Hi there. 

At the moment, I am focused on how the consumer tech ecosystem changes will affect news media and what we can do about it. Apple Intelligence recently launched to beta users, so in this newsletter I want to share some sneak peaks and possible implications for our businesses.  

Are you being affected by changes to GenAI search or other tech ecosystems? I’d love to hear from you as we all try to unwrap this. I’m at Jodie.hopperton@INMA.org, @jodiehop on most platforms, and you can book time with me here. 

All the best, Jodie

The effect of Apple Intelligence on e-mail newsletters and Web sites

Apple Intelligence is now out in the wild to a small number of users in their beta programme. I got my hands on it and want to offer some thoughts as to what I think may be the biggest effect for news organisations in the short term: e-mails. 

Before we start, there are a few things important to know:

1. Apple Intelligence is personalised to the device, which means it’s running in the background, not constantly sending information to the cloud. This is important for security but as it’s limited to device compute power, it may have an impact on run time for any given action.

2. Apple Intelligence will not be launching in Europe any time soon because of privacy regulations; more here. 

3. To state the obvious: This is new therefore we don’t yet know how consumer behaviours can change. We can, however, make some educated guesses.

Prioritising e-mails

Apple’s algorithm will prioritise certain e-mails. This is likely from particular senders or for timeliness, such as the example below which shows an event the same night:

Why does this matter?

Because your e-mails may get lost or demoted if not recognised as important or timely.

Summarising e-mails

Benedict Evants posted these screenshots on Threads, which show the traditional preview of the first two lines of an e-mail being replaced by an AI summary. In his words: “OK, this is very cool.” 

In addition to the preview on lock screen and through the inbox, entire e-mails can be summarised. Through a single tap on the “Summarize” button in the top right, a short summary is generated.

Why does this matter? 

Because we lose control of what is put forward to the reader, and it decreases the likelihood of people reading long e-mails, which means fewer marketing and advertising views.

Web pages

New tools are also available in Safari. Below you will see a series of screenshots showing a recent article from this newsletter, now available on our Web site. 

By clicking the icon on the bottom left, you get a range of options. “Listen to page” and “Show reader” are not new, but they are more prominent.

There are a few extra features, including translation tools to a preferred language (my Dutch is terrible in case you were wondering). There is also a summarisation tool, as you can see on the two screens to the right. I needed to go into Reader view to get the summary option, but I don’t know whether this is standard practice or a bug.

If you look at this in the context below, you’ll see just how much an experience changes from long text to a short overview:

Why does this matter?

Again, by content being summarised, news organisations lose control of their content and readers may see less advertising — although an optimist view may say our content is more widely available as listening tools and translation tools are more widely built in.

Writing tools

If you want to use some text you see on a Web site, you can now do different things with it. For example, in my previous article, if you wanted to share the main points with colleagues but not the whole thing, you could choose “key points.” Or if my text is a little lengthy, you can make it more concise. 

Below are screenshots showing various responses from the same highlighted text:

There is also a sharing tool in there which enables text to be shared to the usable customisable list (text messages, social etc). However when shared, there is no attribution.

Why does this matter?

While I don’t see a huge impact right now, this is a handy tool to take meaningful quotes/pieces of information. It’s a real shame attribution/link to source aren’t included.

Conclusion

The features in Apple Intelligence replicate many of the features that news organisations are already starting to work on — summarisation, text to speech. However this is being done at a platform level, making it easier for consumers but meaning news organisations have less control over how their content is consumed. 

We won’t know the real impact until this is full out in the wild, which may take some time.

Date for the diary: Media Innovation Week, September 23-27 in Helsinki

If you will be in Helsinki — details here — and would like to connect with me and other product and tech folk, please let me know. I’m at jodie.hopperton@inma.org.

Packaged media vs. bite sized information

This is more of a thought than a blog post, so please bear with me. And if you feel inclined to do so, help me build on this idea. 

Building on the fact that AI tools are summarising in search, e-mails, Web sites, and other major sources of information, news is likely to become more of a commodity than ever. It’s not the pieces of the news we will thrive on though — it’s the context, the package, and how to make it relevant. 

This is what resonated for me when I was listening to my favourite podcast, People vs Algorithms. They have recently talked about packaged media vs. bite sized pieces of information.

Then I noticed this piece by Nieman Lab on a similar theme that people hear about news in a “million different pieces.” All of these pick up on the themes we covered in a Webinar last year. 

As an industry, we’ve spent a lot of time looking at how content can be broken down into the fractured world of distribution. But maybe we should be looking at it as packaging information or as Julian Delaney, chief product and technology officer at NewsCorp put it: connecting the digital dots. 

A few weeks ago, U.S. President Joe Biden announced he was not seeking re-election on X (albeit a letter posted to X). I actually found out from a BBC news alert on my Apple Watch. 

Both of these are bite-sized pieces of information. In the U.S., most people I know were scrambling to find more information, trying to figure out what was next, who would become the nominee. Or would this be decided at the Democratic National Convention?

Making sense of the news is where we shine and gives consumers reasons to go beyond the platforms and the alerts. 

We don’t always know when people come to a story or how much background information they have. But maybe we can get to that. Maybe we can figure out to what degree individuals will want to follow different stories, how deep they want to get into something, and how often they are staying up to date with the essential elements of the story. Maybe this will vary by time of day or week. 

This isn’t just a journalism challenge — it’s a real product challenge. AI will change the way people both discover and contextualise the news. We will need to understand the former to excel in the latter.

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.

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