Tag: #AI

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“Everyone should be required to do something to innovate every year”

For our study on Gen Z and news consumption for Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung I interviewed the independent news creator Sophia Smith Galer. Sophia used to work for the BBC and Vox Media before going independent, she doesn’t only do journalism herself but also helps other journalists getting better at publishing on platforms like TikTok where younger audiences tend to be. Among other things, she serves on the Future Board of Mediahuis.  

Sophia, what do media organizations need to know if they want to reach young people today? 

Sophia Smith Galer: They need to understand young people’s viewing habits and reading habits and where they feel overserved and underserved. 

Is there something like “the younger audience”, or how would you segment it? 

Young people are not one monolith. Their habits vary depending on every demographic mix. Proper audience needs research would reveal those differences in detail. But it takes a lot of time of being on these platforms to figure out how to give audiences what they want. For example, young men can be reached more easily on YouTube, female audiences on Instagram. But ever since I left my BBC job, I never had the remit of reaching young people. My remit is just that I reach people.

Some media brands have experienced that: If they aim to reach young people, they discover they reach broader audiences.  

A lot of people will say that if they grow on platforms associated with young audiences like TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram, they will find growth, discoverability and awareness rising amongst audience far older. If you grow, you grow.

You worked for the BBC and Vice and turned to be an independent journalist creator in 2023. What do you know about the audiences you are reaching? 

To take Instagram where I’m the most active, my audiences are primarily in the 25 to 34 age bracket. That makes sense: I am 31 years old, a lot of creators tend to reach their own age group. But there are factors beyond one’s control. I’m British, but Americans are my biggest audience on Instagram, even though I spent just a few weeks of my life in America. So, it’s a great tool for discoverability across borders. 

You left the BBC in 2021 to get more creative freedom. These days you are advising Belgium-based Mediahuis on their Future Insights Board. What do you think about the ability of legacy media to advance with younger audiences?

A lot of the newsrooms that are making high-quality social media content on places like Instagram and TikTok are halfway there. That is if they have prioritized vertical video which is the growth engine right now. The big but is that publisher accounts simply do not have the reach or appeal that individual accounts have on these platforms. Audiences are drawn to influential expert individuals, and I think that more journalists should be occupying those roles and disseminating information themselves. 

So, it is key for legacy organizations to empower their individual journalists?

Definitely. Many journalists have to rely on a small, very underresourced video team in their newsroom that is in charge of the newsroom’s entire digital presence. That’s simply not how social media works. Social media is a peer-to-peer network of individuals. 

Do you see examples of organizations doing a good job at this?

In the marketing and commercial worlds, you’re seeing companies taking advantage of concepts like EGC – employee-generated content. Some offer staff incentives and training to be better ambassadors of their work. And to do that safely and freely and have fun with it and get benefits from it, staff need to have the freedom to post without being micromanaged. In fact, journalists could be very good at this because they are used to standing up for their work. A print journalist may appear on broadcast media to represent their work, for example. This is not different from representing your work on a platform like TikTok.

But even that is challenging for many journalists who have been trained to keep a low profile as individuals and disappear behind their reporting and their brand. 

A lot of journalists I have trained or surveyed say they don’t have the video skills, and they don’t have the time. But if they have too many obstacles to become ambassadors of their work, they will remain invisible online. And if they are invisible, their work will be invisible. That’s what really worries me, even more because a lot of the information on Instagram and TikTok is not good. It could really be improved if we had better storytellers there.

You just published a report on a sample of 526 UK journalists, revealing that the majority lacks a strong following on the platforms that matter with the public. They hang out among themselves on X when they could be reaching audiences on Insta, TikTok and YouTube. Is that because they don’t want to or because they don’t get the opportunity by their publishers? 

There are two groups: those who want to do this but haven’t been able to and those who really don’t want to do this. They do not think it is the job of a journalist today to amplify their work on social media. Obviously, I disagree with that personally. But I do come from a public service journalism background where it was really drummed into me that if I do journalism, the whole point is that as many people as physically possible can see it. If you’re not a public service journalist, maybe you can afford to not want to upskill yourself to put your journalism on social media.

Is it also because many journalists still expect people to come to them rather than the other way round?

They may possess quite hierarchical views of the newsroom. In the UK, we’re still seeing an environment where the output of the social media teams may not be seen as prestigious as the output of other teams. We need to stop talking about vertical video as innovation and start talking about it as platform risk mitigation. We need to make sure that we remain visible in an increasingly fragmenting online space where video is getting more important and where a lot of us are digitally homeless following the exodus from X.

What would you advise editors-in-chief to do? 

Newsrooms get the best results if they work with reporter talent who do original, distinctive journalism that is connected to the signature content of the newsroom and wins paying subscribers. This is a way to really amplify not only what you stand for, what you write or film or publish about, but what’s why you’re worth being paid. Identifying that talent and nurturing them and keeping hold of them is its own art, but there are plenty of frameworks from existing journalism structures to rely on. It isn’t reinventing the wheel, but it does take a bit of digital ambition and newsroom culture shift around what it means to be a reporter. It is not just you publish the story and that’s that, and you have nothing to do with the impact or discourse that is created around it. 

What are the major mistakes you have been observing in the media industry?

If a newsroom is making demands, but has not bothered to invest in resources and training for the staff to meet them. Also, in many newsrooms pioneering new formats or taking an interest in the sustainability of the organization does not figure in somebody’s career progression. What’s needed is a cultural shift: The entire workforce should have a vested interest in the future of the company that they’re working for. Everyone should be required to do something to innovate every year. But many senior journalists can’t see the crisis I can see because I am so chronically online. And for junior staff, it can be quite hard to translate that to those who have the power and decision-making abilities. Senior decision makers must become better listeners. This would retain junior staff because they would feel they were having a greater impact on the company’s future. Also, there has always been this church and state separation in newsrooms between commercial and editorial. But there is not a single content creator who divides church and state. They all have to be very editorially and commercially minded.

Is there anything on the content and format sides that could be improved?

 At the moment we’re seeing a lot of high-quality vertical video explainers that look identical to each other. I don’t think it’s sustainable because ultimately, you’re not building communities around your work. It’s within those communities that you’re going to do those important conversions that everyone in the business side of your newsroom is desperate to win over.

You have been very successful as a female creator. But there is a huge gender gap in the creator economy. In a study published by the Reuters Institute, 83 percent of the creators that were mentioned by those surveyed were male. One major reason seems to be that women shy away from online harassment – they are way more exposed to it than men.

