AI alerts and agents are coming — what does it mean for news?
Product Initiative Newsletter Blog | 04 February 2025
Hi there.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks. We had an excellent session with an expert in entertainment branding. How we appear to consumers is an important topic as media distribution becomes more and more fragmented.
And did you see our new report on How news media companies can work with AI companies? It’s free to members, and I hope it will be a helpful foundation based on everything I have learnt from visits to Silicon Valley and many meetings with often elusive AI companies. Both of these are free to INMA members.
Taking of AI, did you see the announcements on highly personalised news alerts from OpenAI? And a wealth of AI companies launching agents? I dive into both within this newsletter.
Lastly, can we get the community together to answer the question I am asked the most: How big should the product/engineering/design team be? Let’s do a quick benchmark. Could you complete these few simple questions in less than a minute, and I’ll share anonymised results so that we can all better answer that question?
Thank you, Jodie
OpenAI tests scheduled news summaries, weather, and more
I recently noticed an announcement that OpenAI is doing scheduled summaries of news. Other news staples such as weather, horoscopes, and cartoons are being offered, too.
Why does it matter? Because this is going from query-led reactive user search to proactive alerts. This is the start of AI agents working on your behalf (more about that below).
TLDR: ChatGPT users, and likely all answer engines, will soon be able to get their own personalised news — not by asking for it but as an alert at a personalised time of day.
How are we preparing for this?
The news alerts didn’t work at launch and are taking time to get ironed out — a product lesson in itself. I’ll re-review when this is fully formed, but there is a lot we can learn to start preparing now. Below are a few things I found interesting.
As soon as I saw the announcement, I wanted to try it for myself. There was no proactive prompt anywhere in the mobile or desktop app but, it’s a simple case of asking the question and it’s a very smooth sign up. And by “sign up” I mean dictating exactly what we want.
The product has not given any nudges for this; for now, it’s purely on the user to know this feature is available.

Also note “memory updated” at the top of the response. As chat gets to know you better, it can give better answers.
It’s not just scheduled summaries; breaking news is also included in this feature:

I’m still not getting my news unless I prompt. Some of it is good, such as the media and technology section at the top (both very on point articles for this newsletter). But the location-based news alerts need a lot of work. For example, it’s telling me of a new fire in Los Angeles that is actually a week old and it has told me about before. And apparently there is no news in London.

How is success being measured?
A proactive push leaves little room for feedback.
Attention time could be measured.
Click-through rate: But this format is designed to give you the information you need, not a teaser.
Follow-up questions.
Can we trust the algorithm?
This is a touch snarky to add to this note, but I think you may appreciate why I have added it.
Several days after launch, I asked about the news alerts. As soon as the answer came, I took a screenshot. But within a second, it overwrote itself. Rather than admitting “repeating issues,” the text was changed to apologise for “the oversight.”
Does this mean — shock — that an algorithm can have a secondary layer filtering certain information? As we are seeing with automatic follows and downgrading certain information after the U.S. election, this could prove a serious issue.
Can this be truly effective when it can’t access news you pay for?
I wondered whether I may be able to get paywalled content if I provided my login details. Seems I can’t, although I know that is something being considered — which makes sense because if I pay for these sources, I’d like them featured more not less.
As users click through to our owned and operated products, what kind of experience is being given?
It can be pretty jarring for a user going from a succinct personalised text to a page with a lot of different media, including advertising. Should we be thinking about giving these users a different, smoother, experience?
Date for the diary: March 18-25, master class on building direct audiences
We know there are fundamental changes coming to the media ecosystem — the entire information ecosystem actually. What can we practically do, right now, to build and strengthen direct, loyal audiences who keep us top of mind as trusted sources?
That’s what we’ll dive into over the course of three modules in my Building Direct Audience Master Class, our upcoming Product & Tech Initiative virtual event. I hope you can join us.
The era of AI agents is upon us — what does this mean for news?
There have been a raft of announcements about AI agents.
Let’s start with the basics. According to ChatGPT: “AI agents are intelligent systems that can perceive their environment, process information, make decisions, and take actions autonomously. Unlike simple automation tools, AI agents can learn from interactions, adapt over time, and operate with minimal human intervention.”
The promise of AI agents means more tasks can be automated. My colleague Sonali Verma, lead of the INMA Generative AI Initiative, is looking into how news media companies can use this internally. Check out this article. Here, I am looking at it from a consumer point of view and how it may affect our products.
In the section above, I mention an example of an alert I have set up for local events. It’s pretty specific to me, and the results are good as you can see below.

An AI agent can take this one step further. It would be able to sign up for the events online, add them to my calendar, and invite my husband (or not).
We’re moving into a world where a single system will learn so much about you as a consumer that it can deliver highly personalised information and act upon it.
How does this relate to news?
Here are a few thoughts that spring to mind:
Firstly, we may need to rethink how we deliver news. One size does not fit all. Information is becoming more and more personalised, and consumer expectations of what a good product or service is will change with that.
We may need to rethink “service journalism,” where instead of telling people what they could do if they want to take action, we offer actual actions that agents can follow up on.
Here’s an example from a recent news event, the Los Angeles fires. The New York Times added “How to Help” to the navigation bar. The article gave good advice on actions consumers could take:

AI agents could take this to the next level by offering specific actions. For example, instead of a long article about it, you may see, “Would you like to donate $25 here?” and your agent would complete appropriate forms and make the donation simply by replying or clicking “yes” (or Y if we programme it for utmost simplicity!).
Or, “It looks like you are free 1-3 pm tomorrow. Shall I sign you up to volunteer there?” — whereby the appropriate form would be completed and the calendar would be blocked.
These are just a couple of obvious thoughts around how we may want to start iterating our products. In truth, we know this is coming, but it’s often hard to conceive of the virtually unlimited options we could use this for.
I expect to see most trails around news adjacent categories such as sports, cooking, horoscopes. Another obvious example is AI writing a meal plan for you based on what you like, how adventurous you are, how much time you have, family preferences, etc. An agent can do the grocery shopping and have it delivered at a suitable time.
It’s an exciting period that brings many opportunities. Are you starting to think about how you’ll bring agents into your products? Are you already experimenting? If so, I’d love to hear from you. Reach me at jodie.hopperton@INMA.org.
About this newsletter
Today’s newsletter is written by Jodie Hopperton, based in Los Angeles and lead for the INMA Product and Tech Initiative. Jodie will share research, case studies, and thought leadership on the topic of global news media product.
This newsletter is a public face of the Product and Tech Initiative by INMA, outlined here. E-mail Jodie at jodie.hopperton@inma.org with thoughts, suggestions, and questions. Sign up to our Slack channel.