Tag: #audiences

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“There’s definitely a backlash against noise”

Being the longtime lead author of the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report, Nic Newman has collected data on news consumption for more than a decade. By analyzing data and leading focus groups, he and his co-researchers have observed significant changes in behavior by young audiences: These days they overwhelmingly access news via social media and expect the consumption experience to be frictionless. I interviewed Nic for a research project on Gen Z and News by Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung.  

Nic, you have studied news consumption behaviour of different age groups for decades. What do media organizations need to know if they want to reach young people today? 

Nic Newman: People who grew up with social media show very different behaviours from those of previous generations. They want everything friction-free – ­and immediately –  and they want to consume content where they are. They don’t want to go to news websites or apps. And they want their consumption to be easy, entertaining, fun. That’s a big challenge because do you change your journalism to make it more entertaining and fun? Or do you just accept that they’re going to come less often to you because you’re not very entertaining and you’re not a lot of fun?

Is there such a thing as “the young audience” some in the media are talking about, or does your research reveal different young audiences? 

One of the defining features of this younger audience is just how varied their consumption is. We’ve done qualitative work where we’ve talked to individuals in different countries, and everyone has got different media habits. For example, it’s not true that all young people use TikTok for news. There are many who hate TikTok. We found people who had very clear routines, almost like those of newspaper readers. We saw them reading The Economist at exactly the same time every morning on their commute as they briefed themselves on the things they needed to know for work. You have the typical lifestyle effects when as you get older and go into a job, there’s information you need. Just young people’s way of accessing that information is going to be different, the unhappiness with any kind of friction applies to all. 

Presumably education and social status matter, too.

Education is always the biggest divider in terms of how interested people are in news. The more interested people are in news, the more likely they are to build a relationship with a brand or with an individual. That’s the other big trend: that many young people prefer to access news through an individual they trust. 

You did a major report on creators for the Reuters Institute. What were your key findings?

It varies by country. We all know the politically polarizing creators in the US, the Joe Rogan types. There are a lot less of these in Europe. There you see more of those educator types like MrWissen2go in Germany. In explanatory journalism creators are clearly filling a gap that traditional media does not fill. The third area is the specialists who are building really deep, authentic relationships in a particular subject area. This also threatens traditional media companies, because these individuals have an incredibly low cost base. Many of them came from mainstream media but now think it’s better to operate on their own. 

Some data shows we have reached peak social media – now that even the most backwards media brands have realized they need to give it a go. 

There’s definitely a backlash against noise. But it might be impossible to even talk about social media anymore. Social media used to be social: about what your friends were doing. But that has been declining. In the past two to three years, it has developed from content that came from someone you knew to content that is essentially driven popularity using AI driven algorithms. A lot of that is fuelled by video. People aren’t getting bored with YouTube or TikTok, that’s growing. 

What does that mean for the media industry? 

One of the implications is the competition for attention within the new discovery mechanisms. The platforms are setting themselves up as creator friendly, they want to attract the best content that’s going to keep people’s attention. And again, they find that although professional media is part of that, people are paying more attention to non-professional media, to authentic personalities. Younger people are paying a lot of attention to people who look like them. Traditional media are struggling to behave like creators, because their sometimes less objective approach doesn’t fit with journalistic norms. The other growth area is through AI. Young people are more likely to access news and information through AI, because it’s friction free, quick, easy, and gives them what they want, it is personalized. 

What would you recommend editors and media organizations to do in this situation where both is quite foreign to them: creators and AI-based discovery?

Most media companies are thinking about investing more in video, particularly in vertical video that builds an authentic trust relationship. You’ve seen the New York Times and a range of other media companies putting vertical video on their front pages, trying to bolster the visibility of their own personalities and journalists to the extent that these are looking directly at you in the camera, building that sort of authentic direct relationship. They’re trying to copy a few creator techniques. Other strategies are to partner with creators or to co-opt them and bring them on staff. A whole list of companies have done that, in the UK for example the Daily Mailand the Independent. The third possibility is to engage with existing creators in particular fields, for example in investigations to help with distribution or content creation

What are the most common mistakes that you observe in newsrooms – apart from not doing anything for young audiences?

Probably the biggest mistake is an old newsroom trying to be down with the kids. Some older television anchors have done very well on TikTok, but in general, young people do not want you to dumb down. They want you to maintain your credibility and institutional authority. Don’t not cover politics or other important subjects because young people are spending less time on these issues. Try and make it accessible. Think hard about the formats you’re using. This works for older people as well. The other common mistake is to do a brand for young people, unless you do it to learn something from it. There have been very few cases where that has been successful. 

