Ringier Media just released a fascinating playbook for digital media, which includes a section on getting your newsroom to adopt AI and also contains many nuggets of insight into best practices and use cases at the Swiss media giant.

Their mid-term goal? Every piece of content should be AI-supported. The reader gets the impression they are ready to roll up their sleeves and do what it takes to make this happen.

Newsrooms should consider AI “a friendly co-pilot” that extends their reach and their effectiveness, Ringier says, and underscores the need to both truly understand journalists’ pain points before building tools as well as to appoint AI ambassadors who foster communication, user buy-in, and ongoing education.

For everyone out there struggling with scaling the adoption of AI tools at their news organisation, the authors of the playbook make it clear that none of this is glamorous work: “It sounds boring, but you have to talk with the real users who will be using these tools in their work,” they say. And also: “A lot of what we are doing at the moment is repeating the message every day.” 

What if it doesn’t work across the board?

Ringier also spelled out in black and white that it is willing to bite the bullet when needed: “There could be a potential need to eventually let go of employees who are resistant to embracing new technologies, especially if their skills are not irreplaceable.”

And at a time when many news brands are struggling with blocking crawlers, Ringier’s view is it is imperative to optimise your content for search generative experiences so that users can discover it in a list of source links while Googling. “Ensuring your content is part of such lists can drive traffic and engagement.”

They also believe readers will prefer to go to news sources over AI overviews and that partnering with Big Tech is vital. “While user behaviours change, user needs do not … . AI chatbots cannot deeply satisfy these needs alone and in many cases are beginning to link sources. To be among the content selected to satisfy these needs, we must build a strong relationship with these LLM platforms, as they act as gatekeepers to visibility.”

Ringier experiments with AI in video and with synthetic voices, and also clones journalists’ voices. “A key point is the focus on high-quality narration, possibly using professional narrators or journalists, rather than solely relying on automated AI voices.”

Having an automated “content distribution engine” that automatically schedules and publishes content with customised promotional copy across different platforms and then tracks its performance is important, the playbook says.

Another place for personalisation: marketing. “Use marketing automation tools to understand user behaviour on your platforms. This allows for target messaging based on user preferences and subscription status.”

Ringier’s North Star is the lifetime value of a customer, and they caution against neglecting subscriber retention rather than simply acquisition. 

When it comes to innovation, the authors believe allocating 80% of resources to the core road map and setting aside 20% for exploring new ideas is wise. 

They also have scathing words for the news business’ current innovation efforts, pointing to silos — rather than integration — as a challenge.

“Media companies are genuinely very good at ‘business as usual’ activities, and they are quite good at innovating on the side, somewhere in the labs, inside some other kind of protected small teams. 

“What they are really rubbish at is actually transitioning the innovation into business as usual.”

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