results.
The company claims that the number of readers of news generated by NLG has risen from zero to 7% in the last two or three years. “With this in mind, it is more than likely that we have read an article generated by artificial intelligence at some point without even realising it.”
There are more examples of AI growing increasingly fluent and proficient at generating text. In the Journalism, media and technology trends and predictions report for 2022, Newman writes that the BBC is planning to extend its 2019 experiment with election results, which allows hundreds of constituency pages to be automatically written and rewritten by computer as the numbers change – all in a BBC style. “Local elections in May
2022 will provide the next test of what will become a permanent system that could be adapted to work with many other types of publicly available data from health to sports and business,” he notes.
Swedish publisher Gota Media is another that publishes automated stories about sports, real estate, company registrations, and traffic in order to provide regular updates in all its local communities. Its automated real estate content has a conversion rate of 2% which is the best across the group’s ten news sites.
“For a small newsroom, automation is necessary,” Helena Tell, Editor-in-Chief, Bärgslagsbladet (Bonnier News) in Sweden, told What’s New In Publishing. “We know where to deploy our resources in order to make our readers happy. And if we can use technology and automation to perform tasks as well as we reporters would, there’s no doubt that’s what we should do.”
Another example is Crosstown, a non-profit community project that uses machines to cover hyperlocal news in neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. The title is published by Gabriel Kahn who is also a journalism professor at USC Annenberg School for Journalism.
Speaking at Journalism.co.uk’s Newsrewired conference in 2021, Kahn said he uses AI-powered tools to scrape public datasets and store content in the cloud. Humans can then turn that data into narratives that address people’s concerns around topics as varied as crime, traffic, air pollution or coronavirus.
The idea is that by having a location tag on each piece of data, every story can be turned into neighbourhood news. For example, Kahn said a large database on crime in LA can be dissected into stories about crime on each street which gives residents information that is relevant to their lives.
By outsourcing the most labour-intensive tasks to the machines, Crosstown is trying to address one of the biggest pain points of local news: sustainability. It is simply not possible to have a reporter in every neighbourhood to monitor everything from traffic to pollution to public spending, then produce personalised news relevant to the residents. By using machines to source and analyse data, Kahn said the editorial team can extend its reach and serve LA inhabitants on a
hyperlocal level.
WHAT’S NEXT FOR AI? The next frontier, Newman writes, is using AI for images and video. In particular there is much excitement about DALL-E, a new AI model from Open AI, revealed in January 2021, that automates original image creation from instructions you provide in text.
“This could open up a range of new possibilities, from simple story illustration to entirely new forms of semi-automated visual journalism,” Newman writes.
“The big challenge for many large media companies is serving audiences with very different needs using a monolithic website or app. AI offers the possibility of personalising the experience without diluting the integrity of the newsroom agenda by offering different versions of a story – long articles, short articles, summaries, image or video-led treatments – with much greater efficiency.”
Summarisation and smart brevity are trends that Newman expects to see more of in 2022, with news organisations experimenting with content formats for under-served audiences. Research shows that these audiences prefer:
l Increased use of bullet-points in news articles,
l Visual stories over text,
l Mixed media story formats popularised by social media.
As an example already in operation, Newman writes of the BBC’s latest Modus prototype uses two different NLP approaches to generate bullet point-led stories and automated captions for images in picture galleries.
“Enabling this,” he adds, “will be a new generation of modular content management systems, such as Arc from the Washington Post and Optimo from the BBC that do not base authoring around a ‘story’ but instead around ‘nested blocks’ that allow better connections across stories, making it easier to reassemble content in potentially limitless ways.”
Up until now the best models for Natural Language Processing and Generation have been focused on English. While this has been a challenge for languages like Arabic and Spanish where extra training is often needed to get the required quality, Newman expects to see faster progress over the year with publications like La Nación in Argentina
and Inkyfada in Tunisia refining their own models in collaboration with academics. Programmes to share best practice such as the Journalism AI collaboration programme from LSE’s Polis and INMA’s AI webinars and showcases are also helping spread knowledge.
The adoption of AI could, it would seem from the multiple cases elaborated on here, free journalists from routine tasks, streamline production and improve how content is utilised. An Associated Press study based on survey results and in-depth interviews found that newsrooms could benefit from AI-aided tasks like transcribing and translating interviews, delivering story recommendations to online readers, and enhancing the fact-check process. Survey respondents also recognized the potential of AI to improve reporting functions, such as analysing public records and sifting through social-media content.