Why is that? Some young editors in large media companies have put quite some effort into developing those brands. 

Because in most of those cases you’re trying to get young people to do something they don’t want to do, which is come directly to an app or to a website. And if it’s a brand that only works in social media, you might as well build a personal brand or try and amplify the message of the existing brand rather than trying to create a new one. It is different if you are a digital first brand like Zetland in Denmark where you have a very clear audience in mind to begin with. 

What is their secret sauce?

One important aspect of this is representation. Young people struggle with traditional brands because they don’t feel that the journalists and the newsrooms really understand what they’re interested in – both in terms of the agenda and in the way they like to consume media. For newsrooms that are primarily employing people age 45 and older, it’s very hard to speak authentically to a younger audience. Zetland’s founders were of that generation.

One of their recipes for success seems to have been their audio first concept. Because the data shows that young people like long stories – when they can listen to them. 

That’s another myth about young people: that they’re not interested in linear, they’re not interested in long form. Obviously, they binge on long television series, they binge on podcasts. But the kinds of podcasts they’re listening to are an accessible, easy mix of entertainment and information. There’s a lot of humour involved. And again, that works well with older people, too. Interestingly, podcast is becoming video. What we found in our research for the latest Digital News Report is that younger people watch podcast videos because they want to get closer to the host. Whereas older people say, it’s all about audio. And then you’ve got this third audience, which is people who just come across the podcast brands as short form video clips on TikTok and Instagram. So, podcasts are becoming kind of multi-platform brands with different appeal to younger and older people, depending on the platforms that are being used. 

Listening to you I get this feeling that about two thirds of today’s newsroom inhabitants are useless species because all they’ve ever wanted to do is write long stories. 

The other side of that coin is that the majority of traditional news organizations’ audiences are older and that they’re not dying anytime soon. Newsrooms will continue to serve those people, which is one of the things which makes it hard for them to change: Most of the revenue comes from older people. If they super serve young people, they’re likely to annoy these older groups. This is where personalization could come in: showing people who like these formats more of the video and showing people who don’t like them less of the video. When targeting younger audiences, there’s a bit around the news agenda, there’s a bit around formats, and there’s a bit around tone.

What about young people and news has surprised you most in all your research? 

That there is so much diversity in interests. Let’s take Sudan. That’s a country that gets very little mainstream media coverage, but on Instagram and TikTok there’s quite a lot of news about it, because it’s a completely horrific situation. You get a lot of surprises like that which challenge some of those myths that young people aren’t interested in anything outside their backyard or their friendship group.

Your creator report says that across the 24 countries you looked at, 85 percent of the creators were male. That looks like the opposite of increasing diversity. 

Yes, it is ironic that  that this new space that is full of creators is actually less diverse in some respects. That tells us quite a lot about who wants to get in front of the microphone. Political commentary is the one that is most dominated by men talking into their big microphones to other men, mainly consumed by older people. Then you’ve got the explanatory stuff, which is mainly created by young people and consumed by young people. And then there’s a whole load of more news adjacent creators who are in fashion or food and that’s much more gender mixed. There are some exceptions though. The Philippines has almost gender parity.

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 of the Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung, Co-Author was Jana Koch. The interview was published in full length here. 
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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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Gen Z and News: How to engage young audiences with journalism – advice from Austria and the world

There are tons of assumptions out there about young people and news consumption – and many of them are NOT backed by evidence. In fact, young people trust media brands, if certain conditions are met. They are interested in news and have a long attention span, if something matters to them and they feel their needs matter to news brands. They are not only on TikTok, and they might trust creators more at times, but that happens often when regular media fail them.

Jana Koch of Mediengruppe Wiener Zeitung and I have researched the topic for many month and led dozens of qualitative interviews. Jana spoke to young people and Austrian editors, I interviewed international experts. The result was a 150-page-report: “Knapp daneben ist auch vorbei”. You can read the executive summary in English here.  Furthermore, I will publish the expert interviews here separately one by one (stay tuned).  You can download the complete report in German (an English version is in the making).  

 

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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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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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Tav Klitgaard, CEO Zetland: “We don’t like perfect, because perfect is not trustworthy”

The Danish news media Zetland belongs among the few big success stories in European digital media brands. It was profitable three years after being launched, attracts a comparatively young audience and is set to launch a new brand in Finland in January 2025. I spoke to their CEO Tav Klitgaard about how to engage audiences, working business models and the future of journalism in an AI-supported word.    

