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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
US publishers are so over Google | Nursing Times ends 120-year print run
And the Financial Times has become the latest legacy media title to launch on Substack
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Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Wednesday, 19 November. Here’s our daily round-up of media news.
🗽Press Gazette took the temperature of the US news industry last week with our Media Strategy Network event at the People Inc building.
We will have lots to report from this, starting with my interview with Bloomberg Media chief operating officer Julia Beizer below.
But in the meantime here are three hot takes:
1) Google is so over, as far as US news publishers are concerned. Most are working on the assumption that referral traffic from Google search will trend towards zero and they are intensely focused on building direct relationships with their audience.
2) Being more human could be the latest big trend in publisher technology. Automate the hell out of everything you can, especially the more mundane elements of content publishing. But do not use AI to create your content. This will make it average and, likely, inaccurate. Publishers need more human insight, humour and edge if they are to compete with the bland aggregation of the answer engines.
3) Publishers won’t get fooled again in the latest great information revolution. They are working hard at blocking illegal scrapers and are optimistic that AI companies, which want to have a future that is not based on endless litigation, will find ways to more fairly compensate the creators of the content their businesses are based on.
It was particularly interesting to hear People Inc chief innovation officer Jonathan Roberts - one of our keynote speakers - talk about discussions between Microsoft and the news industry to work out the rules of its AI Publisher Content Marketplace.
It is hugely encouraging that the world’s largest AI company accepts the principle that the news industry deserves to get paid and is working on ways to make this happen.
Bloomberg’s Beizer revealed some innovative use of OpenAI’s Custom GPT technology in her keynote talk. She revealed they have used it to create “synthetic personas” which can be used to test out new products and marketing messages quickly. She also shared some of the tactics and insights which have enabled Bloomberg to add more than 100,000 paying subscribers over the last year.
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💊Back in the UK, Nursing Times is the latest B2B title to ditch its print edition.
We found out how the Metropolis-owned title is investing further in paid digital offerings including a custom AI chatbot and a premium subscription tier.
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📨And the FT has become the latest mainstream media title to launch on Substack.
The new free weekly newsletter will be based around the FT’s popular markets blog Alphaville.
The FT has been no slouch when it comes to launching newsletters in-house (in fact it has more than 1.6 million newsletter subscribers).
The Substack move is an admission of a couple of things that Press Gazette has also found:
Substack is a really good newsletter platform.
Being on Substack brings other benefits, such as access to the network effect it provides via recommendations and sharing within its community of authors and readers which offer access to a new audience.
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