Anabelle Nicoud

Innovating with AI, the impressive work of Aftonbladet

Anabelle Nicoud — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 10:38:10 +0000

When it comes to innovating with AI in the newsroom, Schibsted, a media group based in Oslo, shows the world what publishers can do (see this story). Among their innovations is creating an LLM for media in Norway. In an episode of AI Inside’s podcast, Jeff Jarvis states: “Schibsted is, and I do not exaggerate, the most admired news company and cause of the most jealousy in the news industry in the world because they’ve been successful and they figured out the internet better than any other company I know of online.”

I caught up with Aftonbladet’s Martin Schori in June, a few days after the EU elections. Martin is deputy managing editor for Aftonbladet, one of Schibsted’s legacy media outlets in Sweden. I was particularly curious about their chatbot, Valkompisen, launched after an internal hackathon for the elections to provide fact-checked answers about the elections to their users. Leveraging AI for elections proved to be a good bet, driving a significant amount of engagement.

Hi Martin! Thanks for taking some time to talk with me. As you know, many publishers have embarked on the AI journey over the past 2 years, bringing AI into their newsrooms. I was curious: what’s the goal in your own newsroom?

Martin: In October, we started our AI hub. It’s now seven people working full time: four journalists, two developers, and one UX designer.

The idea was to make fast progress. We have a large product and tech organization, so many ideas from the newsroom had to be prioritized against other projects. It was often hard to get them through because there were so many big projects. So we decided to build something on top of the organization. These seven people started with education, training the rest of the organization, and developing and implementing editorial tools for internal use. Now we’re more focused on services and products for the audience.

> Also on AI: Bringing AI to a 400 year old media group

When we think about AI, there’s so much that can be done. We can work with internal tools, workflows, or user-facing tools. So, how do you prioritize?

There’s a lot you could do on the business and marketing side, but we haven’t gotten that far yet. We started with the newsroom. Initially, it was about experimenting, and it was easy to experiment with editorial tools like SEO headline generators and proofreading. Now we’re prioritizing services for the audience. Our AI-generated article summaries have been a huge success.

That’s exciting! I’m going to age myself here – but when I think about the time I spent transcribing interviews as a reporter, I can only imagine what a huge time-saver it is. However, I can see how sensitive it is to use transcription tools with confidential material. Was protecting your sources and data the incentive for developing this tool internally?

Yes, exactly. That’s why we built our own transcription tool. You can upload interviews, but you can also use it live. If you have a press conference, for example, it can transcribe live for you. Obviously, we want to be able to upload sensitive data safely.

I’m very curious about the success of AI summaries. It’s one of the use cases many newsrooms are embracing now. Can you tell me more: does it drive more audience, or cannibalize it?

Indeed, it doesn’t cannibalize – quite the contrary. But if that had been the case, we should offer it anyway because if that’s what the audience wants, they should have the option. I think the idea that a journalist decides 100% how the audience will consume the news is old school. Now that technology allows it, we can give the power to the audience to decide how they want to consume it – read, listen, watch, read bullet points, or read half and listen to the rest. That’s a great development for us.

The idea here was to do something with generative AI pretty quickly. Our product team decided on generated summaries, and it turned out to be a very good service. We had no idea how people would use it. We thought those who expanded the summaries would only read them and then go somewhere else. But we realized that almost half of everyone who saw the summary went on to read the article. Those who did tended to read the articles deeper than those who didn’t expand it. That surprised us. At first, we thought something was wrong with the data, but maybe it’s not that strange. For example, when you read a research paper, you get an abstract first, which gives you a good understanding of what you’re going to read. Maybe we should replace our leads with summaries.

I’m curious to know more about the elections chatbot, as you’ve said it’s a huge success. How did you build this and how did the audience interact with it?

That was one of our biggest bets for the year. We had to convince our management team to focus on it for the elections, which is typically not a very engaging news event for the audience. But we thought it might be good because we could test it for elections and then scale it up for other events. But it actually turned out to be very successful – we had 160,000 questions. We categorized and checked them all. We could see that some questions were malicious, but most were actually real ones.