Tav, interviews shouldn’t begin with praise, but Zetland is an outstanding success story in digital media. Your team founded it in 2016, it was profitable three years later. Today you have more than 40.000 digital subscribers. What do you do that others don’t

An advantage was that we did not have any print legacy when we started. We had the privilege of sitting down and thinking really hard about what does news media mean. Among other things, we found out that it means journalism is an experience. You have the content and then you have the distribution. Those two together create an experience. The value does not lie in the journalism. The value lies in the moment when the journalism becomes an experience that changes something in your head.

But you seem to be very proud of your journalism?

Sure, we are! But existing companies way too often produce journalism from a sender’s perspective. We always try to have a receiver perspective. I would see this as the key reason for our success.

Zetland doesn’t do breaking news but publishes just a few in-depth stories a day, it focuses on explanation and analysis and has offered everything in audio format from the beginning.

Our first principle is that we are our members. This is why we came up with audio, because we asked them and they said: ‘Well, I really would want to consume your articles, but I’ve been looking into a screen for 10 hours today and I’m tired of it.’ We said, then audio could be a thing for you. And it turned out we were right.

In the age of generative AI, converting stuff to audio will be very, very easy. Won’t you lose your competitive advantage when everyone can just press the audio button everywhere?

I believe the last frontier against AI is personality. Audio is awesome at creating an intimate relationship. So, when we create a human audio product, we don’t use an AI robot voice, because the problem with that is that it’s too good. It’s perfect. We don’t like perfect because perfect is not trustworthy. You should not be perfect, you should be a human. And that’s what we are doing in all our products, creating something that is human.

Managers from traditional news outlets envy you because your audience skews young.

We are not a news outlet for young people, but we do have a pretty young demographic. About 50 percent of our audience is in their 20s and 30s. And we believe that the way that you build trust within a younger audience is to be human. It’s a giga trend in the world that that the trust is moving from authorities to persons. That’s also the reason behind the success of Instagram or TikTok. That’s why we always focus on the tone of voice and the storytelling. We imagine ourselves to be your friend and get into the car with you and tell you the story from the passenger seat. The world is super interesting. But there needs to be energy and engagement behind the stories we tell.

Part of your distribution model is people need to pay for a membership, but they can share the story with as many people as they like to. Don’t you fear that many free riders are taking advantage of you?

That’s right, our readers can share everything for free. Actually, the more members share our content, the happier we are. It proves to us and themselves that it has value to them, and it means more people get to know us. Journalism is great when it is discussed, and it should be easy for our members to get someone to discuss it with. It’s also great for our sources that they can freely share what they told us in their own network.

A Zetland membership is pretty expensive compared to other digital subscriptions though. 

Yeah, it costs around 18 or 19 euros per month. I keep hearing: Young people don’t want to pay for news. That is not true. You have to look at the user needs. If people don’t want to pay, it’s because your product is not valuable to them. If you look at, let’s say, a person who is 25 years old. She has a strong need to understand the world. Who am I in this world? What does society mean for me? What do I mean for society? The key is to not require a whole lot of prior knowledge for her to understand the world but to tell her super interesting stories about the world. Younger audiences are underserved by the media, at least in Denmark. If you’re 60 and a doctor and live in Copenhagen, well, you have a plethora of options. If you’re 26 and a nurse working at a rural hospital, you don’t have a lot of places to go to in the media world. So, what happens? You end up at TikTok. The right price is whatever value the product gives to the user. Our average member spends more than seven hours per month with us. I think €18,50 is actually very cheap for seven hours of value.

Are you still growing or have you reached a ceiling with your particular audience?

We are growing very much. On the group level, we will have a revenue growth of at least 40 percent this year and I pretty conservatively project that to be the case next year, too. It’s not a 40 percent growth in Denmark, but it’s a 40 percent for the group which consists of journalism outlets in Denmark and now in Finland. And then we also sell other things, for instance, we sell books and technology.

So, you’re not only a media and journalism company, but also a tech company.

