EVERYONE’S talking about AI. Understandably so. Artificial Intelligence technology, particularly GenAI, is developing at an exponentially rapid rate, and it is not an understatement to say it is revolutionising the world and how people live in it (for better or worse).
The news publishing industry is a big player in this innovation race and has experienced shifts in editorial processes as a consequence. However, one should not speak about AI technology without addressing the dark down side.
For example, Google now creates its own AI summaries for searches and places them at the top of the search results list. This decreases the need for users to click elsewhere for their information, as it has already been gathered and summarised for them. While convenient for readers, this reduces traffic to the sources of the summarised information.
For news publishers, this new status quo could have a marked impact as their home pages may not get the traffic they used to. Moreover, it cannot be denied that GenAI has the potential to diminish our critical and creative thinking capabilities by way of “replacing” it through overuse or even dependence. This risk extends to the journalistic voice and how the news is communicated to the general public.
My goal is to shift the focus away from the buzz and toward the brass tacks: technology that empowers its human users, enables journalists to share their voices and supports editors with easier collaboration independent of their location, all without threatening the creative spirit or key reader touchpoints.
In short, technology dedicated to the human element, to elevating the human experience and to helping news publishers evolve and thrive.
For example, many tech tools (including ones that are AI-driven) that optimise editorial workflows do so without taking away from the editorial spirit or diminishing exposure. Therefore, news publishers should work with a content management system (CMS) consolidating and integrating the right tools with proven efficacy in supporting newsroom workflows so editors can truly focus on telling their stories.
Speaking of telling stories, let’s take a look at the storytelling timeline and how a comprehensive CMS with industry-specific newsroom transformation tools can support editors every step of the way.
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The ideation stage: Where planning begins
Any story starts with an idea. An idea is then translated into pitch. And once the pitch is defined, the planning process can begin.
Planning includes determining what length and kind of piece will be created, which deadlines must be adhered to, and how the story would align with other planned topics. How can this process be streamlined and aligned within a CMS so key elements are not lost in translation at the start? Through collaboration tools.
Real-time collaboration tools allow all the related players to connect early on to give the nascent story momentum. These tools should enable people across departments to communicate transparently and efficiently with simultaneous editing capabilities, comment notifications, and tracked changes.
Establishing strong collaboration from the start — as opposed to further down the timeline — within a single unified system helps optimise the entire editorial process and, ultimately, lays a robust foundation upon which the story can be built.
Another element to consider is integration. Even if a CMS is a one-stop shop, news publishers may have system preferences when it comes to planning tools. Therefore, a CMS should be able to integrate outside planning systems in order not to disrupt any planning workflows.
The creation stage: cross-team collaboration and industry-relevant features
Once planning is settled, the creative process can begin. The same collaboration tools that support editorial teams at the start continue to contribute to successful storytelling further on in the process. The original author is able to track the history of changes made to a text while getting feedback from colleagues.
But a story is not just text; it’s images, too. Visual storytelling is not just complementary to a text; it is essential. This is why the image-handling workflow should be an intuitive breeze for users.
For example, there should be ways to facilitate deciding how images exist within a system. Having a system that provides optimised ways for users to archive, delete or revoke images keeps the image handling workflow streamlined, along with having an easy way to store original images along with their variant while ensuring only the right image versions are delivered.
Within the editing phase itself, editors should be able to edit images — whether making aesthetic adjustments to achieve a desired look or redacting number plates and faces if images contain sensitive information. They should be able to do this without having to leave their editing interface. Editors should also be able to move images easily and intuitively within a text, even many at a time with multi-image drag and drop capabilities.
Beyond the text and images, how can editors amplify their storytelling with tech? By leveraging tools perfectly suited specifically for the news publishing industry. For example, if editors want to enhance their story with real-time updates, they can look to live-blogging tools like tickers.
In the meantime, while all these creative tasks are carried out by humans supported by machines, non-creative tedious tasks can be taken care of in the background with AI-driven automated workflows.
It’s worth noting that, if there are actions being done by machines, in the interest of integrity and the European Union Act on AI, companies must be transparent about an action’s origins.
Therefore, a CMS should have the functionality to distinguish between human-generated actions and content and those produced by a machine, and steer priorisation according to whether or not the creator is human.
The curation stage: pages and print
Once a story is complete, it’s time for the curation stage, including page management and distribution. Where the story will go, how to showcase it strategically, and how to best promote it with readers across all relevant channels and products are all questions that come into play.
As such, news publishers should look to a CMS that offers functionalities to support high-quality hyper-curation.
To allow for complex page management and align pages efficiently with a particular interest — brand, region, or theme, for example — editors should have the ability to define components and containers that are conditional and designated to be delivered only for certain brands or according to other parametres.
Another way a system can facilitate complex page management is by enabling users to manually pin a chosen article teaser to a position inside a container with remaining spaces filled automatically by a teaser list, de-duplication included, for a pragmatic blend of machine-driven automation and human curation.
This functionality can be enhanced even further with the ability to manually boost certain articles for a set amount of time, which is particularly useful if automatic updates on algorithmic sections are frequent and important stories get pushed down too quickly.
Moreover, being able to edit individual article teasers in real time, without changing the article itself allows teasers to be coherently incorporated into the theme and picture of a given page, without affecting its SEO impact.
Speaking of SEO, having large-scale automation and optimised curation for meta-data tagging is another way to have tech take care of tedious tasks that don’t take away from the creative process.
When it comes to print, while many news publishers are focused on a digital-first strategy, they are not planning to abandon their print product. This is why it is important for a CMS to have a way to connect the digital workflows to those of print.
One way is to enable editors to effortlessly create a print version of an article from the online one via a specialised copy flow with dedicated UI elements, with possibilities for manual changes and full overwrites, if necessary.
The big picture
It is clear there are a myriad of tools available to news publishers looking to thrive in the digital age that are genuinely helpful and don’t present any risk of reducing online presence or snuffing out the human creative spark.
Rather than narrow the focus to AI only, media companies should focus on the big picture to include the full spectrum of technology tools proven to facilitate their workflows, finding the perfect balance between machine efficiency and human genius to support the production of world-class content.
Sarah Robins is communications manager at Livingdocs in Zürich, Switzerland.