We didn’t just build a sandbox that goes out on the internet and finds information. On the contrary, the bot can only use data that we put in: official data from the European Union and all the political parties. We also did a lot interviews and surveys with each political party. So it’s actually journalism. It’s a very good model. Everything is safe and secure, and it’s also instructed not to hallucinate. If it doesn’t have an answer, it has to say that. Up until now, we’ve gone through thousands of questions and haven’t seen any examples of hallucinations.

I think you’re touching on something very interesting. There are obviously trust issues when it comes to generative AI. Fact-checked content, whether it’s numbers or even interviews, is really valuable for a news organization. And it can be served to the audience in many ways.

I think so too. It’s a bit scary because in the newsroom we usually have control of every single number we publish. With the bot, we didn’t know exactly what it was going to answer. I think we should be careful not to use AI just for the sake of using AI. There’s already news fatigue and a lot of content out there. We shouldn’t use generative AI just to create even more content.

Thanks Martin!

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Bringing AI to a 400 year old media group

Anabelle Nicoud — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 20:18:47 +0000

Talk about digital transformation! Germany’s Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger Medien is a publishing company born 400 years ago that now owns 3 newspapers and multiple radio stations. The company recently started writing a new chapter of its history thanks to its use of AI. Most notably, they have, since last summer, an AI bot writing articles and appearing in journalism conferences: Klara, a blond and blue eyed young woman who launched a year ago. I was intrigued with Klara and I wanted to understand more her impact in the newsroom. We caught up with Thomas Schultz-Homberg, CEO of the group, to understand how AI helps the group in its editorial and business strategies.

Hi Thomas! Thanks for taking the time to talk with me about AI. I first met Klara on one of your posts on LinkedIn. Can you tell me about her, and the idea leading to the creation of an AI journalist?

The idea behind Klara was to humanize AI in a way, because you can use a lot of GenAI models and clarify them at the bottom of the article but we thought a little further because it would be part of our daily reality to have an AI bot around us, a lot of surgery around you will be supported by AI and will be humanized by avatars like Klara is – it is easier to accept technology with human. Klara is a star. I have been with Klara to Copenhagen, Berlin, Vienna, Colorado. I will be around with Klara on a lot of occasions, but she is not only a star in the media bubble, but in the editorial because she is a colleague. If she was just a prompt interface in the CMS, without a face and identity, they would not have talked about it. Now they talk about Klara. In the conference, journalists say : it might be a topic for Klara.

That’s interesting. What would be a good story for Klara?

A good story for Klara is a story that is easy to research, not a lot of sources and investigation is easy, when there is a lot of data. We look for dense data sources, that we are sure, every story that needs a lot research and investigation is not a good story for Klara or any AI model, and we are not trying to replace real journalism and the real world for journalism, we try to replace our “easy” simple things just take a text from an agency and re-write it – something that humans don’t have to do it anymore

Klara Indernach – image created by Midjourney

Tell me more about the tech behind Klara.

She is an AI model based mainly on OpenAI Chat GPT, in combination with Gemini, and then there are smaller more specialized GenAI models, which we make it complete. For example, if you write about certain topics that need a lot of specific knowledge : let’s say a special type of sports, we use it for her to let her write an article about winter sports – we have a model more effective on specialized topics.

Klara is integrated in our CMS, she is a native part of our CMS and the prompts that are done for her are stored in that interface so if somebody gives her an idea, about a football game, then you can look in the library if there is a prompt you an use and you don’t have to use it as an editor. This speeds up the time you spend with the prompt, which means that Klara is super fast.

> AI in the newsroom: 5 use cases to leverage AI in your operations

So Klara will work with an editor.