Exactly. The day before ChatGPT was launched, we launched our transcription service. That means very early on, we have been working with large language models and generative AI. The number one use case people think about when thinking about AI and journalism is transcription. So, we built a transcription service that for the first time ever has worked in Danish. That is basically contributing almost a quarter of our revenue this year. We also sell our distribution technology. We license the website and app and CMS that we built for Zetland to other media companies. It’s not something that we do to become filthy rich, but we need to be tech-savvy. Spotify is spending a gazillion dollars on tech development, and we need to be able to compete with Spotify.

You are planning to scale the Zetland concept internationally? Tell us about the Finnish project that you made headlines with recently.

The Finland case is super exciting for us. Three or four years ago we decided that we would begin the international journey. My background is within tech and in the tech industry, we always say if you have a product market fit, the next thing you need to do is scale. It’s not as easy as translating something, but we asked ourselves if the concept was replicable outside of Denmark. In the beginning of 2024, we hired a founding team in Finland and tasked them with creating a splash in the market to test whether our assumptions were right: that there is no big difference between Finnish people and Danish people in terms of what user needs they have. We talked about our mission of quality journalism and then said: If you’re willing to pay for this, we’re willing to build it. And that’s what we told them in September and October. What happened was that 10,000 Finns decided to prepay a subscription worth around 100 euros, which was much more than we had anticipated. We got 10,000 Finns to pay for something that does not exist!

When will it start to exist?

We are currently hiring a ton of people in Helsinki, a lot of journalists, and then we will start publishing the Finnish version of Zetland on 15th January.

What will you name it?

Zetland in Finland is called Uusi Juttu, meaning something like “The new thing”. Check it at uusijuttu.fi.

Do you have other markets where you have these kinds of assumptions or is this a Nordic thing? After all, the willingness to pay for journalism is much lower in other regions of Europe.

I think what we have learned to do in Denmark is very usable in a lot of different markets in Europe. It could also be outside of Europe, but it’s going to take us some time, some partners, and some money to be able to prove that I’m right.

Of course, I have to ask you about Germany now.

Well, Germany is definitely interesting, and it’s close to Denmark. If anyone who reads this thinks they want to build that in Germany, please reach out, because it’s also obvious for us that we are not going to be able to do it alone. We would need German partners who agree to our mission and are awesome journalists, tech people, and businesspeople.

Is there still some advice you could give to legacy media, or do you think they’re just lost?

If you have a print paper, you have to really, really think about why do you have a print paper? Most managers say: because it’s profitable. This means they do not focus 100 percent on the future and will innovate at a much slower pace.

What is the future of journalism in the age of AI?

I think there is a golden future for journalism. I think that the user needs that journalism fills are very much there, also among younger audiences. People need someone with feelings and with human intent to tell them about what’s going on. Plus, I believe that besides information, people want community and a sense of belonging. And I think journalism is wonderful at filling these needs. That’s why I believe that that there is a golden future.

So, it will be a golden future for less journalism, a lower volume at least.

Yes, I think that there has been a lot of work within journalism that has really been not super creative and that will go away.

Interview: Alexandra Borchardt

This text was published in German and English by the industry publication Medieninsider on 5th January 2025. 

 

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Nieman Lab Prediction 2025: Newsrooms Reinvent Their Political Journalism

In traditional newsrooms, political journalists tend to be those who call the shots. Even in the absence of statistics, it’s safe to bet that the majority of editors-in-chief used to cover politics before rising to the top job. This has shaped pretty much all of journalism. The “he said, she said” variety of news coverage that makes for a large part of political reporting has pervaded other subject areas as well. The attempt to give opposing parties a voice led to the so-called “both-sides journalism” which operates under the assumption that on the marketplace of ideas and opinions those will survive that serve the people best.

But the past few years have already demonstrated that this kind of journalism is not sustainable. First and foremost, it doesn’t serve humanity well in the case of imminent and severe threats like climate change or attacks on democratic institutions where bothsidesism is not an option. Also, newsroom metrics have shown again and again that audiences tend to be put off by news content that just amplifies opinions and intentions of decision makers without linking it to people’s lives. News avoidance is real and has been growing.

“What if reporting on racist, misogynist, dehumanizing opinions and comments has the opposite effect from what most journalists intend — normalizing propaganda and even making political candidates seem interesting?”

The result of the 2024 U.S. election and the rise of authoritarian leaning extremists in other democracies should have served as the final wakeup call for political journalism. What if the media’s calling out those who don’t respect democracy and its institutions doesn’t deter people from voting exactly those politicians into office? What if reporting on racist, misogynist, dehumanizing opinions and comments has the opposite effect from what most journalists intend — normalizing propaganda and even making political candidates seem interesting? And what if newsrooms who complain about political polarization have contributed their fair share to it themselves? Polarization has been a successful business model for journalism after all. These are hard questions that demand answers.

