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.

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