The report found, however, that the bandwidth to experiment may be minimal in smaller newsrooms, and that news providers could benefit from additional training. Among the nearly 200 print, TV and digital newsrooms surveyed, certain issues stood out, most of which would need addressing if AI were to be normalised in the newsroom. “Many newsrooms spoke of staff turnover, frequently losing the one person who had been the driver of innovation. Others spoke of being unable to spare one of a handful of reporters
to take a month to learn how a speculative technology might enhance, and not distract, from their other duties,” the report notes. “What’s more, current technology in local newsrooms is patchy and often does not sync. Adding still another layer to an already cumbersome technology stack can be out of the question for many newsrooms.”
For this reason, it is important that newsrooms walk the tightrope of minimising costs, maintenance requirements and staff learningcurves while ensuring humans retain control over how to identify sources and other sensitive matters. Most importantly, to facilitate this, perhaps a wider range of newsrooms could benefit from all-inone, integrated solutions, rather than customised systems or the adoption of a la carte approach to adopting AI tools one at a time.
NEWS MEDIA AND THE METAVERSE Ever since Mark Zuckerberg’s 2021 announcement that the Facebook corporation would be referred to as Meta, the “metaverse” has become the oft-touted new thing, the latest revolutionary cultural phenomenon. Now an umbrella term referring to the growing eco-system of interactive online worlds, games, and 3D meeting places, the metaverse is the next stage of the internet, already generating dialogue around how digital content is broadcasted and consumed. Referred to as Web 3.0, the metaverse is fundamentally about how users, media companies and gaming giants interact with the internet. And if TV companies hope to survive
in this world of online entertainment, experts warn that they will need to find ways to capture the fastfading attention of a younger audience – according to Statista, viewership under-35s has halved in a decade, and is only likely to reduce further. In 2021, in fact, streaming video accounted for a higher percentage of viewership than broadcast TV, according to Nielsen data reported by Forbes contributor Brad Adgate, indicating a shift away from traditional ways of broadcasting.
According to Matthew Warneford, co-founder of media research firm Dubit, broadcasters now face an all-important decision: stick with a shrinking market for traditional TV programming or start bringing their characters and brands into metaverse platforms. “It means bringing people into a world, making them part of the story, playing alongside their friends,” he says, just as Disneyland “allows you and your friends to be in their world with Mickey Mouse.”
Ahead of the curve, some television channels are already take advantage of a modern omnichannel approach —games, apps and other content types may be released to support content shown on TV. The popular British talent show Britain’s Got Talent allows the audience to feel more immersed in the show, with an app that provides exclusive backstage content, activities and ways to vote for their favourite acts. This sort of interactive approach is one of the many that traditional television may need to adopt to channel the power and possibilities of the metaverse.
TARGETING ALL DEMOGRAPHICS With the metaverse and all its possibilities, how do content creators for television produce shows that keep audiences interested, involved and coming back for more? TV companies face a particularly significant challenge in ensuring they cater at once to various demographics – older people watching traditional broadcasts, middle-aged people shifting to streaming and young people wanting interactive and social entertainment. “If we want to stay relevant, we will have to position ourselves across all these usages,” said Kati Bremme, head of innovation for France Televisions. This national broadcaster, like many others, is experimenting with augmented and virtual reality to build immersive cultural and sporting experiences.
ADVERTISING REVENUE What happens to the finance side of things? So far, unlike other traditional media like newspapers, TV firms have been more or less immune to
technological change because their advertising revenue was unaffected. Now, however, the metaverse may allow for brands to have greater scope to promote their offerings and sell them to viewers directly. With fashion and luxury labels already making millions selling virtual clothes and accessories on popular gaming platforms like Roblox and Fortnite, there exist more avenues for advertising and marketing if TV media colludes intelligently with Web 3.0.
TV NEWS AND THE METAVERSE: A CASE STUDY FROM TURKEY A case study from Turkey News broadcasting organisations are not far behind. Turkey’s public broadcaster TRT recently unveiled its TRT Metaverse project, currently in the process of being coded. In keeping with its tagline “tomorrow’s broadcasting starting from today”, the organisation believes it has ushered in the future of the news media, with a vision to introduce viewers to a bold, new and exciting three-dimensional world. Doing away with the one-way interaction of traditional news, the immersive nature of the Metaverse would, the project envisions, allow users to teleport to a different environment altogether.