If they want to stay relevant in serving the public, newsrooms will have to double down on studying the impact of their political journalism and think about consequences. Otherwise, they will continue to preach to the converted and fail in their mission to inform people about real threats to their livelihoods. While there is no quick recipe to disrupt and reinvent political journalism, some of the following ingredients might help to develop an strategy and improve the result:

First, studying human behavior. There is plenty of research and evidence out there on how propaganda works, how those in or aspiring to power use the media to amplify it, and how people react to it. If journalists don’t want to be tools in the hands of those ready to abolish press freedom and erode democratic institutions, they better familiarize themselves with these mechanisms. Insights from communication and behavioral psychology should be part of all journalism education and shape newsroom debates. It has become obvious that values and emotions like a sense of justice, pride, shame, and fear shape people’s voting decisions often more than rational choice theory would suggest. Newsrooms must account for that.

Second, chasing data, not just quotes. For political journalists, quotes are data, for other people not so much. They deserve to know what happened, not what someone says they might want to see happening or intends to make happen once in power. Data journalism — increasingly improved by the capabilities of artificial intelligence — provides plenty of opportunities to paint pictures of the real world instead of the world of intentions and declarations. Political journalism can be more interesting when people see how politicians have actually performed in contexts where they were responsible. Needless to say that data journalism needs to be made engaging to appeal to a variety of audiences.

Third, connecting reporting to people’s everyday lives. Politicians have an agenda and journalists are often swayed by it; people are likely to have different ones. Observers might have been baffled that voters didn’t give the Biden administration credit for the strong state of the American economy, but apparently all many people saw before casting their vote was their rising cost of living. Most people care deeply about issues like housing, personal security, the education of their children, health, and care for aging relatives. Only, most of these issues are linked to citizens’ immediate surroundings, their communities. Unsurprisingly, local news tops the list of interests in all age groups when asked for their journalism preferences, as the 2024 Digital News Report revealed. But with diminishing investment in local journalism, many of these topics have been under covered in recent years. A disconnect between political journalism and people’s lives has emerged that needs to be remedied.

Fourth, choosing appropriate formats. Modern newsrooms target different audiences with different formats on the platforms these audiences engage with. Political journalism is still too focused on the audiences that they have traditionally served. It is often made for well-educated groups and decision makers. If newsrooms really want to reach people beyond the community of like-minded news consumers, they need to explore how these audiences can be attracted. There are high hopes in the industry that artificial intelligence can assist in making journalism more appealing and inclusive by transcending formats — converting content to text, video, audio, interactive chat, or even graphic novel by the push of a button. It is too early to tell how this will affect news consumption and audience figures in the real world, but many media leaders expect opportunities for stronger news uptake.

Fifth, learning from other fields of journalism. Political journalists tend to be aware of their importance in the internal hierarchy. Many of them feel proud to do “the real thing” instead of covering entertainment, sports, personal finance, and the like. This might help them to digest the fact that colleagues in other fields score higher in the audience metrics department. But it’s exactly these colleagues political journalists could learn from to improve their own game. They could ask the science desk how to best deal with data and how to break down complex matters in digestible formats. They might get some advice on humanizing stories from those reporting on sports or celebrities. They could learn from investigative reporters how to pace oneself when seemingly sensational material is at hand and how to cooperate with others. And they could practice churning out one or the other service story. In fact, the whole newsroom should be interested in improving political journalism, since at times politics is part of most subject matters.

If journalism wants to maintain its legitimacy, relevance, and impact — particularly in an age when artificial intelligence will make content production ubiquitous — it needs to urgently rethink political journalism. Making it appealing to broader audiences and attracting them to engage with it might be no less than a matter of its survival. Many media leaders are aware of this. Chances are that in 2025 newsrooms will finally rethink the paradigm of political journalism.

This text was published by Harvard University’s Nieman Lab in their Journalism Predictions for 2025 series. 

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AI Labels in Journalism: Why Transparency Doesn’t Always Build Trust

The use of artificial intelligence in journalism requires sensitivity toward the audience. Trust is lost quickly. Transparency is supposed to remedy this. But labeling could even have a negative impact. This column discusses what to do.

