Tag: #leadership

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AI-Washing: Whoever Has No Moral Compass Now Will Never Build One

At first glance, many media companies have tackled the subject of AI in an almost exemplary manner. They got off to a flying start, experimented, formed interdisciplinary teams, appointed AI directors and – after all, they do have a responsibility – developed ethical guidelines. Of course, the industry was also able to express outrage at a few moral outliers – “Sports Illustrated!”, “the Michael Schumacher interview!”, “Burda’s cookery magazine!” – but in many places, lengthy lists of “dos and don’ts” were intended to prevent the worst. It’s just a pity that most of these sets of rules are likely to prove, before long, to be a form of AI-washing. For they give the illusion of control that has long since slipped from the media companies’ grasp. To paraphrase a line from Rainer Maria Rilke‘s famous poem „Autumn Day“: Whoever has no moral compass now will never build one.

The long version is this: rapid technological progress and the power of tech conglomerates, coupled with economic and, in some places, political pressure, have created realities that even exemplary management finds difficult to cope with. This is suggested by research for the EBU News Report “Leading Newsrooms in the Age of Generative AI“, published in 2025.

First and foremost, there is the issue of ‘shadow AI’. One media manager observes that the biggest changes are not currently being driven by media organisations, but are arising simply because journalists are using AI tools. Unlike 25 years ago, when editors and reporters still had to be painstakingly convinced of the value of digital tools and platforms, AI tools are so intuitive to use that people employ them even more frequently in their private lives than at work, as a recently published study found – at least with regard to the US. A report by the Thomson Reuters Foundation supports this view for journalists in the Global South: 80 per cent of those surveyed used AI at work, but not even 20 per cent of their newsrooms had a corresponding strategy or policy in place. Yet within organisations, both groups can become a problem: the tech-savvy staff who overstep boundaries whilst experimenting, and the less tech-savvy staff who make mistakes out of ignorance, such as disclosing sensitive data.

Added to this is the fact that many ethical guidelines are not practical for day-to-day use. The BBC is no doubt proud that it has condensed its current guidance on AI into just nine points – plus sub-points. But one cannot expect editors, who are under such time pressure during their shifts that some do not even dare to go to the loo, to have internalised all the regulations. The workload is likely to push journalists even more towards using AI. Just as text from dpa reports has occasionally had to be used in the past, an LLM will be consulted in future if it saves time.

The rule that is currently most widely followed is particularly difficult to adhere to: ‘Human in the loop’ – a human should have the final say on AI-generated content before it is published . Even in day-to-day operations, editors overlook errors. When AI tools multiply the speed of output, humans reach their cognitive limits. And if they were to work meticulously nonetheless, they would inevitably prevent the efficiency gains hoped for by management. The ‘human in the loop’ principle undermines the scalability that is expected from AI, writes Felix Simon in a commentary for the Reuters Institute.

When in doubt, editorial teams wriggle out of the requirement with disclaimers. They state that content translated or produced using AI is labelled as such – in other words: they accept no responsibility for errors. This can work well and is accepted by the audience in some cases, for example with subtitles for TV programmes. Here, the desire for comprehensibility takes precedence, for instance for the hearing-impaired. However, it can also produce rubbish, as with articles from the Washington Post that are translated by AI and published in the Ippen Group’s publications. Furthermore, even in high-quality journalism, there are scenarios where rigid rules are of no help. If, for example, cloned voices were banned across the board, it would limit narrative possibilities. Even public service broadcasters have used voice clones of historical figures to bring contemporary history to life.   

In all these cases, guidelines tucked away on the intranet are of no help. A more effective approach is a mix of technical solutions, training and debate: desired applications must be automated within the CMS. Through experiments and training sessions, users can acquire knowledge of AI and learn how to work with it. And those who regularly discuss values – even in highly contentious cases – are more likely to reflect on them and act accordingly. Monitoring staff at every stage of research and production has never worked in journalism. Each individual must calibrate their own moral compass and follow it.

