Time for derring-do
I think you’ll see why David Caswell provided my favourite post on LinkedIn, or anywhere else, this week. But aside from the praise – for which many thanks, and which we are honoured to receive from someone we so admire – what got me thinking was this paragraph:
“The real scarce resources for news publishers in the AI era are not funding, or technical skill, or time, or a clean tech stack, or even (in my opinion) some kind of new 'culture'. The real scarce resources are imagination and courage and a willingness to just engage.”
He’s right. We need a bit more derring-do in the news business. We need to take some risks, because frankly it’s hard to have a conversation with a senior industry executive about the state of their business at the moment without them puffing out their cheeks and starting with: “Well…”
Reflecting on David’s post, and also on what I heard at the WAN-IFRA congress in Krakow and at the PPA Festival in London, I have a suggestion. Publishers should show some courage and commit resources to implementing full personalisation of their products.
Why? First, we should remember that most of the digital titans of our age – Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Google – have had their growth driven by personalisation. Second, it works, it really works.
Everywhere I go I hear of experiments on or the implementation of personalisation in news products and always the algorithm outperforms human curation. And even more so when the algo incorporates editorial judgments – which also helps alleviate filter bubble fears.
People cling on to the idea that “readers want to see what we’ve decided is important” but I’m afraid the data says otherwise.
In our talk in Krakow we predicted that the near future use cases of AI in news are multi-modal content and personalisation. The latter is easier to implement. I say do it now. (We know people who can help, so get in touch if you’d like an intro.)