Last week more than 300 media professionals from across Europe’s news business gathered in Dublin for the 51st instalment of the European News Media Conference.
As usual, the executives, editors and managers were there to wrestle with the same question that has dogged most of them for their careers: what the hell is the future for professional journalism?
These industry bunfights have a familiar rhythm. A parade of lanyarded speakers describe how bravely they are reinventing their operations. PowerPoint decks explain ingenious schemes for growing audiences or maximising engagement. There is the usual polite dance between the editorial and commercial sides of the house over who is really responsible for driving change.
And, inevitably, more than half of the conversations end up being about the latest shiny new thing that’s going to either rescue the business model or finally scupper it.
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The background music this year is a little more urgent. The shift from print to digital, long described as a slow-motion crisis, appears to be entering a new phase. Some challenges are familiar. Advertising revenue and print circulation continue to decline. The global platforms that dominate digital distribution act as gatekeepers, deciding what gets seen and what vanishes.
But these trends have been given a sharper edge by the increasing entwinement of Big Tech with politics and power.
This year’s new shiny thing is, obviously, artificial intelligence (AI). Generative AI now sits at the crossroads of every media strategy conversation, although, for all the talk of “integrating AI” into processes, practical examples are only slowly beginning to emerge.
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Some of these are unsettling. Instead of the old commissioning process, one well-known magazine now sends its writers machine-drafted articles and tells them to “add value”.
Several publishers are feeding press releases into large language models that churn out hundreds of finished stories each week, with only a final human check before publication.
You don’t need to be a hardened sceptic to see the thin end of a wedge here.
But much of the AI talk was more prosaic. AI tools are increasingly used for things such as tagging articles, laying out pages or generating short social videos. One German group demonstrated a “reel machine” that can turn a long article into an Instagram-ready clip in minutes. Norwegian developers showed predictive models that spot the readers most likely to subscribe and tweak paywalls and ad placement accordingly.
These initiatives are pitched as a way of freeing journalists to concentrate on higher-value work. But everyone knows that “freeing up” can also mean “cutting back”. There’s always a narrow line between efficiency and redundancy.
The lure of speed and reach is strong. But there’s a real danger that news organisations end up adding to the very flood of synthetic content that already threatens to submerge us all in a sea of what is called “AI slop”. If your stated mission is trust and distinctiveness then why start churning out the same machine-made sludge as everyone else?
Money remains the other half of the equation. For years the industry has debated whether advertising or subscriptions should be its lifeline. The answer, obviously, is both.
But many publishers are seeing a significant reweighting, away from a business where advertising sales were the primary source of revenue to one where subscriptions are more important.
That makes the relationship of trust with subscribers even more vital than it already was. Transparency was a recurring theme last week. Radical openness, it was suggested, could well be the cheapest way of buying trust. That will not come easily to some; the very institutions that hold others to account are often slow to hold themselves to the same standard.
AI may end up posing an even more existential question: how much of what journalists currently produce really requires human craft?
Routine weather alerts, traffic updates and match previews are already well within the reach of large language models, once safeguards against factual glitches are in place. If automation takes on those chores, that should free reporters for genuinely original work. But if it just allows companies to reduce headcount, that will be a recipe for self-destruction.
Speaking at the conference, Peter Vandermeersch, outgoing publisher of Mediahuis Ireland, compared AI-generated obituaries with those written by experienced journalists and said that only a minority of the human efforts were better. The point is not that the machines are about to take over, but that the industry needs to be clear about which parts of the job truly require human judgment and which do not.
As Vandermeersch pointed out, time is short. Whatever you think of the claims made for the transformative impact of AI across society, it will almost certainly accelerate radical change in the media industry.
Experimentation was a recurring buzzword last week. “Start small, but start,” one of the conference’s more candid participants said. Even failed projects, he said, were data points that can guide the next attempt.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Across the world, press freedom is being eroded at a pace not seen in decades. Co-ordinated smear campaigns, online abuse and legal intimidation are increasingly common. The news media can reorganise its workflows and balance its revenue streams all it wants but, without legal and civic support for a free press, those efforts will not amount to very much.
Vandermeersch’s departure from Mediahuis Ireland this month (he will be replaced by Sheena Peirse) coincides with Deirdre Veldon stepping down as managing director of The Irish Times Group. The two organisations are responsible for most of Ireland’s leading newspaper titles and a substantial chunk of its digital news media landscape. The new chief executives, as soon as they are in position, will have no shortage of to-do items in their in-trays.
