The best thing publishers can do with generative AI is experiment with it.
If journalists don’t decide the best use of AI in journalism, then AI firms will decide for them, says Christian Broughton, CEO of The Independent, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
“Do you want AI firms to just be dictating how [AI] is used everywhere,” Broughton says, “or do you want journalists to set out the best use of AI in journalism?”
The Independent is one of the UK’s leading national news sources and a top 10 news brand in the US.
In March, the it launched a new AI-powered news service called Bulletin in collaboration with Google’s Gemini, which generates bullet-point summaries of news stories with busy people in mind.
The summaries are AI-generated, but Bulletin only pulls from stories on The Independent, and every single summary is edited by a human journalist.
Broughton is quick to note that The Independent hired people to help run Bulletin, which is counter to the narrative that AI adoption will only replace human roles.
“This created employment,” he says. “We created jobs by using AI.”
According to Broughton, the new tool is also helping boost The Independent’s traffic. Beneath each Bulletin there are links to the original long-form stories, and people actually click on them.
In fact, the links have very high engagement, Broughton says, which is unlike generative AI search that siphons away traffic from digital media publishers. It’s a closed-loop system.
“There’s great referral going on between people on The Independent into Bulletin and from people on Bulletin into The Independent,” Broughton says. “It creates a very complementary ecosystem.”
Also in this episode: Embracing video as a revenue driver, how The Independent is managing to grow in such a harsh environment for publishers and behind its decision in 2016 to retire its print edition and go fully digital.