However, this is of little use if the management doesn’t have one. The owner of the Los Angeles Times, for example, recently ordered the editorial team to tag comments using a tool called the Bias Meter. The AI automatically alerts readers to opposing viewpoints. Clearly, the output isn’t being proofread by humans. Otherwise, someone might well have noticed that the machine had cast the Ku Klux Klan in a somewhat too favourable light. But those are details. No AI tool will ever be able to replace a lack of trust. Yet using AI in this way can destroy hard-won trust – both amongst staff and with the public.

What could, however, render ethical guidelines in media organisations entirely obsolete is the dominance of tech giants. The more AI is embedded in all the tools that everyone uses in their daily lives, the less users will question the values underlying them. The fact that a smartphone camera always makes the sky a little bluer than the one you see in front of you – fair enough. The fact that search engines make answers increasingly easy to digest thanks to AI – that’s fine. The fact that word processing programmes are increasingly acting as editors before an editor has even seen the piece – why not? Only the major organisations will be able to afford to embed their own standards in their systems, and even those may well be infiltrated by AI. The rest will be working with Office and the like.

None of this has to be a bad thing. Autopilots have made air travel many times safer; autonomous driving will achieve the same on the roads. Perhaps AI-assisted journalism will also manage to raise the standard of overall output significantly. After the devastation of the ‘reach’ era, that’s not such a difficult task for some publications. AI tools may even eventually help to implement ethical guidelines. The crucial question is whose rules these will be.

This column was published by the German industry publication Medieninsider in German on 17 March 2025.#

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Managers, Talk About Your Fears!

Supposedly, the days are over when newsrooms resembled macho hives, war reporters were the cool guys with armoured souls and journalists could only guess a colleague’s burnout by the length of a sick leave. At least that’s how Phil Chetwynd, Global News Director at the AFP news agency, sees it. While 10 to 15 years ago newsrooms were dominated by a culture of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, since then not only has the discussion about mental health in the workplace reached a different level; appropriate structures have also been put in place, Chetwynd said on a panel at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. This was necessary, he added, as journalists worldwide were facing unprecedented pressure.

In fact, just scrolling through the festival program provides a good overview of all the pain points: Eroding business are squeezing budgets and AI is accelerating the pace of innovation, while authoritarian politicians and their vassals are discrediting journalism, threatening journalists and sowing mistrust or even hostility towards the profession among the population, which is expressed both online and offline. Nevertheless, it is safe to assume that some media executives have not yet understood this with all its consequences.

In fact, business models can only be made resilient if you take care of those who are supposed to do so. And for all the reasons mentioned, the media industry has lost its appeal. Many journalists and media managers are questioning their career choice or leaving for calmer waters if they can. And the next generations don’t even feel tempted to join. In editorial offices that operate according to the old principle “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”, things could soon become breezy. Starting your own business is an alternative. However, it is more suitable for workaholics and self-exploiters, as was made clear on one or two other panels. So even in start-ups, there is no harm in thinking about mental health at an early stage.

Journalist and consultant Hannah Storm – on stage with Chetwynd – has published a book on the subject in 2024. “Mental Health and Wellbeing for Journalists” is based on 45 interviews with media people and trauma experts from all over the world. Key is to create safe spaces for conversations about the topic, said Storm. And anyone who thinks of post-traumatic stress disorder primarily in terms of war correspondents is underestimating the extent of the issue. For example, those who view disturbing footage day in, day out may be more affected than those who work in the middle of the action, said Storm. Vicarious trauma is the technical term for this. Psychologist Sian Williams has developed some recommendations for newsrooms on how to deal with this.

Such guidelines should also be of interest to local editors, as colleagues who frequently report from accident scenes or are confronted with gruesome details when covering the courts generally receive less attention than those who are sent to crisis areas. And fact-checkers are particularly threatened online – to an extent, as Chetwynd reports, that they no longer sign their texts with their names at AFP. The non-profit company The Self Investigation has put together a toolkit on mental health specifically for this group.

