Generative AI will revolutionize the news industry 

By Marisa Porto, Knight Chair in Local News and Sustainability

Two years ago, Ukrainian publisher Valerii Garmash faced the challenges of most leaders in journalism — fragmented audience, advertising competition and a collapsing business model. Add to the challenge — a war on his doorstep. 

The entrepreneur was developing new revenue initiatives when Russians began a full-scale invasion on February 22, 2022. Overnight, local advertisers and subscribers fled his hometown of Slovyansk, located close to the Russian border.  

Garmash did not flinch at the latest business challenge. He moved his news team to a safer part of Ukraine, continued to provide community news and searched for new revenue opportunities. 

About six months after the war began, Garmash shared his story with me during my visit to Ukraine to study what local news organizations can do to survive the economics of crisis. Today, he’s expanded his news operations to include other cities and services.  

With the war just months from its third anniversary, I think of Garmash’s resilience as I consider the difficulties facing news leaders in western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene.  

As they tackle the long tail of the crises in their communities, they will face a new challenge — a technology that will revolutionize the news industry.  

Generative artificial intelligence is an algorithmic process that scrapes digital copyrighted news content and converts that information into new text. Rapid public adoption of GenAI has given rise to the “AI economy.” It will impact every industry, especially the media, which relies on design, writing, audio and visuals. 

Since ChatGPT launched in 2020, generative AI has been reshaping the news industry. It has produced news companies like Channel 1, an AI TV program with AI anchors and AI-produced stories. It has birthed Belstad, an online news outlet created by a college student, which cannibalizes content from global news outlets to create politically unbiased news summaries.  

AI will join the series of technology disrupters that have changed the face of the news industry. This disrupter, however, will have a greater impact. It will increase the fragmentation of an already fragmented audience. It will cause greater advertising competition. And if they do not acquire new skills, it will cost some employees their jobs. 

When worldwide journalism luminaries gathered in Chile in May for World Press Day, one of the key issues was the challenge generative AI poses to local news. The conversation centered around the increased power it gives to Big Tech to control distribution, encourage misinformation and personalize news to create “filter bubbles” that confirm audience perspectives.  

As a participant in the discussion, I shared a presentation about the lack of copyright protection for the news industry. Today, The New York Times is blocking AI scrapers from using its content for GenAI training. The company, along with Gannett and Tribune, is suing Microsoft for copyright violations for scraping its content without permission.  

Still, more than 75 percent of the global news leaders surveyed last year said they were using AI in their news operations, according to JournalismAI, a collaboration between Google News Initiative and the London School of Economics.  

While 80 percent of news leaders who responded to the survey believed AI use would increase rapidly, fewer than a third had developed a business strategy for it.  

For most news organizations, the focus has been audience transparency for AI-generated content and job loss for journalists. AI bias, misinformation and ethics were elements of the ethics discussion even before a news organization recently fired a reporter for using fake quotes produced by AI.  

Some news organizations view AI as an opportunity to reshape their organizations to increase productivity and better serve their communities with new, targeted products.  

The Associated Press, for example, is using GenAI to recap sports games and scores. Bloomberg has automated the production of routine earnings reports and is using its data to better understand how its audience responds to its content. Reuters has automated stories about business leadership changes and economic indicator reports.  

AI produces engaging news updates, graphics and social media posts and determines the best time to post for the widest audience. Additionally, it can generate niche content, including translations of stories into different languages.  

News organizations are using AI to automate reports and analyze sales and audience data. They are culling resumes to hire the best candidates for jobs. GenAI chatbots are now the standard in customer service. Advertising teams are analyzing consumer data and creating personalized messages, visuals and campaigns.  

Garmash’s news teams in Ukraine currently use GenAI to develop content plans based on audience data and improve search engine optimization to increase content visibility. His sales teams personalize advertising offers with GenAI. Additionally, his organization uses AI to summarize meetings, track projects and tasks and automate emails after meetings. 

While GenAI revolutionizes the news industry on all fronts, it also will cause turmoil and consolidation.  

Small news organizations, with fewer resources, will face the most economic difficulties. And, of course, AI will cause job loss in an industry where employment has dropped more than 25 percent since 2008, according to the Pew Research Center.  

In January, International Monetary Fund chief Kristalina Georgieva suggested that AI would affect 40 percent of all jobs in the world and recommended workforce retraining programs, according to a story by Agence France-Presse.  

In Chinese, the word for danger is the same as the word for opportunity. While AI is likely to make us work faster, it also will create new revenues and new jobs such as prompt engineer, fact checker or ethics director. Employees of news organizations need to prepare by finding ways like workshops or conferences to learn AI skills.  

News leaders should develop a strategy for AI use. Among the steps in such a strategy are: 

• Assess AI’s impact on every role from interns to leaders.  
• Initiate a plan for retraining and new hiring.  
• Examine every department from sales to production.  
• Eliminate routine tasks and focus on what is important for your organization and your community.  
• Evaluate products and services through the same lens and complete the strategy for change.  
• Finally, news leaders should convene, converse and establish a plan for public policy guardrails on topics from media economics to misinformation.  

AI cannot replace the spirit of journalism, or the resilient humans dedicated to its mission, but we must be more entrepreneurial as we reimagine our news organizations. If we are, journalism will survive and thrive in the AI economy, and journalists like those in western North Carolina and Ukraine will continue to serve their communities in times of crisis and beyond.