That worries me, too. In the data set of my study, the highest profile women are individuals who have big jobs in TV. They’ve had strong backing from the traditional television industry and were famous pre-social media, they entered the race with a big following. As social media platforms may have become increasingly toxic or dangerous experiences, these women have a lot of institutional power and real-life resources and money that can help keep them safe. Whereas it’s the people who are yet to acquire these jobs and sort of fame who have to navigate this toxic environment without these resources. Many will not be able to make it because of how awful an experience they’re going to have online. 

You have embraced the AI age decisively by creating the Sophiana App that helps journalists to get proficient on TikTok. Could you explain your thinking behind this?

From the work I’ve done, I identified a clear need for a tool that could help journalists make vertical video more quickly and at a higher quality. And we know from research that news audiences are happier with journalists using AI tools if it keeps the human in the loop. Sophiana helps translate the written work into a TikTok friendly script that the journalist would have otherwise not been able to do at all or to the quality I expect. It includes a teleprompter so they can film it quickly. The tool centres the journalists’ work, helps them translate it, amplify it, keeping them front and centre and in total editorial control.

How do you think the AI environment will shape the way we all consume news? 

The most pressing change is the decline in website traffic. People are getting answers from speaking to AI agents, but where will the newsroom stand to make money in that new environment? I don’t see a lot of people who are worried about AI misinformation and AI slop. Audiences are really annoyed about all of that, that’s why they are on our side already. A bigger problem is audiences knowing who we are and how to support creative industries in this time of flux. They’re not going to know about it unless we talk to them about it.  

Data suggests social media usage peaked in 2022 and has been declining. Is this just a post-pandemic effect, or could there be more to it?

I think a lot of social media platforms have become less pleasant to use because of how much advertising is forced on people and how changes to what appears on a feed can put you off spending loads of time on it. I agree that there’s going to be a dip because people want to get back to real life. But I don’t think a decline in social media use is going to be an issue we have to deal with in the next three years minimum. 

This interview was conducted as part the study “A miss is as good as a mile: A qualitative study on Gen Z and journalism in Austria, featuring perspectives from users, media professionals, and international experts.”  You can find more information and the full study here. The study was commissioned by Zentrum für Medienwissen der Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung, Co-Author was Jana Koch. The interview was published here.

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“Don’t try to be cool, because that is not your role”

For our study on Gen Z and news I interviewed Pierre Caulliez who has been leading the News Creator Exchange at WAN-IFRA and founded the Consultancy Yoof in London. By the time of our talk, Pierre was 23 years old, thus a pretty credible source on young people’s news consumption behavior. 

Pierre, what do media organizations need to know if they want to reach young people today? 

Pierre Caulliez: They need to know that it is a long-term game. It’s the wrong mindset to come in and say, ‘I want to see direct returns’. It is an investment into the future. It is showing the brand and the mission over the long run. 

Do you see ways to monetize young people with media products or experiences at all, or shouldn’t publishers even be trying?

18-year-olds didn’t pay for news 50 years ago and they won’t pay for it today either. I’m convinced that a portion of young people will pay for news once they get in a financial position and a stage in their lives where they need the news to understand the world and the decisions they make. Now with AI the role of journalism is more important than ever. And young people will see it with misinformation, with the fact that there is an infinite amount of content. News brands have a role as trusted sources of information, everyone will rely on checking whether an information is accurate. 

So, today’s young people are not really that different from previous young generations?

The main difference is that when you look at those who grew up in the 2000s as I did, there was not a lot of media choice. They grew up with Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, these big outlets that decided what the culture was. Now, there is a fragmentation of media. Everyone can become a news channel; everyone can do a TikTok. We are moving into a niche world where people consume niche content instead of mainstream content. These niches can be anything: certain sports or politics or a certain cinematic universe, for example the Marvel niche, which is seeing amazing loyalty. That drives the way they consume news and content and the loyalty they bring. 

But legacy media’s mission is to foster the democratic debate, not to cater to niche interests. 

The key to re-engage younger audiences around media is to recreate a relationship with them. Many young people don’t even know that these legacy media exist. If you ask five under 25s in the streets of London today: ‘give me five names of publishers’, I’m pretty sure they will struggle after number two or three.

Media managers often say ‘young people don’t read our stuff because they have such a short attention span’. Is that just an excuse?

Everyone now has a shorter attention span, because with all the content we are exposed to, we have less time to decide what’s relevant. But people are more likely to spend time with the topics that interest them most. If they were super interested in Formula One, they would listen to a podcast of two hours. It is about grabbing their attention and convincing them that something is relevant for them.

You have a new role with WAN-IFRA, building and leading the News Creator Exchange. Have you set yourself a goal?

We’re seeing more and more non-traditional news outlets that started out as creators and are now doing a very strong job at engaging young audiences. My mission with the News Creator Exchange is to bring these creators into the WAN-IFRA ecosystem and put them on an equal footing with editors and newsrooms. The aim is to create a shared space where editors and creators can sit together, compare how they work, learn from each other, and explore new ways of doing news storytelling. We’ll do that through different formats, workshops, exchanges, and collaborative sessions, and we have onboarded 150 news creators and digital-first outlets thanks to the support of the Google News Gap Project.

Imagine you have 15 minutes with a room full of legacy editors-in-chief. What would be your advice?

The biggest advice is: listen to your audience. Get these young users around the table, listen to them and to what they have to say about your brand. What do they watch, what do they find relevant? How do they find out about you? All this is important to know, not just to assume.

Frankly, it’s been a decade that pretty much every advisor I know has been telling newsrooms to listen to their audiences, and it doesn’t seem to happen. 

To be honest, I don’t understand why. Newsrooms should create open days where they make their journalists meet the audience, for example. It’s not that difficult. My second recommendation would be to build a human relationship with users. For example, 30, 40 years ago, there were some limits to how much we knew of celebrities. Now, because of how much they share about themselves, we know so much about their lifestyles. People identify with them because they share their vulnerabilities, they’re authentic. Some journalists are good at recreating this link and showing themselves as humans in the age of AI. And the third big advice is: do not try to be cool because that’s not your role. Some newsrooms are trying this, and I think it’s a disaster because that’s not their job to be making memes or being funny. Young people have thousands or millions of memes already on TikTok, so why would they go to this media for it? You got to keep your values straight. The formats you’re doing could adapt, but the journalism you do shouldn’t change. 

You are 23 years old yourself, but is there anything that surprises you when observing your generation consuming media?