Yes, she has a companion editor, everyday is a different one, and the companion editor does the prompts. And there is the responsibility for humans. She is defining what sources she uses for articles, how she quotes people, saying something, we do not permit her to change any words and prompts have to be from certain sources. This is the responsibility of a human, as AI is not gonna be able to do it yet. It will change but for the time being you need a human. The editor checks the result and that it is ready to publish, if it needs refining a human will do it. I will be fully transparent, we have a link to Klara and a link to the companion editor so if you think you detect a mistake you can refer to the editor to give him a hint.

So Klara is – I presume – a productive journalist. What’s her impact?

Now she is more productive but at the beginning she was not. When you start an AI model, basically it is really stupid it takes a while to train an AI model. Editors were complaining that they had to rewrite everything, that changed very fast because she was learning very fast. We trained her with our archives. She knew what we write, our typical headlines, she learned very fast. Today she writes 11% of all the articles and depending on the season she stands for 8 – 12% of all traffic. It is super reliant what she writes, she is very productive in terms of catching, she makes better headlines. She gets so much traffic because of her headlines. She gets feedback, she is learning, her headlines and the humans admit, we have colleagues that ask Klara for a headline. We do AB testing of course and always have a control group of at least 10% of the audience who gets normal things if there was no AI, there is “old school” website that 10% audience gets, and then we measure if AI has an impact we never experienced a case where the figures have been worse than before. Using AI for recommendation of articles in the context of user journey leads to a 50% – 80% CTR increase.

That’s interesting. Klara is part of a broader effort to leverage AI in your newsrooms. Can you tell me more about how you use AI? I’ve worked as an editor and curator, and I have to say, it’s rather depressing to hear that the machine would have a better performance!

We value humane as well, 90% of our content is produced by humane, it is not the purpose to have 90% Language model. But the curation if the article is critical, if you write an article of opera, for example, more at the bottom of site – sports will be curated at the top. However, if AI detects you as an opera topic, what we do is display this story at a higher place for you. We deprioritize the sports section, because we detect you as a non-sports interest person. This is not an echo chamber: we don’t kill anything. Everything is still there. You have the news in a different order, this is why CTR increased so much (50-80%)

A German research shows that the average user flips 3 pages, and then quits if they don’t see anything of interest. So if we do the opera to the top, people will stay and it will be better for engagement. If they have a page view, they will find sports.

I like how you describe it. We went, in a way, from having the top editor building the front page to a front page that is tailored to users interest. Same pool of stories, but presented in a different way.

400 years of newspaper reading this is nothing new, people at home were separating them, that was selective reading over 100 years. Also, there is a big difference between the newspaper pages and digital screening on smartphones. We have 80% consumption on smartphones, desk and site and 20% most people see a smaller screen. Front page you have a lot of space to display the articles, which is why the curation is more important.

It is a different consumption than people gave the purpose of news consumption is driven by a kind of search, I look for a source I trust – we still have 50% direct traffic, and those people come because they want to know something and we make it easier for them to find something for them of interest : newspaper in the time was a lean back user, enjoy time reading with a coffee – you don’t do web to get inspired. It is very difficult to publish real quality content like we publish.

Let’s talk about revenue. For over two decades, the print media business models have been changing. For your print products, where does most of your revenue come from today? And how do you see it evolve?

We have had Print for 400 years – we closed down our printer, but we still have a circulation of 200,000 copies a day in a region of 3 M habitants – so this is still pretty good if you compare it to Germany. The print is still our main business in terms of revenue. But it is a dying business, and we are moving forward on AI field, because we think we must use the time to establish a sustainable business.

The challenge on the digital is to make people pay. I have done the whole internet journey in my career, and all the stories, even the hero stories are not true. Look at The New York Times: they celebrate their millions of subscribers, but they don’t mention how many of them just pay 50 cents! Advertising is still the most promising avenue.

Thomas, I really appreciate the chat. Before we go, I’d also love to ask you what you found the most challenging in bringing AI to your newsrooms. It is obviously a major cultural shift, and not an easy one, I assume.