For some it’s not the news that causes burnout, but the accelerated pace in newsrooms coupled with economic pressure and concerns that AI could make the job redundant – all this on top of the normal madness of family management that keeps many colleagues busy in key career years. And this is not only true in cultures where self-fulfilment and leisure time play a major role. At a change management workshop for a media company in Malaysia – I led the seminar – participants brought up work-life balance and mental health as top challenges for the industry.  

Emma Thomasson, now a consultant and previously a bureau chief and senior correspondent at Reuters, addressed the topic proactively at the news agency and met with such a positive response that she set up a corresponding internal program. Today, she is involved in the journalist helpline of the Netzwerk Recherche, which offers help to all those who feel that the stress of their job is getting too much for them.

But managers are not doing their job if they leave such offers solely to external bodies and the initiative of those potentially affected. It is important to create a culture in which employees can talk about such experiences without fear, said Chetwynd. This includes managers also showing themselves to be vulnerable. This challenge must be taken up by all those in leadership positions. At AFP, with its 150 offices around the world, that’s a lot of people, but that’s the only way it works. Chetwynd: “The only barriers to a potentially unlimited amount of work are the managers.”

Experts consider two things in particular to be important to alleviate stress: good preparation and regular breaks. Not every journalist, for example, is suited for every assignment simply because of their character and personal history. And managers should address the potential risks proactively before someone takes on a task – be it a disaster assignment or moderating online comments. Adjustment helps. AFP, for example, only lets crisis reporters go to the front lines once they have become familiar with the environment and culture in less exposed roles. And after a few weeks, they must take time off to breathe. This sounds simple, but in many traditional newsrooms as well as in start-ups, it is part of the culture to quietly let workaholics do their thing if they get unloved work out of the way or increase the fame of the brand. This may work in the short term, but in the long run such negligence can be expensive – not to mention the human cost of it. 

Media companies are generally well advised to think proactively about the current and desired corporate or editorial culture, put it in words and communicate it precisely to employees. Lea Korsgaard, editor-in-chief of the widely praised Danish news brand Zetland, presented clear principles on another Perugia panel. Everyone who joins the company gets an hour with her, “and then I explain the culture”, she said, adding: “If you want to create a human-centric product, you need a human-centred culture.” Any news organization who wants to play a part in the battle for talent should listen up.

This column was written for and published by Medieninsider in German (“Chefs, redet über eure Ängste!”) on 15th April 2025.

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Optimism is underrated – What will remain when Marty Baron leaves the Washington Post

Even on the European side of the Atlantic, Marty Baron may be a household name to some outside the journalistic microcosm. The reason is “Spotlight.” In the movie, which won an Oscar in 2015, a young, new editor-in-chief drives an investigative team at the Boston Globe newspaper to top performance. The reporters finally succeed in uncovering a huge abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. The editor-in-chief’s real name is Martin Baron, and the actor Liev Schreiber, who played him, actually looked a lot like him in the film. By that time, however, Baron had already buzzed off to the Washington Post (WaPo), where he became editor-in-chief in 2013, shortly before Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the paper. There, @PostBaron, as he calls himself on Twitter, has now had enough. 66 years old, he announced he would be leaving his post at the end of February 2021.

In many a newsroom, reporters might have wrangled over who gets to pay tribute to Baron on his farewell. Of course, lots of journos are in awe of such a seasoned colleague, who during his time as editor-in-chief expanded the editorial team from 500 to 1,000 people, won ten Pulitzer Prizes with them and still managed to do a first-class job with digital transformation. “Democracy dies in darkness” – the WaPo’s claim will hardly be missing from any article. And if you like it funnier, you can integrate the expression “swashbuckling” into your English vocabulary. Jeff Bezos used it to say goodbye to his business partner: “You are swashbuckling and careful, you are disciplined and empathetic.” Never mind Baron could also be quite exhausting, Bezos admitted.