I’m talking here as a pure Gen Z, not as a consultant, but I don’t see many people using Google anymore. It’s now about chatting with ChatGPT about anything, some do it two or three hours per day. I have a friend who is applying for jobs, and he recorded all his interviews to make him better at it. The new tools that AI offers will change the way we consume information. And one thing that scares me a lot is the trust we put into these tools.

What about social media? Data says we reached peak social media consumption in 2022. 

There is obviously a fatigue of consuming social media, consuming TikTok, but it’s not going to change the impact. Some young people I know are quite scared of how they consume these sorts of media for hours without even noticing. A lot of people are trying to quit social media, but they don’t manage because of the way these media are designed, they give us so much dopamine. 

Are there any missing conversations around young people and media consumption?

We are not discussing the event side of things enough. Events offer quite a good opportunity to familiarize young people with your brand. For example, a news brand in France sponsors a student congress that helps students to choose their course of study. When a person goes to a specific event, they are ten times more likely to remember the brand than if they were just seeing YouTube shorts of the same brand for 10 seconds. It creates value to build connections with different types of events across the life span of a person.

This interview was conducted as part the study “A miss is as good as a mile: A qualitative study on Gen Z and journalism in Austria, featuring perspectives from users, media professionals, and international experts.”  You can find more information and the full study here. The study was commissioned by Zentrum für Medienwissen der Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung, Co-Author was Jana Koch. The interview was published here.

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Broken Trust: Lessons from the Downfall of the Washington Post

The Washington Post is collapsing, and this is affecting people far beyond the media industry. On the one hand, this is because Washington itself has been shaken, not just an institution brimming with Pulitzer Prize winners that once brought down a president. Thanks to various movies, Watergate is a household name to younger people as well. On the other hand, the capitulation of the media company – it can hardly be called anything else in view of the layoffs of 300 journalists and the withdrawal (or dismissal) of CEO Will Lewis –, also shines a spotlight on the state of the industry. In the new, rapidly changing media world, no one is safe, not even the proud Washington Post. 

The case is both unique and generalizable. Unique because it is not only about the decline of a media company, but also about the moral decline of Jeff Bezos as a person. The Amazon founder bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million and held on to it despite several offers, his motivation for doing so never becoming entirely clear. It is generalizable because there are some lessons to be learned from the collapse of the Post. The layoffs are accompanied by a redirection of content, which one may not like but can understand given the circumstances.

But first, let’s look at the specifics. This is the Bezos who, during Trump’s first term in office, approved the Post‘s advertising slogan “Democracy dies in darkness” and gave the highly decorated then editor-in-chief Martin (Marty) Baron a free hand in exposing all the crimes and misdemeanours emanating from Washington. Baron, who has been publicly expressing his deep disappointment with Bezos for some time, described all this in detail in his book “Collision of Power,” published in 2023. The same Bezos then decreed shortly before the 2024 presidential election that the Post was not to publish any endorsement this time around. Given the timing, this was seen by many as kowtowing to candidate Donald Trump. Hundreds of thousands of readers subsequently quit as subscribers. Right after the announcement, the editorial team reported 250,000 cancellations, ten percent of the total digital subscribers.

Since then, Bezos has joined the ranks of those tech bosses who have curried favor with the new administration not only symbolically, but also in deeds. Whether this is done for purely business or possibly even ideological reasons will vary from case to case. One might kindly assume that Bezos is concerned with his fortune and not with a long-planned coup to undermine the fourth estate in the capital. But the fact that he had the opinion section trimmed toward “personal freedoms and free markets” shortly after Trump took office also indicates a change of course. In American newspapers, the opinion section is not headed by the editor-in-chief, but by an opinion editor, David Shipley, who subsequently resigned. Here, the specific contains something general: it is a risk that should not be underestimated to rely structurally on the moral integrity of a single person, billionaire or not. (This should also be taken to heart by those who see the future of journalism in the creator economy, by the way.) In other words, the “billionaire buys newspaper” business model can work as long as that billionaire remains true to his or her values.

As has been widely reported elsewhere, the management of the Washington Post has now imposed drastic cost-cutting measures: more than a third of all reporters have to go, the sports and literature sections are being completely shut down, and foreign reporting is being scaled back. A Ukraine correspondent received her notice of termination while reporting in Kiev. The tech journalist who was responsible for the coverage of Amazon also has to leave the company. The new focus will be on domestic and security policy. It’s back to basics in Washington. 

It’s to be expected that journalists around the world are reeling amidst these announcements. They mourn the decline from the celebrated, well-resourced competitor of the New York Times to a publication targeting the Washington home team. Once again, attractive job opportunities are disappearing. Sports reporters feel their days are numbered—quite a few top journalists began their careers on the sidelines of sports grounds. And those who dream of working as foreign correspondents or already do so are once again cringing. It has long been obvious that there is less demand for this type of reporter in a globally and digitally connected world than there was in the days when having a pair of eyes on the ground was essential for publications with a journalistic reputation.

However, the WaPo‘s return to its core values can also be interpreted as a long overdue step. In an information and communication world where content is increasingly brought to light by AI searches, every media company must find its own special place, making itself indispensable and distinctive. What department stores have been experiencing for decades is now also coming to the media industry: the concept of a full-range retailer no longer works. Relying solely on a glorious past, a strong brand, and brilliant journalists is not enough. The Washington Post has reacted rather late to this development. But at least it is doing so. Media organizations that are less strict with their balance sheets still have this painful process ahead of them. Where the restructuring is delayed for too long, there may eventually be nothing left to save.

You can already hear the critics shouting: “But The New York Times…” Yes, in the same week that the Washington Post announced its downsizing plans, its New York rival published strong figures. But the management there has done a number of things right, which is now benefiting it in a winner-takes-all economy. Unlike the Washington Post, it has not relied solely on its strong journalism. It is a painful truth for journalists that the material for which they sometimes risk their lives is only one component of a bundle that people are willing to pay for. Millions of people today subscribe to the NYT not (only) because of its award-winning journalism, but because of the recipes, puzzles, and product reviews. With a clever internationalization strategy in the form of affordable subscriptions for customers outside the US, it understood earlier than its competitors how to build global loyalty. There is a certain irony in this: in retail, Amazon, as the remaining full-range retailer, has pushed countless others out of the market. Similarly, the New York Times is valued by educated classes worldwide as a powerhouse of media expertise that also helps you cook. There is no need for a second global player that now also has the misfortune of being associated in its name with an unreliable world power and its vassals. 