In the case of Sports Illustrated, the issue was obvious. When it leaked out that some columns and reports at the renowned American sports magazine were not produced by clever minds but large language models, it cost the publication plenty of subscriptions and ultimately CEO Ross Levinsohn his job. Newsrooms that use journalist imitations made by artificial intelligence are therefore better off doing this confidently; a clear transparency notice is needed. The Cologne-based Express, for example, uses a disclaimer for its avatar reporter Klara Indernach. And even when stated openly, things can go wrong. The radio station Off Radio in Krakow, which had proudly announced that it would be presenting its listeners with a program controlled solely by AI, had to abandon the experiment after a short time. An avatar presenter had conducted a fictitious interview with literature Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska and asked her about current affairs – only the author had passed away in 2012. The audience was horrified. 

Nevertheless, transparency and an open debate about whether, when and to what extent newsrooms use AI when creating content is currently seen as a kind of silver bullet in the industry. Most ethical guidelines on the editorial use of AI are likely to contain a paragraph or two on the subject. There is a great fear of damaging one’s own brand through careless use of AI and further undermining the media trust that has been eroding in many places. So, it feels safer to point out that this or that summary or translation was generated by language models. How this is received by readers and users, however, has hardly been researched – and is also controversial among industry experts. While some are in favor of labels similar to those used for food, others point out that alerts like these could make the public even more suspicious. After all, the words “AI-assisted” could also be interpreted as editors wanting to ditch their responsibility in case of mistakes. 

We also know from other areas that too much transparency can diminish trust just as much as too little. A complete list of all mishaps and malpractice displayed in the foyer of a hospital would probably deter patients rather than inspire confidence. If you read a warning everywhere, you either flee or stop looking. Rachel Botsman, a leading expert on the subject, defines trust as “a confident relationship with the unknown”. Transparency and control do not strengthen trust, but rather make it less necessary because they reduce the unknown, she argues.  

Much more important for building trust are good experiences with the brand or individuals who represent it. To do this, an organization needs to communicate openly about the steps it takes and the processes it has in place to prevent mishaps. In airplanes, this includes redundancy of technology, double manning of the cockpit and fixed procedures; in newsrooms, the four-eyes and two-source principle. When people trust a media brand, they simply assume that this company structures and regularly checks all processes to the best of its knowledge, experience, and competence. If AI is highlighted as a special case, the impression could creep in that the newsroom doesn’t really trust the matter itself.

Felix Simon, a researcher at the Reuters Institute in Oxford therefore considers general transparency rules to be just as impractical as the widely used principle “human in the loop”, meaning that a person must always do the final check. He writes in a recent essay that it is a misconception that the public’s trust can be won back with these measures alone. 

Many journalists also do not realize how strongly their organization’s reporting on artificial intelligence shapes their audience’s relationship with it. Anyone who constantly reads and hears in interviews, essays and podcasts about what kind of devilish stuff humanity is being exposed to will hardly be open-minded about the technology if the otherwise esteemed newsroom suddenly starts to place AI references everywhere. As expected, respondents in surveys tend to be skeptical when asked about the use of AI in journalism – just as a consequence of the media’s reporting. 

It is therefore important to strengthen the skills of reporters so that they approach the topic of AI in a multi-layered way and provide constructive insights instead of meandering between hype and doomsday scenarios. The humanization of AI – whether through avatar reporters or just in the use of words does not exactly help to give the audience a realistic picture of what language and computing models can and cannot do.

People’s impression of AI will also be strongly influenced by their own experiences with it. Even today, there is hardly anyone among students who does not use tools such as ChatGPT from time to time. Even those who program for a living make use of the lightning-fast calculation models, and AI is increasingly becoming an everyday tool for office workers, just like spell checking, Excel calculations or voice input. However, it will become less and less obvious which AI is behind which tools, as tech providers will include them in the service package like the autofocus when taking a picture with a smartphone. AI labels could therefore soon seem like a relic from a bygone era.  

At a recent conference in Brussels hosted by the Washington-based Center for News, Technology & Innovation, one participant suggested that media organizations should consider labeling man-made journalism. What at first sounds like a joke actually has a serious background. The industry needs to quickly realize how journalism can retain its uniqueness and relevance in a world of rapidly scaling automated content production. Otherwise, it will soon have bigger problems than the question of how to characterize AI-supported journalism in individual cases.   

This text was published in German in the industry publication Medieninsider, translated by DeepL and edited by the author – who secretly thinks that this disclaimer might make her less vulnerable to criticism of her mastery of the English language.