It was harder that you might imagine. We separated the new business from the legacy we divided they developed independence from each other they don’t have to look after each other when they make a decision. Biggest challenge: make people accept the obvious, that the digital is a different product from the traditional print, the socio-demographics are different, the purposes are different, the business model is different, that is hard to make people accept what they see in the mirror. It took a lot of discussion, we have a tool on their smartphone that helps you understand digital models. We have sessions with me as the CEO teaching formats. We do a lot of education.

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AI in the newsroom: 5 use cases to leverage AI in your operations

Anabelle Nicoud — Sun, 26 May 2024 08:18:58 +0000

This year, AI has created a major buzz in the media world (and maybe in every other industry too!).

If you’re into AI and journalism like me, you might’ve felt some serious FOMO with events like the recent Perugia Festival in Italy and the Nordic AI in Media Summit.

And whilst the discussions are interesting, there’s a lot of talk of ‘potentials’ and questions of what might be possible in the future. But let’s cut through the noise: how are newsrooms actually using AI today?

I’ve chatted with different AI leaders in Europe and North America, including Hearst, Gannet, Newsquest and L’Équipe, to find out.

1. Gannet: article summarization and daily horoscopes generated by AI

Gannett | USA Today, one of the leading publishers in the US, started shaping their AI use last year, rolling out two different use cases:

AI-generated bullet points. These offer a preview to the user as “a way to drive interest, and have the user enter the conversion funnel”, explains Amelie Sutton, product manager at Gannett | USA Today. They are reviewed by editors before publication however

Daily horoscopes. What started as an article that had to be reviewed and updated daily, is now a template which natural language generation transforms into an article. Suttons shares how “it’s a very low-risk effort, we are only using data from a third-party provider. We use the same template for the lottery, and right now, it’s fully automated. It’s pretty successful and something that people search for”.

2. NewsGames: building quizzes and crosswords with AI

Since the rise of gaming apps (think The New York Times, Apple News and The Telegraph), puzzles, crosswords, and other traditional media fixtures have gained renewed prominence in publishers’ strategies.

But how can local newsrooms, who don’t have the ability to dedicate teams or invest heavily, capitalize on this trend?

Meet Bill Miles and Kevin McCurdy, a pair of tech entrepreneurs, who founded NewsGames, a platform dedicated to crafting puzzles, quizzes, and crosswords tailored specifically for local newsrooms. Their mission? To engage audiences, reduce churn, and create a strong experience around local news.

Utilizing GenAI, the platform enables newsrooms to effortlessly generate quizzes and crosswords. These interactive games can seamlessly integrate into any website or newsletter.

Each game is meticulously customized for the local newsroom. The only requirement being to input article URLs, images, podcast links, and other content elements. Newsrooms can personalize the appearance by adjusting logos, colors, and fonts, ensuring seamless integration with their platforms.

“Generating a fully-fledged quiz written by AI only takes a few minutes,” remarks Bill, emphasizing the platform’s efficiency. “Our top priority is engagement and finding innovative ways to attract audiences to the local market,” he adds.

The company firmly believes that local newsrooms can “quizzify” a broader spectrum of content, extending beyond news to encompass politics, sports, entertainment, and more.

“As quiz creation becomes simpler, we anticipate a surge in their popularity because customers enjoy them. They’re fun, engaging, and offer a fresh way to consume news—especially on mobile devices,” Bill Miles says.

3. L’Équipe: Leveraging AI to summarize comments and drive engagement

L’Equipe is a leading daily sports newspaper, TV channel and digital platform. As their team started to explore how AI could be leveraged across the brand, they wanted to put it to use in improving the user experience for community members. Indeed, L’Équipe has a very strong following of users who not only read articles but interact with the site too. More than 400,000 comments a month for 12 millions unique visitors/month.

“Our readers love to read comments, and certain articles can generate 1,500 to 2,000 comments”, says Emmanuel Alix, director of digital at L’Equipe.