However, it is not only the Times that is growing. In light of the crisis at the Washington Post, Charlotte Tobitt, a journalist at the British Press Gazette, examined the digital strategies of five successful American media companies. What they all have in common is that they have also established themselves in fields beyond pure journalism, whether it be the development of special digital products or events. This shows growth is possible in these market conditions. But it requires a strategy that goes beyond news journalism.

It is an open secret that strong investigative stories, such as those that established the Post‘s reputation, are good to cultivate ones image. However, because they are expensive to produce, most companies can only afford a handful of them in a certain period. But if you want to attract loyal media users, you need to get them to visit your site as often and for as long as possible. This is more successful with content that is more relevant to the lives of the specific target audience. Data analysts in many newsrooms know that the journalism that wins awards is often not the journalism that scores with the audience—and vice versa. 

In the case of the Washington Post, the concept of investigative strength had even worked in the early Trump years: the many Trump critics in the capital were well served. During Joe Biden’s presidency, however, the connection to this readership weakened. Many no longer knew why they should subscribe to the Post of all newspapers. At the same time, successful digital start-ups such as Politico had challenged the newspaper’s unique selling point as a Washington insider. It was no longer necessary to subscribe to the Post to stay informed about events within the Beltway. According to official statements, the Post now wants to reclaim this territory.

In the age of AI, every company must also consider which field it wants to play in in the future. As understandable as the outrage over the discontinuation of the sports section is, reporting on results or detailed reports on the successes and failures of various teams can confidently be left to AI. For example, the BBC is already successfully using AI-automated audio commentary in regional sports—even in local accents. In the future, sports reporting will have to focus on personalities, lifestyle, and well-told stories. Incidentally, the New York Times also took the lead in this area when it acquired the appropriately positioned media brand The Athletic in 2022 – for more than twice the price Bezos once paid for the Post.

The same will become apparent in other areas of reporting: simply being there is no longer enough. Those who report internationally must do so better or differently than The New York Times, for example, with a view to a specific audience. Those who recommend books need a strong community or personal brands with extremely high credibility around them. Those who offer service or explanatory journalism should take the ChatGPT test: they must clearly exceed the level of chatbots. Media brands have a good chance of asserting themselves in the flood of artificially generated content if they sharpen their profile and build and maintain credibility with strong content or personalities.

Incidentally, what Jeff D’Onofrio, the acting CEO and former CFO of the Post, said after Lewis’s departure is not enough. He announced that the company wanted to use data to decide what customers needed. Data is indeed indispensable for steering and adjusting the offerings. However, what is even more important are values. This is especially true for media companies that are committed to democracy, as the Washington Posthas long been. Those who betray their value proposition to customers should not be surprised when their community implodes. The future of journalism is built on trusting, loyal relationships. The Washington Post has a long, hard road ahead of it.

This column was published in German by Medieninsider on 10 February 2026. It was translated with DeepL and edited by the author.   

 

 

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Nieman Lab Prediction 2026: Editors will start tackling the 5% challenge – and it won’t be fun (at first)

The advances of generative AI have put those in charge of newsrooms on an emotional rollercoaster. While 2023 and 2024 were the years of reckless experimentation (“Hey, look what these models can do!”), in 2025, AI realism took over. Great ideas turned out to be hard to implement, costly, or solutions looking for problems (“Nice, but it’s not serving anyone!”). Putting strategy back into AI development became key.

This is why 2026 is likely to become the dip of the ride. Because now, the strategy needs to be filled with life. And while editors at media conferences widely agree that AI will force newsrooms to focus on unique, original journalism and experiences that create value for their audiences and deepen customer connections, some detailed data analysis will make many of them feel queasy. Because the result will often be not that different from what an editor recently revealed at an industry gathering: Only 5% of a subset of his brand’s content was original journalism. The subtext was clear, of course: The rest could have been done by an AI. Welcome to the 5% challenge.

Expect many newsroom leaders to become busy next year figuring out what exactly makes their brand stand out in the emerging sea of content. And even harder: finding a way to scale the 5% (or maybe 20%) to proportions that guarantee their journalism’s survival. Because let’s face it, the era of the web has been the age of copy-and-paste journalism. And this is exactly what (once) younger journalists have been raised to do in the past 20 years or so. Sitting behind the screen all day and competing for reach was the job. The word “reporting” — picking up stories from the streets by looking at things and talking to people, face-to-face or on the phone — was converted into the phrase “reporting on the ground,” which sounded as if leaving the comfort of the office was an award-worthy niche discipline.

For leaders, doing all of this will involve conveying some hard truths to many newsroom inhabitants: telling them that their daily work has to change — and fast. Converting agency copy into a snappy story — the AI has already done it. Doing some service journalism because customers safely clicked on it — the chatbot will have been there already. Upselling subscriptions with branded recipes — maybe, as long as ChatGPT still spoils the dish with hallucinations. Unfortunately, “stop doing” is among the hardest disciplines for any kind of enterprise. Because other than running exciting experiments and excelling in the innovation department, stopping routines and common practices is neither sexy nor does it bring about career advantages. To the contrary, it means robbing people of things they love to do, or are at least proficient in. And it takes away the status and power that was attached to practicing them. Speaking of rollercoasters, there will be some uncomfortable circles at the bottom of this.

There are four areas where media brands can scale the human-made part of their journalism

But here comes the uplifting part: Focusing one’s journalism on “the real thing” (again) will be fun — for seasoned hacks and creator-type newcomers alike. And it can also help bridge the newsroom generation gap. While younger colleagues can learn from the more experienced ones research and source-building skills for access and investigations (including persistence and picking up a phone), older ones will profit from everything that the Insta-and-Spotify generation can bring to the desk, like video, podcasting, data research, and brand-building competencies.

There are four areas in particular where media brands can scale the human-made part of their journalism: First, with strong personal brands who will play out their authenticity and humanness to connect with audiences (plenty has been published about news creators in 2025). Second, with deep expertise in niche areas that AI-generated content cannot provide because it is prone to converge around the average. Third, with investigations that make news consumers proud of “their” news brand. And fourth, with strong local journalism that is deeply rooted in its communities — in most cases, AI won’t go there. Creators who understand their formats and their stuff can figure in all of these areas, of course.

The sizable rest can safely be left to the workings of AI, where agents will do a much faster, more targeted, and personalized job than humans could have done, provided humans do the necessary prep work for accuracy. Markus Franz, chief technology officer of Munich-based Ippen Group, predicts that with agentic AI, the current “human in the loop” principle will be replaced with a “human on the loop” approach in the future that helps with scalability.