Begum Aydinoglu, founder of the trailblazing ILLUSORR, the world’s first design-oriented Metaverse platform, explains it thus: “Imagine instead of having to go on Twitter to see news or watch it on TV, you can enter the Metaverse with your avatar, click on a certain channel, and be immersed in a live 360-degree feed in Rwanda, Egypt or Ukraine. You are there with reporters, experiencing the news in real time. Those are the kind of immersive experiences the Metaverse is going to introduce to the conversation.” This
underscores the idea of being able to live through experiences in the way storytelling aims to do. For this, content creation and smart design must go hand in hand.
Linked to TRT’s exhaustive archive and all its channels, the ILLUSORR project will enable users to access and manipulate its main feature, an interactive globe, on which they can pick a specific country and directly consume its news. This will allow for the user to have a dynamic and immersive experience of the area, its geography, and its happenings with, as co-founder Faisal U-K describes, “layers of functionality that enhances the experience of the physical world.”
Importantly, the metaverse can allow for twoway interaction and communication flow, which social media channels with their one-way chat boxes do not facilitate. In an example, ILLUSORR’s own launch event in the metaverse had guests arrive as avatars who could communicate with each other. This could be replicated in news environments as well.
As with all exciting and pathbreaking innovation, the Metaverse needs regulation, with users offered adequate privacy and security. ILLUSOR’s co-founder Sarah Jamal also warns that companies need to clearly define their audience before they take their Metaverse presence to the masses to avoid ending up as yet another entertainment gaming social media platform.
And what does the future hold? Faisal U-K predicts that within two to five years a device will emerge that will allow for both a fully immersive experience as well as a mixed reality experience with the physical world. The device, he believes, will be smart glasses.
The NFT CRAZE/PHASE NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) are the media world’s current enfant terrible, embraced in some quarters as a possible revolution in monetisation of content, and in others as very much a passing fad. Much of it depends, we suppose, on how you feel about the potential of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. “
While NFTs have been around since at least 2017, the buzz surrounding them has escalated in recent weeks, for a number of reasons,” Mark Stenberg writes in his Medialyte blog.
“The technology presents a new, and potentially very lucrative, revenue stream for anyone in the business of creating digital media, a classification that includes everything from songs to tweets to essays to memes. NFTs also represent the beginning of a new way of thinking about how ownership works on the open internet.”
Stenberg expands on this idea in an article about publishers adopting NFTs for Adweek – “In an industry determined to diversify its revenue stream, NFTs offer publishers a way to monetize their digital content in a novel fashion. Whether articles, covers, collaborations or as a form of membership, the tokens allow media companies to translate reader
affinity into revenue in a new manner.”
Publishers experimenting with NFTs is no longer a new thing, but it’s worth running through the examples. In October 2021, Stenberg wrote that Playboy had unveiled its latest round of NFT, a drop of 11,953 3D rabbit characters known as Rabbitars.
The Economist, he said, had followed suit, announcing that it had minted its first non-fungible token, the cover of its Sep 21 issue exploring the world of decentralised finance.
“By creating this NFT, The Economist is engaging with one of the earliest ways developers have created for the distribution of content on a decentralised web,” Alice Fulwood, Wall Street correspondent for The Economist, told Adweek.
Jamal Dauda, the vp of blockchain innovation at Playboy (yes that position exists now) said the publication was drawn into NFTs “because it seemed like an interesting way to reimagine our 68 years of IP and to leverage our immense archive.
”These examples can be added to a flurry of others over the last year or so, when NFTs basically seemed to give a new twist to a business model we have always advocated for at INNOVATION – monetising archive content.
TIME MAGAZINE TIME was one of the first to jump in with its “Is God Dead?” cover auction in March 2021. The magazine auctioned three covers as NFTs – The first was its iconic 1966 cover asking, “Is God Dead?” The second was a more recent spin on that cover from 2017, during the Trump years, when the magazine asked: “Is Truth Dead?” A brand-new “cover” that’s not actually appearing in the magazine: “Is Fiat Dead?” was designed for the NFT sale and is basically meant to appeal to crypto enthusiasts.
“Fiat money is government-issued currency that is not backed by a physical commodity, such as gold or silver, but rather by the government that issued it. Crypto currencies, like Bitcoin and Dogecoin, are challenging that model,” a release from Time said. The three covers were auctioned on digital artworks marketplace SuperRare for $435,000.
