Britain’s news brands are experimenting widely with GenAI, mainly to find efficiencies but also to serve their audiences better, according to a report by research and advisory firm Enders Analysis. 

The report talks extensively about the risks of AI-generated content, which I believe the readers of this newsletter are already acutely aware of. So instead, I’ll focus on the key findings that may be news to you: 

• Using GenAI to cut costs will not offer any business a competitive advantage because all businesses can access these tools. “But there are opportunities to improve service, reduce costs, and potentially develop new products that could build out utility to readers in the context of a shift to digital reader revenues — even if there is no immediate, killer news use case to raise new revenues,” wrote authors Niamh Burns and Tiffany Chung.

• New product development is in the very early stages for UK publishers. “Some are dipping a toe in the water with ‘chatbot' interfaces on their sites,” which could pave the way for improvements to their sites and let them extract more value out of their archives, which are generally not well monetised.

“Products could be developed that allow users to discover more of this,” the report said, citing Condé Nast’s partnership with Google to digitise Vogue archival material as an example. “AI can assist in generating more sophisticated metadata for archival material that would have been far more labour-intensive before and that has been a barrier to better use of the archive (this is a stated goal of the BBC using generative AI, building on its previous COMMA project to make the archive searchable).”

• Generative AI doesn’t represent a revolution in the newsroom — but combining it with rules-based AI and human intelligence can be powerful. For example: The Financial Times may use LLMs to classify information in large datasets but then use traditional rules-based AI to perform analysis on that data. 

• Newsquest has built a range of custom tools it is deploying across its newsrooms — like a freedom of information (FOI) bot that can generate story leads through automated FOI requests and identification of newsworthy responses. 

• Newsquest also encourages its newsrooms to create their own applications based on a GenAI toolkit.

• The British Broadcasting Corporation creates synthetic audio forecasts for every postcode in the UK. The synthetic voice was created by recording 3,000 sentences to create a natural-sounding voice clone, which can read out a weather forecast, a news article or any other BBC data, or text. The BBC is also trailing adding generative AI subtitles to podcasts on BBC Sounds.

• FT Professional has tried an “AskFT” chatbot format with some subscribers, finding relevant articles in response to user queries. FT Professional subscribers can also highlight text in an online article and are offered other articles semantically related to the highlighted section. 

• The Telegraph, The Guardian, Reuters, and News UK all use GenAI for “back-office” tasks, such as headline suggestions, editing help for journalists, transcription, story ideation, and research assistance.

• Reach Plc’s “Gutenbot” modifies existing Reach articles for different publications, as well as transforms press releases or police reports into copy. Reach also uses GenAI to write articles and says it produced 6,000 articles “with the support of AI tools” in 2023.

• Future Plc uses GenAI to generate product specifications for articles, shaving 30% off writing time, on average. It also acts as a co-pilot for editors and edits video for different distribution channels. Future was one of the first UK sites in March 2023 to launch a chat product for users to interrogate for its Tom’s Hardware brand.

The report also offered business strategy advice:

• “New product offerings could be more of an opportunity for businesses that rely on subscribers than those that are ad-supported.”

• “The best practice we identify involves aligning experiments with business strategy.”

• And as for bad practices, such as using GenAI to generate content at scale: “You should ask if you have a business problem that will be solved by more content, especially if that content will stand out less and less online — or by cheaper content, at the expense of a reduction in quality.”

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