In all of these scenarios, journalism jobs will move into two quite different directions. One set of roles will lean toward the more techie side. They will need to shape the new AI-mediated world of journalism, ensure scalability that adheres to the quality standards of journalism, and build compelling products for customers that make them connect directly with the brand. On the other side, we will see the new “old-style” journalists who do everything to solicit exclusive information and/or establish themselves as personal brands. Talent will most likely have to pick sides early on, and it is essential that journalism education reflects and fosters this. As soon as everyone has settled into their new seats, the rollercoaster can go on its next climb.

This prediction was published with Harvard University’s Nieman Lab on December 16, 2025.

 

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AI Strategy Beats Shiny Objects

 

 

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The Optimist’s Guide to the Digital News Report

If you work in the media industry and want to feed your pessimism, the  Digital News Report 2025 makes it easy for you, because this is what it tells you: influencers are challenging established media brands right and left, news avoidance is at an all-time high, and it is becoming increasingly difficult (and costly!) to reach audiences because they are spread across even more platforms – sorted according to political preferences and educational level.. Welcome to the journalistic dreariness of the propaganda age! However, if you want to pave the way for journalism’s future, the only thing that helps is to look at things through the optimist’s glasses. And through these, the media world looks much friendlier already. Here are a few encouraging findings from the publication by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, whose material media professionals like to dissect and discuss:

Firstly, trust in established media is stable. This has been true for the global average for three years – this time, the report covers around 100,000 online users in 48 markets – but also for Germany, where the long-term study on media trust conducted by the University of Mainz recently recorded similar figures. Yes, things looked even better in Germany ten years ago. But the figure currently stands at 45 percent (Mainz study: 47 percent), which is respectable by international standards. As elsewhere, public broadcasters perform particularly well. In addition, the researchers note that users of all age groups prefer traditional media brands when they doubt the veracity of information. The oft-repeated narrative of dwindling trust in the media cannot be substantiated this year either – although trust in the media and media usage are two different things.

Secondly, attracting audiences to your own platforms – that can be done. At least, that’s what the Norwegians, Swedes, and Finns have proven. Public broadcasters there have invested heavily in their own video platforms and are very restrictive when it comes to posting their content on platforms such as YouTube or X. The Finnish broadcaster Yle now attracts more users to its platform than all other providers in Finland combined. The study tours to Scandinavia by many media professionals are therefore justified.

Thirdly, energetic journalists can benefit from the influencer trend and successfully start their own businesses.Frenchman Hugo Travers (Hugodecrypte) now reaches as many users aged 35 and under in France as established media brands: 22 percent of them said they had heard of him in the previous week. The audience appreciates the (perceived) authenticity and approachability of such personal brands. The fly in the ointment: many demagogues on the political right have benefited from this so far, and the line between journalism and opinion-making is blurred. Research by the news agency AFP has revealed that politicians in Nigeria and Kenya hired influencers specifically to spread false messages.

Fourthly, willingness to pay remains stable – and there is room for improvement. Okay, the percentage of people who pay for digital journalism averages 18 percent – that could certainly be higher. But it’s also quite something to know that, despite all the free content available online, around one in five people are willing to pay for journalism – in Germany, the figure is 13 percent. The researchers believe that the subscription market is far from exhausted. Where paying is already common practice, the key is to intelligently bundle offerings and create more interesting pricing models that cater to different types of users. Incidentally, regional and local newspapers in Germany stand out in international comparison with their subscription rates. On the one hand, the researchers speculate that this is an expression of federalism and the fact that many users strongly identify with their regions. On the other hand, projects such as data pooling in Drive or Wan-Ifra’s Table Stakes Europe may also have contributed to this success; they encourage the exchange of experiences, networking, and a focus on targeting specific audiences and user needs.

Fifth, text lives on – especially in this part of the world. Yes, there are highly respected experts who predict at AI conferences that the future of journalism lies in chat – specifically, spoken chat. People would rather talk and listen than write and read, they say. Elsewhere, media professionals complain that young users only digest short-form video, if they pay any attention to journalism at all. The figures do not support these claims. Text is still the most important format for 55 percent of users worldwide. This is different in some countries in Asia and Africa, which could also have to do with later literacy rates. But it is definitely still worthwhile for media companies to invest in first-class texts. There is ample evidence that young people also enjoy listening to long podcasts or binge-watching series. Only one thing does not work today and will work less and less as AI delivers decent quality: poor text.

Sixth, the audience is smarter than many journalists believe. When it comes to the use of AI, for example, respondents expect pretty much what is predicted or feared in the industry: journalism production is likely to become cheaper and even faster, while factual accuracy and trustworthiness will decline. Young consumers in particular are skeptical about media use and verify a lot. In countries such as Thailand and Malaysia, where journalism is largely consumed via TikTok and Facebook, users are very well aware that they may be exposed to lies or fantasy news on these platforms. When it comes to “fake news,” 47 percent of respondents consider online influencers and politicians to be the greatest threat, which is likely a realistic assessment. And many users worry that they could miss important stories if media companies personalize their offerings more in order to turn these users into loyal customers. 

Incidentally, what respondents worldwide want from journalism is: more impartiality, factual accuracy, transparency, and original research and reporting. Media researchers couldn’t have put it better themselves.

This column was published in German for the industry publication Medieninsider on 17th June 2025.

 

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Let’s talk more about what quality journalism truly means!

As a rapporteur for Wan-Ifra’s World News Media Congress 2025 in Krakow and member of their Expert Panel, Alexandra had the honor of sharing her key insights on stage in the final wrap-up, together with co-experts Jeremy Clifford (UK) and Chris Janz (AUS). This is the written-up version:

🏄 It’s about strategy: No matter which technology or platform you are using, it won’t help you when you don’t know your mission and the needs of your audiences. And when you have a strategy, follow it – and cut down on the rest.

🏄 It’s about direct and loyal relationships to users and customers: Give people more reasons to go directly on your site and engage, to download your app, to subscribe to your products, to attend your events. In an AI mediated environment when referrals from search decline and your brand will further lose visibility, this is the only way to make your business sustainable.

🏄 It’s about brand: Trust is rooted in brands. This could be personal brands or organizational brands. Double down on clarifying and delivering the value proposition of your brand. Young people tend to be less loyal or even brand agnostic. Put particularly effort in attracting and retaining the next generations of users by understanding their needs.

🏄 It’s about emotion: In a sea of choices, signals that trigger emotional responses matter. Feeling connected is a human need. When so much of life is dominated by technology, people are even more likely to look for authenticity. Particularly young people want to be listened to, not talked down to.