You can say a lot about this Marty, who was well aware of his importance. However, he was not so aware that he did not repeatedly tell young and experienced journalists about his work, as he regularly did at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, where he sits on the advisory board. He was happy to do so, also in the hope that a few of his messages would find their way back across the Atlantic. Only when he said something publicly did his newsroom take it from him that he was serious, he once said. He was obviously serious about one thing, because he repeated it, and it stuck: “I only hire optimists.” A flair for those colleagues* who push things forward with tenacity and a belief in success, whether investigative research or product development, may have been part of his recipe for success in digital transformation (the other’s first name was Jeff).

As a pragmatic, confident optimist, one can only agree. How nice it is, even as a boss, to share everyday life and offices with colleagues who take a deep breath at every minor and major crisis and then assure you with a desperate yet hopeful smile: “We’ll get it right.” How do you appreciate them, the ones who keep experimenting, digging in, doing the math and ultimately turning the corner with the message, “It’ll work out.”

In the media industry in general though optimism as a concept is not very popular. On the one hand, this is due to the less than encouraging balance sheets and the crumbling business models. On the other hand, it also reflects the self-image of a profession that often succumbs to the reflex of attaching the word crisis to every problem, thus making it seem a little more insoluble – think of the Corona crisis, the refugee crisis, the climate crisis, the vaccine crisis and, yes, the media crisis. Optimism in this reading is often misunderstood as whitewashing. Journalists, after all, are supposed to be critical and uncover messes. To bathe the world in optimism, that’s what PR is supposed to do. For this reason, journalism that calls itself constructive or solution-oriented sometimes has a hard time, at least communication-wise.

The audience, however, is increasingly annoyed by this. More than a third of users find journalism too negative and therefore switch off, as can be read in the Digital News Report year after year. Not necessarily because they no longer want to hear bad news, but because many perceive the world around them very differently – at least when there isn’t a pandemic going on. They often have quite positive experiences with colleagues, friends, neighbors, even complete strangers in the supermarket or at the train station. Therefore they feel that they can achieve something if they get together and tackle problems rather than going into hiding. Challenges have to be overcome, nothing helps.

And that is indeed the core of optimism: not a rosy view of the world, a denial of the facts, a euphoria-soaked jumping on every trend. But the confidence that with proper use of brain cells, diligence and cooperation, one will somehow make progress on the path to a better future, no matter how far away the goal may be. Things don’t always turn out well for everyone; many a generation carries burdens that are almost impossible to shoulder. But anyone who follows Max Roser’s long-term data series in Ourworldindata.org knows that progress is reality, not fiction.

Now it would be wrong to claim that progress is built by optimists alone. In every team there must be doubters who see details and nuances, point out risks and dangers and do not let themselves be silenced by bosses who divide the world into “trouble shooters and trouble makers”. Many a misfortune could have been prevented, many a danger averted, if the worriers had been listened to in good time. But the power is in optimism, the belief that something good can come of it if only worries and doubts are taken seriously enough.

They certainly weighed on Marty Baron, the great investigative journalist, when he met with Jeff Bezos eight years ago to talk about the future of the WaPo. Would the newsroom be able to remain independent under the eye of a man for whom the paper seemed more toy than vocation, and whose corporate empire earned far fewer stars in the humanity department than in the “customer obsession” category? In any case, the editor-in-chief was happy with the owner, he emphasized this one time after another. Possibly Marty Baron would have even hired himself.

This post appeared for the Digital Journalism Fellowship newsletter on January 28 on the Hamburg Media School blog. It was translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) and then edited by the author. 