Users don’t have to subscribe to leave a comment. They do, however, have to create a free account to read or add a comment. Once registered, the user enters the top of the conversion funnel and is 15 times more likely to subscribe, says Emmanuel.

To increase the value of the comments section even further, the team has developed an AI tool to summarize the comments in a drop down box placed within the comments section. Just a single article can generate more than 300 summaries from the comments section.

With this new tool, the L’Equipe team can track how many users click on the “read more” tab to read the full summary. So far, more than 200,000 users have used the feature and the feedback is positive.

L’Equipe uses OpenAI to generate summaries. The tool isn’t perfect yet, says Emmanuel Alix, but AI does offer certain opportunities for the media.

> To add to your reading list: Changing the way we do paid: how L’Équipe halved subscriber acquisition costs whilst increasing both attribution and last-click subscriptions

4. San Francisco Chronicle, Hearst Media: meet ChowBot, your AI-powered restaurant guide

AI tools are rapidly evolving. How can Hearst newspapers, which include leading local newsrooms such as the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle, and their teams experiment with it?

Tim O’Rourke, VP of Content Strategy, leads the Dev Hub, an innovative team in Hearst media. His team leads the efforts for the digital innovation for Hearst’s newspapers with data-visualization and interactive projects.

Naturally, Tim’s team came to experiment with AI. The mindset is to experiment whilst still holding themselves to a high standard and not eroding the public’s trust. “In some areas, the technology is just not good enough yet. We don’t want to be taking risks with our reputation,” Tim explains.

But they still see huge potential for AI in their work. Production P, for instance, is an internally developed tool to help editors in some of their smaller newsrooms create summaries, and tweak headlines. On the reader-facing side, Tim’s approach is to be very careful.

Their first AI-powered user-facing product is the “Chowbot”, an AI-powered chatbot that went live in February on the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, helping readers find recommended restaurants and specific dishes in the Bay Area. As the chatbot only uses verified data from the San Francisco Chronicle, the risks of hallucinations and errors are limited.

Chowbot is reserved for the Chronicale’s subscribers only and was already being used by 10,000 users just a month and a half after its debut.

5. Newsquest: an assistant tool to help local journalists spend more time in their community

When I talked to Jody Doherty-Cove, he was just back from the Nordic AI in Media summit. As Head of Editorial AI for the the second largest media group in the UK, Jody has a lot to share about the impact AI can have for journalists.

The media group owns more than 250 local titles – including the Berrow’s Worcester Journal, the oldest surviving newspaper in the world.

“We have AI-assisted reporters using AI tools to help speed up certain tasks”, says Jody. For example, an internal GPT, that writes articles from trusted sources.

“We only use trusted sources that can be transformed into a media article”, says Jody. In smaller newsrooms, reporters would often have to produce content at scale. But with the help of this tool, they have more time to report on the ground, develop sources and be part of the community they are covering.

Newsquest papers have seen success thanks to these tools. Subscriptions are up, says Jody, and page views are also doing well.

“But we also can’t quantify the impact on the editors themselves. They have more free time on their deadline days”, he adds.

Bringin AI to the newsroom hasn’t been as hard as one can imagine: “It is an easy sell. We found that things those tools are good at are things no one wants to do. We are not taking away things that people enjoy”.

Beyond the AI-assisted reporters, no reporter or editor is forced to use those tools.

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Advertising, philanthropy, and user engagement: How the non-profit La Presse generated $13 million net assets in 2023

Anabelle Nicoud — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 16:46:55 +0000

Montreal-based La Presse is a unique news organization. Long-time property of the Desmarais family, the legacy daily, which famously ditched its print edition for an iPad-only app in 2015, became a non-profit in 2018 and launched its philanthropic program a year later. The move stunned many observers -myself included- in Canada.

Five years into their new model, the daily is stronger than ever. I worked many years alongside Florence Turpault-Desroches, Vice-President of Communications and Philanthropy, as a journalist and managing editor at La Presse.

We caught up, and she took me through the steps of their unique formula: philanthropy, advertising, and high engagement of their readers.