🏄 It’s about place: In a globalized, sometimes confusing world, many people are looking for meaning and human connection in their communities. Much of political polarization is fueled by the rural-urban divide: people from outside the political centres often feel not represented in public debates and policy making. There is potential for excellent storytelling away from where power crowds. Local journalism matters.

🏄 It’s about journalism: In an age when content can be produced at scale by AI, we need to move journalism up the value chain, as SVT’s Director General Anne Lagercrantz put it in a recent interview. And every news organization needs to explore and talk more about what that means for them. We don’t talk about what we mean by quality journalism nearly enough.
 

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Anne Lagercrantz, SVT: “Journalism has to move up the value chain”

Anne Lagercrantz is the Director General of SVT Swedish Television. Alexandra talked to her about how generative AI has created more value for audiences, SVTs network of super users, and what will make journalism unique as opposed to automated content generation. 

Anne, many in the industry have high hopes that AI can do a lot to improve journalism, for example by making it more inclusive and appealing to broader audiences. Looking at SVT, do you see evidence for this?  

I can see some evidence in the creative workflows. We just won an award for our Verify Desk, which uses face recognition and geo positioning for verification.  

Then, of course, we provide automated subtitles and AI-driven content recommendations. In investigative journalism, we use synthetic voices to ensure anonymity.  

I don’t think we reach a broader audience. But it’s really being inclusive and engaging. 

In our interview for the 2024 report, you said AI hadn’t been transformative yet for SVT. What about one year later? 

We’re one step further towards the transformative. For example, when I look at kids’ content, we now use text to video tools that are good enough for real productions. We used AI tools to develop games then we built a whole show around it.  

So, we have transformative use cases but it hasn’t transformed our company yet.  

What would your vision be? 

Our vision is to use AI tools to create more value for the audience and to be more effective.  

However – and I hear this a lot from the industry – we’re increasing individual efficiency and creativity, but we’re not saving any money. Right now, everything is more expensive.  

Opinions are split on AI and creativity. Some say that the tools help people to be more creative, others say they are making users lazy. What are your observations?  

I think people are truly more creative. Take the Antiques Roadshow as an example, an international format that originated at the BBC.  

We’ve run it for 36 years. People present their antiques and have experts estimate their value. The producers used to work with still pictures but with AI support they can animate them.  

But again, it’s not the machine, it’s the human and the machine together.  

You were a newsroom leader for many, many years. What has helped to bring colleagues along and have them work with AI?  

I think we cracked the code. What we’ve done is, we created four small hubs: one for news, one for programmes, one for the back office and one for product. And the head of AI is holding it all together.  

The hubs consist of devoted experts who have designated time for coaching and experimenting with new tools. And then there’s a network of super users, we have 200 alone in the news department.  

It has been such a great experience to have colleagues learn from each other.  

It’s a top-down movement but bottom-up as well. We combine that with training, AI learning days with open demos. Everyone has access and possibility.  

We’ve tried to democratize learning. What has really helped to change attitudes and culture was when we created our own SVTGPT, a safe environment for people to play around in. 

What are the biggest conflicts about the usage of AI in the newsroom? 

The greatest friction is to have enthusiastic teams and co-workers who want to explore AI tools, but then there are no legal or financial frameworks in place.  

It’s like curiosity and enthusiasm meeting GDPR or privacy. And that’s difficult because we want people to explore, but we also want to do it in a safe manner. 

Would you say there’s too much regulation?  

No, I just think the AI is developing at a speed we’re not used to. And we need to find the time to have our legal and security department on board.  

Also, the market is flooded with new tools. And of course, some people want to try them all. But it’s not possible to assess fast that they’re safe enough. That’s when people feel limited. 

No one seems to be eager to talk about ethics any longer because everyone is so busy keeping up and afraid of missing the boat. 

Maybe we are in a good spot because we can experiment with animated kids’ content first. That’s different from experimenting with news where we are a lot more careful.  

Do you get audience reaction when using AI?  

There are some reactions, more curious than sceptical.  

What also helps is that the Swedish media industry has agreed upon AI transparency recommendations, saying that we will tell the audience that is AI when it has a substantial influence on the content. It could be confusing to label every tiny thing.  

Where do you see the future of journalism in the AI age now with reasoning models coming up and everyone thinking, oh, AI can do much of the news work that has been done by humans before? 

I’m certain that journalism has to move up in the value chain to investigation, verification and premium content.  

And we need to be better in providing context and accountability.  

Accountability is so valuable because it will become a rare commodity. If I want to contact Facebook or Instagram, it’s almost impossible. And how do you hold an algorithm accountable?  

But it is quite easy to reach an editor or reporter. We are close to home and accountable. Journalists will need to shift from being content creators and curators to meaning makers.  

We need to become more constructive and foster trust and optimism.  

Being an optimist is not always easy these days. Do you have fears in the face of the new AI world? 

Of course. One is that an overreliance on AI will lead to a decline in critical thinking and originality.  

We’re also super aware that there are a lot of hallucinations. Also, that misinformation could undermine public trust, and that it is difficult to balance innovation with an ethical AI governance.  

Another fear is that we are blinded by all the shiny new things and that we’re not looking at the big picture.  

What do you think is not talked about enough in the context of journalism and AI? 

We need to talk more about soft values: How are we as human beings affected by new technology?  

If we all stare at our own devices instead of looking at things together, we will see loneliness and isolation rise further.  

Someone recently said we used to talk about physical health then about mental health, and now we need to talk about social health, because you don’t ever need to meet anyone, you can just interact with your device. I think that’s super scary.  

And public service has such a meaningful role in sparking conversations, getting people together across generations.  

Another issue we need to talk more about is: if there is so much personalization and everyone has their own version of reality, what will we put in the archives? We need a shared record.

This interview was published by the EBU on 16th April as an appetizer for the EBU News Report “Leading Newsrooms in the Age of Generative AI”. 

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Kasper Lindskow, JP Politiken Media Group: “Generative AI can Give Journalists Superpowers”

Kasper Lindskow is the Head of AI at the Danish Politiken Media Group, one of the front runners in implementing GenAI based solutions in the industry. He is also co-founder of the Nordic AI in Media Summit, a leading industry conference on AI. Alexandra spoke to him about how to bring people along with new technologies, conflicts in the newsroom, and how to get the right tone of voice in the journalism. 

Kasper, industry insiders regard JP/Politiken as a role model in implementing AI in its newsrooms. Which tools have been the most attractive for your employees so far?  

