Are publishers fumbling AI?

Welcome back to a new edition of The Rebooting. My takeaway from the big Deepseek news is maybe our tech oligarchs aren’t the best ones to force government efficiency – and they might want to take a break from pontificating about who should get to play field hockey. Time to compete.

In today’s newsletter:

1. The Rebooting’s first online forum of the year is tomorrow
2. Are publishers fumbling AI?
3. PvA: Politicized tech and second-order thinking

In The Rebooting’s next Online Forum, I’ll be joined by Newsweek chief product officer Bharat Krish and ViaFoura CEO Mark Zohar to discuss how publishers are retooling their product approaches to be more nimble and responsive to audience needs while increasing trust and direct ties. Among the topics we’ll cover:

• Changed distribution strategies
• How Newsweek uses AI to efficiently build audience scale
• Using AI to build personalization and drive incremental revenue

The Online Forum is tomorrow, January 29, from 1pmET to 2pmET. If you can’t make it live, registrants will get a link to the replay afterwards.

Are publishers fumbling AI?

Back in April 2023, I wrote about how publisher reactions to the accelerating AI boom would bifurcate between defensive postures in offensive approaches. On the defensive side, there’s lawsuits and prayers for relief. The offensive side is using AI to do more with less and create better consumer products. In truth, most publishers have chosen the middle ground to do… not much.

The earliest efforts to apply AI in newsrooms were ham-handed, as would be expected. Everyone wants an easy button. And any publishing boss would look down their costs and see editorial as their biggest cost center. This has continued, as G/O Media is increasing the number of stories that are produced using Quartz’s AI bot, the Quartz Intelligence Newsroom. The results are uninspiring, not least to the many G/O Media ex-employees.

Unlike past new technologies, publishers have taken a far more cautious approach to using AI beyond the basics or for little skunkworks projects that are unlikely to have much impact. The examples of publishers using AI are usually confined to small-scale frippery like AI-enabled internal search. This is hardly very risky, since hardly anyone uses site search, even the people who work at the publication. Other publishers like The Washington Post have rolled out chatbots to their sites. Time enabled stories in its Person of the Year feature with an AI chatbot. It was marginally useful, although I’d still classify it as more marketing activation than product change.

The efforts are laudable, if only because there are few other examples of publishers doing much of anything. On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to The Media Copilot writer and publishing veteran Pete Pachal to get his assessment of publisher AI efforts to date. For now, there hasn’t been much of a flood of use cases within the core product, beyond being used for basic efficiency or within data journalism. 

This is a notable shift from the previous era, where newsrooms were more likely to look to be early adopters of new technologies. The back-to-basics and more-with-less mantras have cast a pall on those kinds of skunkworks. The publications with OpenAI deals have all nodded at new products. There’s been nothing outstanding I’ve seen. Part of that is as resources have shrunk at publishers, the cost of entry for AI has skyrocketed, although the Deepseek breakthrough could change the equation for foundational models. 

Of course, many of the practical business uses of AI are internal as opposed to product enhancements. Publishers are adopting AI paywalls, for example, which can increase conversion rates and retention. 

Most of the focus on AI at publishers is still on the threats it poses, particularly in accelerating the demise of the open web that’s underpinned the digital publishing industry. The promise of agentic AI sounds great as a consumer, only as a publisher you recognize the threat it will make visiting websites a fringe behavior. After all, what is a website but a clunky UI on a database?

Instead, we still hear a lot of talk of AI’s potential. And it does have clear potential to alter the publishing business. Dan Gardner, CEO of digital agency Code + Theory, preaches separating the ideas from the execution, with the execution increasingly done by AI. In an essay about how AI will change journalism, Bloomberg Media editor-in-chief John Mickelwaithe says that of the 5,000 articles Bloomberg Media produces a day, “there is some form of automation in a third of them.” 

Yet the examples given are parsing large amounts of data for a piece on Iranian oil smuggling and another on summarizing stories in three bullet points. Even dedicated AI news app Particle is mostly underwhelming. And Perplexity’s AI news podcast is hardly a breakthrough. 

For more on AI and newsrooms, listen to the full conversation with Pete on Apple | Spotify | other podcast platforms.

Thanks to EX.CO for sponsoring The Rebooting Show. 

Politicized Big Tech

On this week’s People vs Algorithms podcast, we discussed the implications of politicized tech, as AI fuels a global race to rule over AI. We recorded the episode prior to the Deepseek news, which slammed tech stocks as it appears Deepseek was able to build its model with a fraction of the resources used by the U.S. tech platforms. You can be sure you’ll hear lots about national security from Silicon Valley. The skeptic would say they just want to avoid competition (again). This could again be a case where tech titans race to first principles but neglect second-order impacts.

Listen on Apple | Spotify | other podcast platforms. You can also watch PvA on YouTube if you want to see my living room. 

In the PvA Weekend newsletter, I wrote about the symbolic shift of action from Davos to Washington for Trump’s inauguration, and why business publications are in the privileged position of suffering far less than general news publishers. Plus: Anonymous Banker on the AI gold rush disrupting venture capital. 

Recommendations

Publishers have decisions to make when it comes to agents. The release of OpenAI Operator will be quickly followed by other attempts to move AI from providing plausible and often true answers to questions to venturing out and accomplishing tasks. I’ve read this described as having “unlimited interns,” but as anyone who has had an intern can tell you, often you have to spend more time on guidance than if you did the task yourself. Expect something similar with early agents. Tollbit CEO Toshit Panigrahi says agents could have far-reaching implications for publishers. After all, all that bot traffic will need to be filtered out or advertisers will bolt or just fully embrace performance models.

Brand safety will be impossible to depoliticize. Advertisers will continue to have tools to control where there ads appear, but the broad approaches to this issue – and the cottage industry that sprung up to amplify the concerns – will decline. Nobody wants to appear before Jim Jordan’s committee because of an ANA working group. 

The power is shifting from editors to writers. AI will mean fewer editors. And the opportunities for writers will followings gives “star” writers more leverage. Paul Krugman left The New York Times after becoming sick of intrusive editing. He’s already got 137,000 subscribers to his Substack. 

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