Time President Keith Grossman told Adweek this is an extension of Time’s existing cover story business, which is a seven-figure business line. “This is not just about the collectibles and big drops,” Grossman said. “The more interesting part is what does this mean about the future of subscriptions, the future of community, the future of membership.
CNN In June 2021, CNN announced that it would sell “moments” from its television archives as nonfungible tokens. “For 41 years, CNN has gone to extraordinary lengths to document and broadcast the global stories of our time. Now, the network and digital news powerhouse is opening its archives for the first time to offer collectors the opportunity to own a piece of history, “a release from the company said.
Vault by CNN will house a select set of digital collectibles, or ‘Moments’, from CNN’s television archives, mint them as NFTs using blockchain technology, and sell them at vault.cnn.com. “Until now, there has been no way to ‘collect’ these moments. Users can often find old footage online, or packaged up in documentaries, but they cannot ‘own’ them or display them in the way they can with a print newspaper or magazine,” CNN said in an FAQ about the service.
SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST In August 2021, journalism.co.uk reported that The South China Morning Post wanted to turn its historic articles, pictures and other items into digital assets that cannot be tampered with and can also be owned by anyone. The project launched by the publication is called ARTIFACT and it will see items like important historic images or front pages re-created digitally using blockchain technology. These NFTs can then be collected or traded by the members of the public or institutions.
ASSOCIATED PRESS More recently, in January this year, The Associated Press announced that it’s starting a marketplace to sell NFTs of its photojournalists’ work in
collaboration with a company called Xooa. According to The Verge, it’s billing its foray into NFTs as a way for collectors to “purchase the news agency’s awardwinning
contemporary and historic photojournalism” and says that the virtual tokens will be released at “broad and inclusive price points.”
The AP actually has history with this, being the first news organisation to sell an NFT, for a work of art titled “The Associated Press calls the 2020 Presidential Election on Blockchain—A View from Outer Space.”
News UK In February 2021, The Guardian reported that News UK may soon join the NFT boom. “Rupert Murdoch’s publishing arm is considering making a move into the frothy market of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, by turning the Times and the Sun’s extensive archive of photos, cartoons and classic front pages into unique digital versions,” the paper reported.
Experiments with NFTs can also be.. well, more experimental. In March last year, Quartz listed one of its articles for sale in NFT form, claiming that it was the first column to be sold as such. That same month The New York Times minted an NFT of one of its own columns, subtly headlined ‘Buy This Column on the Blockchain!’. These were experiments not tied to archive content, more attempts to ride what was at the time a nascent NFT bubble for publishers.
The case for NFTs Can we make a broader philosophical case for NFTs? Jarrod Dicker, who is vice president commercial for The Washington Post, was involved in a cryptocurrency venture called Poet before he joined the company. Speaking at a discussion on NFTs and the media moderated by Columbia
Journalism Review, he said that his primary interest in NFTs is as a way of bringing “an ownership element back to media” and putting more value on individuals and the work they create.”
“We are in the early days of seeing how NFTs impact and evolve existing businesses, most popular today in digital art,” Dicker says. “But I encourage people to think about NFTs beyond the product itself and actually as a process; if we as content creators are able to manage control of assets at the inception of the idea (pre-publish), what dynamics come about that give us more creative control, monetization and agency?”
“Let’s think of NFTs as a point of entry for publishing. each piece of content created becomes an NFT,” he continues at another pointin the discussion. “The value here is that there is an inception of the content that’s immutable and managed by the media company or creator. This gives both control as to how that content is used, licensed and distributed as well as a means to be able to collect revenue on that asset.”
So will NFTs as a viable part of the media business last? Or are they just the latest example of the “nonsensical tactical futuristic toys that distract marketers?”, a colourful description by brand consultant and former marketing professor Mark Ritson,
Like it or not, so long as demand for NFTs is there, publishers will likely continue to explore how they might experiment with it and hopefully translate some of those ventures into revenue.
THROUGHOUT THIS CHAPTER we have been alluding to the increasing range of possibilities that Aio can have for the newsroom but some are simply more visceral than others. When it comes to AI and generating creative images, we present two intriguing examples.
THE ECONOMIST In June 2022, The Economist published a detailed report about how it experimented with advanced AI to design its latest magazine cover.
“Our cover this week is about a groundbreaking new technique in artificial intelligence. But it also broke new ground in our journalism, and that is because it was designed by
a computer,” the magazine wrote.