We rolled out a basic ChatGPT clone in a safe environment to all employees in March 2024 and are in the process of rolling out more advanced tools. The key for us has been to “toolify” AI so that it can be used broadly across the organization, also for the more advanced stuff.  

Now, the front runners are using it in all sorts of different creative ways. But we are seeing the classic cases being used most widely, like proofreading and adaptation to the writing guides of our different news brands, for example suggesting headlines.  

We’ve seen growing use of AI also for searching the news archive and writing text boxes.  

Roughly estimated, what’s the share of people in your organization who feel comfortable using AI tools on a daily basis? 

Well, the front runners are experimenting with them regardless of whether we make tools available. I’d estimate this group to be between 10 and 15 percent of newsroom staff. I’d say we have an equally small group who are not interested in interacting with AI at all.  

And then we have the most interesting group, between 70 and 80 percent or so of journalists who are interested and having tried to work with AI a little bit.  

From our perspective, the most important part of rolling out AI is to build tools that fit that group to ensure a wider adoption. The potential is not in the front runners but in the normal, ordinary journalists. 

This sounds like a huge, expensive effort. How large is your team?  

We are an organization of roughly 3,000 people. Currently we are 11 people working full-time on AI development in the centralized AI unit plus two PhDs. That’s not a lot. But we also work for local AI hubs in different newsrooms, so people there spend time working with us.  

This is costly. It does take time and effort, in particular if you want high quality and you want to ensure everything aligns with the journalism.  

I do see a risk here of companies underinvesting and only doing the efficiency part and not aligning it with the journalism. 

Do you have public-facing tools and products? 

In recommender systems we do, because that’s about personalizing the news flow. That’s public facing and enabled by metadata.  

We’re also activating metadata in ways that are public facing just for example in “read more” lists that are not personalized.  

But in general, we’re not doing anything really public facing with generative AI that does not have humans in the loop yet. 

What are the biggest conflicts around AI in your organization or in the newsroom? 

Most debates are about automated recommender systems. Because sometimes they churn out stuff that colleagues don’t find relevant.  

But our journalists have very different reading profiles from the general public. They read everything and then they criticize when something very old turns up.  

And then, of course, you have people thinking: “What will this do to my job?”  

But all in all, there hasn’t been much criticism. We are getting a lot more requests like: “Can you please build this for me?” 

What do you think the advancement of generative AI will do to the news industry as a whole? 

Let’s talk about risks first. There’s definitely a risk of things being rolled out too fast. This is very new technology. We know some limitations, others we don’t.  

So, it is important to roll it out responsibly at a pace that people can handle and with the proper education along the way.  

If you roll it out too fast there will be mistakes that would both hurt the rollout of AI and the potential you could create with it, impacting the trustworthiness of news.  

Another risk is not taking the need to align these systems with your initial mission seriously enough. 

Some organizations struggle with strategic alignment, could you explain this a bit, please?  

Generative AI has a well-known tendency to gravitate towards the median in its output – meaning that if you have that fast prototype with a small prompt and roll it out then your articles tend to become dull, ordinary and average.  

It’s not necessarily a tool for excellence. It can be but you really need to do it right. You need to align it with the news brand and its particular tone of voice, for example. That requires extensive work, user testing and fine-tuning of the systems underneath.  

If we don’t take the journalistic work seriously, either because we don’t have resources to do it or because we don’t know it or move too fast, it could have a bad impact on what we’re trying to achieve. Those are the risk factors that we can impact ourselves. 

The other risks depend on what happens in the tech industry? 

A big one is when other types of companies begin using AI to do journalism. 

You mean companies that are not bound by journalistic values? 

If you’re not a public service broadcaster but a private media company, for the past 20 years you’ve experienced a structural decline.  

If tech giants begin de-bundling the news product even further by competing with journalists, this could accelerate the structural decline of news media.  

But we should talk about opportunities now. Because if done properly, generative AI in particular has massive potential. It can give journalists superpowers.  

Because it helps to enrich storytelling and to automate the boring tasks? 

We are not there yet. But generative AI is close to having the potential for, once you have done your news work with finding the story, telling that story across different modalities.  

And to me that is strong positive potential for addressing different types of readers and audiences. 

We included a case study on Magna in the first EBU News Report which was published in June 2024. What have your biggest surprises been since then? 

My biggest positive surprise is the level of feedback we are getting from our journalists. They’re really engaging with these tools. It’s extremely exciting for us as an AI unit that we are no longer working from assumptions but we are getting this direct feedback.  

I am positively surprised but also cautious about the extent to which we have been able to adapt these systems to our individual news brands. Our tool Magna is a shared infrastructure framework for everyone.  

But when you ask it to perform a task it gives very different output depending on the brand you request it for. You get, for example, a more tabloid-style response for Ekstra Bladet and a more sophisticated one for our upmarket Politiken.  

A lot of work went into writing very different prompts for the different brands.  

What about the hallucinations everyone is so afraid of? 

This was another surprise. We thought that factuality was going to be the big issue. We had many tests and found out that when we use it correctly and ground it in external facts, we are seeing very few factual errors and hallucinations.  

Usually, they stem from an article in the archive that is outdated because something new happened, not because of any hallucinations inside the model.  

The issue is more getting the feel right in the output, the tone of voice, the angles that are chosen in this publication that we’re working with – everything that has to do with the identity of the news brand.  

This interview was published by the EBU as an appetizer for the News Report “Leading Newsrooms in the Age of Generative AI” on .8th April 2025.

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Prof. Pattie Maes, MIT: “We don’t have to simplify everything for everybody”

Prof. Pattie Maes and her team at the MIT Media Lab conduct research on the impact of generative AI on creativity and human decision-making. Their aim is to advice AI companies on designing systems that enhance critical thinking and creativity rather than encourage cognitive offloading. The interview was led for the upcoming EBU News Report “Leading Newsrooms in the Age of Generative AI”.  

It is often said that AI can enhance people’s creativity. Research you led seems to suggest the opposite. Can you tell us about it?  

You’re referring to a study where we asked college students to write an essay and had them solve a programming problem.  

We had three different conditions: One group could use ChatGPT. Another group could only use search without the AI results at the top. And the third group did not have any tool.  

What we noticed was that the group that used ChatGPT wrote good essays, but they expressed less diversity of thought, were more similar to one another and less original. 

Because people put less effort into the task at hand? 

We have seen that in other experiments as well: people are inherently lazy. When they use AI, they don’t think as much for themselves. And as a result, you get less creative outcomes.  

It could be a problem if, say, programmers at a company all use the same co-pilot to help them with coding, they won’t come up with new ways of doing things.  

