At a moment when artificial intelligence is being discussed as an existential, even imminent threat to humanity, concerns about what it means for the future of journalism might seem quaint.
“This makes nuclear weapons look like nothing,” Bill Gates told The New York Times on Tuesday, the latest tech leader to raise alarms about AI. The task at hand, he said, is to “make sure we get through that with humanity still in control.”
As responsible stewards of journalism, it’s paramount that we understand both the opportunity and the threat that AI poses to our profession.
On the one hand, with AI advancing by the day, it can seem that everything, everywhere is changing all at once.
But if there is one constant, it’s that news organizations still need to establish a direct, enduring relationship with some proportion of their audience. As the media/tech analyst Ben Thompson has put it, “The answer for publishers in the age of AI is no different than it was in the age of Aggregators: Build a direct connection with readers.”
So as we look to the future, Newspack has a dual focus: helping publishers gain confidence and control over the adoption of AI while continuing to develop ever more powerful tools to build a lasting connection with readers.
This note is intended to capture how we’re tackling these twin goals to best serve your business. We’ve been talking about this at forums we organized at this year’s INN and LION conferences. And we’ll be meeting with another 100 or so publishers at Local News Camp in Durham next month. But for those who couldn’t attend, we wanted to be sure to spell it out here.
That’s the tl;dr. More detail below, starting with AI.
Easing AI adoption
Our strategy has three distinct components.
The first is to give publishers visibility into the AI traffic that is coming to their sites — traffic that is currently unseen by the usual analytics tools. With visibility comes context — who’s scraping, for what purpose (live search, indexing, or learning), and is there any evident benefit? Once a publisher has some context, they can think about exercising control. Whether by blocking AI crawlers, formatting the content to make it more AI-friendly, or something in between. We’re currently working with 17 publishers to beta test a sophisticated AI analytics dashboard from a company called Axioma. And we’re working both internally and with a variety of third-party vendors to find solutions we can scale to all 300+ publishers.
The second is to begin showcasing AI applications that have immediate payoff for publishers. With coding becoming ever easier, applications can come from any number of places: from within Automattic, from the Newspack team itself, or from the wider publishing community. And as an open source platform, it’s generally easy for Newspack to integrate these tools. We’ve convened an AI Advisory Committee of Newspack publishers with whom we vet possible applications. And we’ve tested a number so far with this group and others.
Perhaps the most dramatic example is Newspack Insights, a powerful new analytics tool that was developed with AI earlier this year. While the data is retrieved and analyzed by conventional means, the application was developed through the use of AI — deployed (after rigorous review and testing) in probably a quarter of the time it normally would have taken to develop it by conventional means. We’re also working with the American Journalism Project to test and scale several experimental AI features. And we’re in the midst of reviewing scores of AI tools that are being developed by Jetpack, which comes bundled with Newspack for free.
The challenge is not to find possible applications of AI. There’s an abundance. It’s to curate the selections so that publishers can embrace them and incorporate them into their workflows in a way that isn’t entirely disruptive to their routines. We plan to apply lessons learned during the Revenue Development Program, where we worked with small cohorts of publishers, to smooth the adoption of these tools.
The third component is to make Newspack “agent-friendly” — in the expectation that many of the tasks that you perform using computers can be performed more quickly and easily by AI. That doesn’t mean relying on AI to write and publish stories. Or simply setting AI loose on your business systems. But it could mean using it to troubleshoot your site when there’s an issue; to build your election coverage layouts; or to segment and target your audience when you’re fundraising for NewsMatch. These are routines that feel largely out of reach to most folks at the moment. But will become increasingly common as we get better at providing the context and human control that gives us confidence to deploy these tools safely.
As you contemplate how to engage your community in the age of AI, you might be inspired to read about some of your Newspack counterparts and how they’ve taken advantage of AI to advance their business.
Last year, Sahan Journal in Minnesota used AI to develop a tool that helps them craft better pitches to prospective advertisers. We’re working with inewsource in San Diego to extend an AI feature they built to customize calls to action. (The American Journalism Project incubated both with funds from OpenAI). And just this week, Jonathan Keen, co-executive director and chief financial officer of the Real News Network and a member of our AI advisory board, launched Operator Commons, a platform where AI agents can compare notes with other trusted agents about the business habits of their human operators.
Audience management
Even as we learn to deploy AI without undermining trust in our journalism, the fundamentals of the business at some level remain unchanged.
Recognizing that audience engagement is only going to get harder in the age of AI, we have been focused on building out our Audience Management capabilities to both reduce the friction around sign-up by streamlining reader registration and build more creative ways to introduce gentle friction to get folks to sign up through enhanced access control features. I won’t bore you with the mechanics here, but it’s flexible enough to allow you to exploit new touch points as you deepen the ways you reach your audience.
Combine that with two new, very powerful innovations, and you have at your command the tools that the largest media organizations use to drive revenue. One is called Integrations – a low-code bit of functionality that allows you to integrate Newspack with other third-party services that have an API.
It means data can be exchanged bidirectionally with different services so you can make optimum use of all of them. We’re deploying it first on ActiveCampaign with our partner BlueLena, and then with Salesforce, a widely used CRM. What it means in practice is that whether an interaction takes place on the website, via email, or in your CRM, messaging to your readers can be coordinated across different platforms.
The other innovation is our Newspack Insights Dashboard, a greatly enhanced version of the original Newspack Data Dashboard now available directly in Newspack. It launched on all sites at the end of August after a period of beta testing. If you haven’t checked it out yet, please do. It contains data from GA4, Google Ad Manager, your email Service provider, and eventually all donation and subscription platforms — providing rich analytics in a common look and feel across nine different tabs.
Taken together, these are systems that give you everything you need to optimize for engagement and conversion. Newspack Insights for a retrospective look at audience engagement data; Newspack Campaigns to target and intercept readers in real time, using the most up-to-date real-time data; and your CRM as the ultimate repository of customer records.
This is generally considered the holy grail for audience management by even large media organizations and is now available to all Newspack customers at a fraction of the typical cost.
Conclusion
We’ve experienced moments in the practice of journalism that seemed cataclysmic before. For the world and for our work.
As A.G. Sulzberger noted today, reflecting on his family’s 175-year stewardship of the New York Times, it comes down to upholding essential values and delivering real value to readers.
That lies in your hands.
Our job is to clear as many business and technical obstacles as we can in service of that mission. The good news: in its seven years, Newspack has established a formidable infrastructure to help publishers create the essential connection with readers while managing the peril and promise of AI.
As always, we’re grateful for your continued support of Newspack and welcome your active participation and feedback as we help you define and defend journalism for the 21st century.