“We generated the cover using a foundation model to create an image that matched our words. This is how it worked.”
“Foundation models are the latest twist on deep learning (DL), a technique that rose to prominence ten years ago and now dominates the field of AI. Loosely based on the networked structure of neurons in the human brain, DL systems are “trained” using millions or billions of examples of texts, images or sound clips.
Foundational AI is revolutionary because it grasps the symbols in language, programming and illustration and uses them in ways that seem creative. A bit like a human. We set out to harness this computer creativity.”
How does this process harnessing Deep Learning work? The Economist has a more detailed breakdown.
“When we work with our human designers, we start with a briefing: on the theme of the cover, our argument and why it matters. Then we kick around some ideas together. The designers go away and produce a series of roughs, which we refine into the final artwork.”
“With our silicon-based sketcher, a bot created by MidJourney, a research lab, we worked differently. The bot’s briefing consisted of a single phrase, typed into a browser. For example, if you type in the phrase “what do robots dream of”, this is the sort of thing that you get:”
After trying out many options the team at The Economist kep things simple by simply providing the bot the title of the leader article: “Artificial intelligence’s new frontier”.
“Some of the images are creepy,” the editors note of the images generated, with some in particular bearing an uncanny resemblance to a
young Vladimir Putin. “As we looked through the files, that too became a pattern. What was the bot telling us?”
Ultimately, the bot allowed renditions of the same concept with different themes. The team at The Economist keyed in an option for a “travel poster” design filter for AI’s new frontier and eventually picked the cover image from one of the options generated.
COSMOPOLITAN Just a week later, the editors at fashion magazine Cosmopolitan wrote their own post about about using AI for the very first time to design a cover.
We pull out some extracts here to illustrate the process, and the effectiveness with which the AI renders words to text.
From the article: Cheng types a fresh request into the text box: “1960s fashionable woman close up, encyclopedia-style illustration.” The AI thinks for 20 seconds. And then: Six high-quality illustrations of women, each unique, appear on the screen.
Six images that didn’t exist until right now. “This technology is a creation of OpenAI called DALL-E 2. It’s an artificial intelligence that takes verbal requests from users and then, through its knowledge of hundreds of millions of images across all of human history, creates its own images—pixel by pixel—that are entirely new. Type “bear playing a violin on a stage” and DALL-E will make it for you, in almost any style you want. You can depict your ursine virtuoso “in watercolor,” “in the style of van Gogh,” or “in synthwave,” a style the Cosmo team favors for perhaps obvious reasons.”
“The results are shockingly good, which is why, since its limited release in April, DALL-E 2 has inspired both awe and trepidation from the people who have seen what it can do.
The Verge declared that DALL-E “Could Power a Creative Revolution.” The Studio, a YouTube channel by tech reviewer Marques Brownlee, wondered, “Can AI Replace Our Graphic Designer?”
In fact, Cosmopolitan continues, this kind of AI is fundamentally designed to imitate us. “DALL-E is powered by a neural network, a type of algorithm that mimics the workings of the human brain. It “learns” what objects are and how they relate to each other by analyzing images and their human-written captions. DALL-E product manager Joanne Jang says it’s like showing a kid flash cards: If DALL-E sees a lot of pictures of koalas captioned “koala,” it learns what a koala looks like. And if you type “koala riding motorcycle,” DALL-E draws on what it knows about koalas, motorcycles, and the concept of riding to put together a logical interpretation. This understanding of relationships can be keen and contextual: Type “Darth Vader on a Cosmopolitan magazine cover” and DALL-E doesn’t just cut and paste a photo of Darth; it dresses him in a gown and gives him hot-pink lipstick.
The verbal prompts that eventually lead to the creation of the cover? Here it is again in Cosmo’s words: “The next morning, though, an email attachment in my inbox: an image of a decidedly feminine, decidedly fearless astronaut in an extraterrestrial landscape, striding toward the reader. It’s DALL-E’s interpretation of Cheng’s prompt from overnight, “wide-angle shot from below of a female astronaut with an athletic feminine body walking with swagger toward camera on Mars in an infinite universe, synthwave digital art,” and it’s stunning.”
THE Innovation in News Media World Report is published every year by INNOVATION Media Consulting in association with WAN-IFRA, The report is co-edited by INNOVATION President, Juan Señor, and Senior Consultant Jayant Sriram