As AI data increasingly feeds new AI models, you will get more and more convergence and less improvement and innovation.  

Journalism thrives on originality. What would be your advice to media managers? 

Raising awareness can help. But it would be more useful if we built these systems differently.  

We have been building a system that helps people with writing, for example. But instead of doing the writing for you, it engages you, like a good colleague or editor, by critiquing your writing, and occasionally suggesting that you approach something from a different angle or strengthen a claim.  

It’s important that AI design engages people in contributing to a solution rather that automating things for them.  

Sounds like great advice for building content management systems. 

Today’s off-the-shelf systems use an interface that encourages people to say: “write me an essay on Y, make sure it’s this long and includes these points of view.”  

These systems are designed to provide a complete result. We have grammar and spelling correctors in our editing systems, but we could have AI built into editing software that says, “over here your evidence or argument is weak.”  

It could encourage the person to use their own brain and be creative. I believe we can design systems that let us benefit from human and artificial intelligence.  

But isn’t the genie already out of the bottle? If I encouraged students who use ChatGPT to use a version that challenges them, they’d probably say: “yeah, next time when I don’t have all these deadlines”.   

We should design AI systems that are optimised for different goals and contexts, like an AI that is designed like a great editor, or an AI that acts like a great teacher.  

A teacher doesn’t give you the answers to all the problems, because the whole point is not the output the person produces, it is that they have learned something in the process.  

But certainly, if you have access to one AI that makes you work harder and another AI that just does the work for you, it is tempting to use that second one. 

Agentic AI is a huge topic. You did research on AI and agents as early as 1995. How has your view on this evolved since? 

Back when I developed software agents that help you with tasks, we didn’t have anything like today’s large language models. They were built by hand for a specific application domain and were able to do some minimal learning from the user.  

Today’s systems are supposedly AGI (artificial general intelligence) or close to it and are billed as systems that can do everything and anything for us.  

But what we are discovering in our studies is that they do not behave the way people behave. They don’t make the same choices, don’t have that deeper knowledge of the context, that self-awareness and self-critical reflection on their actions that people have.  

A huge problem with agentic systems will be that we think they are intelligent and behave like us, but that they don’t. And it’s not just because they hallucinate. 

But we want to believe they behave like humans? 

Let me give you an example. When I hired a new administrative assistant, I didn’t immediately give him full autonomy to do things on my behalf.  

I formed a mental model of him based on the original interview and his résumé. I saw “oh, he has done a lot of stuff with finance, but he doesn’t have much experience with travel planning.” So when some travel had to be booked, I would tell him, “Let me know the available choices so that I can tell you what I value and help you make a choice.”  

Over time my mental model of the assistant develops, and his model about my needs and preferences. We basically learn about each other. It is a much more interactive type of experience than with AI agents.  

These agents are not built to check and say, “I’m not so confident making this decision. So, let me get some input from my user.” It’s a little bit naïve that AI agents are being portrayed as “they are ready to be deployed, and they will be wonderful and will be able to do anything.”  

It might be possible to build agents that have the right level of self-awareness, reflection and judgment, but I have not heard many developers openly think about those issues. And it will require a lot of research to get it right.  

Is there anything else your research reveals about the difficulties with just letting AI do things for us? 

We have done studies on decision making with AI. What you expect is that humans make better decisions if they are supported by an AI that is trained on a lot of data in a particular domain.  

But studies showed that was not what happened. In our study, we let people decide whether some newspaper headline was fake news or real news. What we found was when it’s literally just a click of a button to get the AI’s opinion, many people just use the AI’s output.  

There’s less deep engagement and thinking about the problem because it’s so convenient. Other researchers got similar results with experiments on doctors evaluating medical diagnoses supported by AI, for example. 

You are telling us that expectations in AI-support are overblown? 

I am an AI optimist. I do think it is possible to integrate AI into our lives in a way that it has positive effects. But we need to reflect more about the right ways to integrate it.  

In the case of the newspaper headlines we did a study that showed that if AI first engages you in thinking about a headline and asks you a question about it, it improves people’s accuracy, and they don’t accept the AI advice blindly.  

The interface can help with encouraging people to be a little bit more mindful and critical.  

This sounds like it would just need a little technical fix.  

It is also about how AI is portrayed. We talk about these systems as artificial forms of intelligence. We constantly are told that we’re so close to AGI. These systems don’t just converse in a human-like ways, but with an abundance of confidence.  

All of these factors trick us into perceiving them as more intelligent, more capable and more human than they really are. But they are more what Emily Bender, a professor at the University of Washington, called “stochastic parrots”.  

LLMs (large language models) are like a parrot that has just heard a lot of natural language by hearing people speak and can predict and imitate it pretty well. But that parrot doesn’t understand what it’s talking about.  

Presenting these systems as parrots rather than smart assistants would already help by reminding people to constantly think “Oh, I have to be mindful. These systems hallucinate. They don’t really understand. They don’t know everything.”  

We work with some AI companies on some of these issues. For example, we are doing a study with OpenAI on companion bots and how many people risk becoming overly attached to chat bots.  

These companies are in a race to get to AGI first, by raising the most money and building the biggest models. But I think awareness is growing that if we want AI to ultimately be successful, we have to think carefully about the way we integrate it in people’s lives.  

In the media industry there’s a lot of hope that AI could help journalism to become more inclusive and reach broader audiences. Do you see a chance for this to happen? 

These hopes are well-founded. We built an AI-based system for kids and older adults who may have trouble processing language that the average adult can process.  

The system works like an intra-language translator – it takes a video and translates it into simpler language while still preserving the meaning.  

There are wonderful opportunities to customize content to the abilities and needs of the particular user. But at the same time, we need to keep in mind that the more we personalize things, the more everybody would be in their own bubble, especially if we also bias the reporting to their particular values or interests.  

It’s important that we still have some shared media, shared news and a shared language, rather than creating this audience of one where people can no longer converse with others about things in the world that we should be talking about. 

This connects to your earlier argument: customisation could make our brains lazy.  

It is possible to build AI systems that have the opposite effect and challenge the user a little bit. This would be like being a parent who unconsciously adjusts their language for the current ability of their child and gradually introduces more complex language and ideas over time.  

We don’t have to simplify everything for everybody. We need to think about what AI will do to people and their social and emotional health and what artificial intelligence will do to natural human intelligence, and ultimately to our society.  

And we should have talks about this with everybody. Right now, our AI future is decided by AI engineers and entrepreneurs, which in the long run will prove to be a mistake. 

The interview was first published by the EBU on 1st April 2025.