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The Power of the Middle – Not even media leaders themselves think that they have the best ideas

Middle management in companies more often than not suffers from its infamous reputation. They are branded as rule-abiding busy bees, nitpickers who stick to processes just as much as they stick to their own chairs, managers, definitely not leaders. If they were, they would have long been promoted to the top – or so it is taught in many a business school. Former Siemens CEO Peter Löscher once spoke of a “clay layer,” the term even survived his own career in the company. A word that is like a slap in the face of all those tireless getting-things-doners who not only keep the company running on a daily basis, but also strive for constant improvement and overhaul, whether there is a crisis or not.

In the media industry, bosses are apparently no longer so sure about that clay layer. In the new “Journalism, media and technology trends and predictions” report by Nic Newman, which the Reuters Institute in Oxford publishes regularly at the beginning of the year, top managers were at least refreshingly self-critical about their own capacity to generate top ideas. Only about one in four (26 percent) of the 234 executives surveyed from 43 countries said they were convinced that top management generates the best ideas. The problem, as Nic Newman frames it: Innovation might not come from the top, “but companies are still run that way”. The report is not representative, but it is a must-read in the industry precisely because the respondents tend to be leaders who are particularly concerned about progress.

But where do they see innovation coming from? Nearly three-quarters revealed that data and audience research were most likely to give them a leg up, 68 percent bet on mixed teams from different areas, and still just under one in two admitted to borrowing the best strategies from other media companies. Okay, according to the survey, editors-in-chief and media managers trusted middle management as such even less (17 percent) than they trusted themselves. But who meets in the mixed teams, who evaluates audience data and derives strategies from it, who attends the relevant industry meetings, reads up on foreign material and then reports to the C-level? That’s right, in the very most common case, it’s the mid-level.

It is often those who are not celebrated as heroes in any industry publication and who neither management literature nor research has an eye on. They are the ones who are closest to the difficulties – and often therefore to the solutions. But they are also the ones for whom demands from employees and customers alike pile up into a sandwich of expectations. They are expected to be both operationally reliable and to think strategically and manage change. And if something goes wrong, it’s up to them to pick up the pieces and rebuild them into something else – in management-speak this is coined as “celebrating failure.

This layer of dedicated and loyal drivers of innovation, many of whom are at an age and in situations where family work demands additional work from them, is – no surprise – most at risk of burnout. Lucy Küng, who researches cultural change in media companies that go digital, has revealed this in countless interviews, including in her latest book: “Hearts and Minds: Harnessing Leadership, Culture and Talent to Really Go Digital.” This results in a huge brain and talent drain, she emphasizes again and again.

Yet many managers consider the mid level worthy of support only as long as they themselves are part of it. As soon as they have made it into top positions, they recoin themselves as visionaries. Gianpiero Petriglieri, a professor at INSEAD Business School, calls this “leaderism.” Instead of valuing reliable and constructive management, which is so necessary especially in times of crisis, he says, people celebrate visionaries whose ideas all too often go down with them. The glorification of leadership on the one hand and the devaluation of management qualities on the other is a dangerous pair of opposites that is still taught, but does more harm than good, especially in crises, he eloquently describes in the essay: “Why leadership isn’t a miracle cure for the Covid-19 crisis (and what can really help).” It is time to put less hope in leadership and more humanity into management, Petriglieri said. Judging by the “Trends and Predictions” report, many media managers already understand this. Humility can be the first step toward innovation.

This text was first published in German with Hamburg Media School Blog on 15th January 2021, then translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator and edited. 

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Getting Real About Talent and Diversity – Ten Recommendations

Europe’s newsrooms are still predominantly white and middle class, though societies are changing at rapid speed. How to better reflect all members of the increasingly diverse European societies within Europe’s Media and public sphere is crucial. Additionally, diversity is a business case. In digital transformation it is essential to gain access to new audiences. For public service media in particular this is not only a mission b’ut also a requirement. 

As part of the European Federation of Journalists’ project ‘Managing change in media’, supported by the European Commission, I have drafted ten recommendations for newsrooms on how to promote diversity and enable them to identify talent and reflect the society they are reporting about. You can read them here: Download the report