Q: Hi Florence! La Presse is a free media, but also asks its readers to “subscribe” to read online. Can you explain what La Presse’s revenue model is?

A: La Presse is a 100% free model. However, we have what we call an “authentication readerwall”. We ask desktop users to create an account to read more than 3 stories online a month. 80% of articles read on line are read in an authenticated manner. We had a very rapid conversion rate when we implemented this wall. We do not plan, at this point, to be more aggressive on our platforms.

Q: What’s the mindset behind this “authentication readerwall”?

A: Creating reader accounts helps us recognize readers, personalize advertising, and personalize our relationship with our donors. The readerwall allows us to obtain data: it also allows us to better know our audience if we want to personalize our content or identify potential donors. We can also personalize our solicitation. The majority of our philanthropy is based on data segmentation: we do a personalized campaign, based on the donation, and what type of readers our donors are.

Q: I looked into your annual report. Philanthropy generates revenue, but most of your revenue still comes from advertising.

A: Indeed, but we don’t want to be dependent on a single source of income – advertising or donation. Diversifying revenue ensures that we don’t have only one source of income. The vast majority of our advertising revenues come from our iPad app. The reason is simple: the ads are much more engaging, interactive, and playful. Our readers also have exceptional time spent in the iPad app, so it is attractive for advertisers.

Q: Let’s talk about time spent. I’ll throw in some numbers: every day, 240,000 readers open the tablet app and spend an average of 40 minutes reading it. This is very high, especially if we compare it with the time spent on a mobile app.

A: Absolutely. Engagement makes all the difference even for our business model. The vast majority of our advertising revenues come from our iPad app. The reason is simple: the ads are much more engaging, interactive, and playful. Our iPad app is still our most important platform because the level of engagement is exceptional.

Q: Who is your audience on La Presse+, the tablet app?

A: It’s a mix of former print subscribers who migrated to the tablet: those readers will read every section in the app. They are highly engaged and they also are mainly our donors. Those readers are very valuable. In the iPad app, we put a lot of effort into graphics and visuals. There is a playful aspect, in the content and in the ads. It is not just text.

Q: Do you plan on replicating this very high time spent on your other platforms?

A: Absolutely. We want to work on engagement in 2024 to see if we can bring La Presse+’s success to our other platforms, desktop and mobile. We know these are short sessions. That raises many questions, including: is there a loyalty issue for the brand?

Q: La Presse launched several newsletters and now notifies its users of all kinds of news. Can you tell me more about the rationale behind those changes?

A: We realized that people used to go to news media to get informed in the past. But now, they expect us to come to them. It forced us to ask ourselves, how are we going to reach them? For us, it has been notifications and newsletters, which are expanding. We have over 950,000 subscribers to our newsletters, and it works well. It’s a way to reach out to readers to bring them back to us.

Q: Finally, the question of advertising revenue earned by Meta, Google, is also at the heart of many discussions in Canada about the future of local media. How do you stand out, what revenue growth (or decline) do you anticipate?

A: Our goal has always been for people to come directly to our platforms. When Meta banned news links from its platforms in Canada, we saw a decrease on our site, but it wasn’t drastic – and we found our users back on our platforms after a few months. In terms of revenue, we also ensured that we developed data tools to “compete” with US tech giants. But we can offer advertisers products based on ethically collected data, and that’s why our advertising revenue has increased. We recently launched a new platform; the goal was not to compete with web giants but to offer small businesses the possibility to buy advertising in La Presse.

Q: So what’s next for La Presse?

A: Since we are in good health, we want to develop and invest in journalism in Quebec. We want to expand our coverage in health. We also plan to have an office in Washington DC for the upcoming elections. The other thing we talk a lot about is getting closer to our readers. We talked about engagement, and how we at La Presse can make sure to get closer and respond in content to their needs.

This interview has been translated from French to English and edited for clarity. Author used AI tools for copyediting (Grammarly).

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