Twipe’s Digital Growth Summit shone a light on a changing industry
A conference that ends with a literal piss-up in a brewery is always going to hold attractions for some. But Twipe's Digital Growth Summit in Leuven yesterday offered a whole lot more.
The brewery in question was the original premises of Stella Artois and the summit doubled as a 15th birthday party for Twipe, which is headquartered in this historic Belgian university town.
The Old Europe architecture, cobbled streets and abundant bars and cafes of Leuven were in contrast to the future-facing content of the summit. The overriding message from the stage was that news publishers need to rethink what they do from top to bottom in the age of AI.
As Bart Becks, a Belgian tech executive, noted of the AI revolution unfolding around us: "We have to accept that this is climate, not weather."
Here are my main takeaways:
The value chain is changing ... fast
In the opening CEO roundtable, Gert Ysebeart of Mediahuis and Stig Ørskov of WAN-IFRA offered what felt like an unsentimental view of news publishers' place in the world.
"There is a paradigm shift going on," said Ysebeart. "We used to make the journalism and people came to us. Then we lost the distribution [to social networks and search]; now, with AI, we are losing the production."
Not only that but our role as destinations for those seeking news is being eroded further. “We are still a destination – and can be for a long time, but not the sole destination,” he said. Ørskov added that “the value of writing skills is approaching zero because there’s no scarcity of that or of access to knowledge”. It all added up to a need to rethink “where we add value”. In his view, one place was on-the-ground reporting, because no AI has any kind of access to that which is unknown.
The news product set must evolve
There was a feeling in the room that pronouncements such as "the homepage is dead" were perhaps a bit extreme and didn't reflect reality. After all, print still lingers in most markets and continues to provide steady, if declining, revenues for many. In truth, the many media on which we publish our work will coexist but shift in importance.
One thought that echoed around the conference – it was also the subject of a lunchtime workshop – was that "apps are the new print". Ysebeart acknowledged that "in the coming years we will manage their decline".
As someone who has used news apps for the past 15 years this makes me feel rather sad, but I need to recognise that this was probably how my print predecessors felt when I was saying to them that print would one day be obsolete. This is just what happens in a climate of change.
(Most) people aren't keen on the agentic future
During Ezra Eeman's typically excellent presentation on the agentic future, it emerged there was a gap between what people expect to happen and what they want to happen. Over a series of audience votes, it became clear that most people expected that by 2030 news would mostly be accessed primarily via agentic interfaces and away from publisher sites and apps.
They also thought that the article would not be the main form of consumption; instead it would be delivered in a liquid format to be reassembled by agents for users in the formats they wanted.
Pause for a second to take in the implication of “by 2030”. That’s only three and a bit years away.
I thought the interesting thing was that though the audience thought this was the likeliest thing to happen, they also voted to say that actually they didn't want it and would prefer if the future looked a bit more like the status quo. And this was an audience of people who I would guess are pretty "AI forward" in their orientation.
I do wonder if in the near term the agentic future will bump up against the wall of people saying “thanks but no, I’m happy with what I’ve got”. But maybe the convenience will trump that.
You don’t have to block bots
Some publishers are leaning into a world of abundant agents. Sebastian Krause, head of product and data at Die Kleine Zeitung said that the Austrian newspaper had accepted it could not stop the journey to Google Zero – ie negligible traffic arriving from search. He declared that “the age of publishing for algorithms is over”.
It had also acknowledged that blocking bots was almost impossible. So his paper has decided to think of bots and crawlers not as the enemy but as a friend. “We want to build them a front door,” said Krause.
In practical terms that means building two pages for each story. One is a rich html page with images, graphics and other enhancements aimed at humans; the other is a clean markdown, built in conjunction with Tollbit, designed for agents.
Because the latter reduces the token count, and hence the cost, required to crawl it by 97%, Die Kleine Zeitung hopes that agents will be convinced to offer micropayments in return. "You save on tokens – give some of the balance to us," as Krause explained it.
It's a bold experiment whose results are worth monitoring.
Publishers should offer intelligence as well as news
AI's affect on the news industry will not be limited to a single outcome. It is pervasive and will have an impact right across the process of creating news, from ideation through production to distribution. So while agents are the flavour of the month, they are by no means the only huge change out there.
One possibility discussed by more than one speaker in Leuven was that publishers should look at converting their expertise, both current and buried in their archive, into intelligence products. Bart Becks said they need to think "not like a content supplier, but own the intelligence feed". Eeman, WAN-IFRA’s AI lead, was another speaker talking about the opportunities of operating as an "intelligence layer”. He outlined the questions that could be answered by such a solution. Among them were “What changed overnight?” “What do audiences care about?” “What is gaining trust?” “What should be updated?” “What to do next?”
We are moving very quickly away from news provision just being about telling people what happened.
It's something that B2B publishers with their deep industry-specific and responsive operations are increasingly investigating and something that consumer publications should get their heads around. I can't wait to see what they come up with.
We have something AI will never have
Change may be unsettling and painful at times but we'll just have to get used to it happening across everything we do.
Krause added that orienting towards agents had led to a change in content strategy at Die Kleine Zeitung. It is one that has echoes across the industry. He said that for every news event the newsroom asks itself: what is there in this story that only we can tell? "If it's nothing then we don't do it," he said.
This is a great principle and one that more newsrooms should follow. There will be some who will want to build systems to provide verified, well-sourced straight-up-and-down news, whether to agents or direct to customers, but this will tend towards a commodity.
The real advantage newsrooms have is that they are full of people who actually go out and talk to the subjects of stories, to get a different view and maybe change the way the story is told. Each journalist also sees things in their own distinctive way, which people may like or dislike, but nonetheless find valuable.
Instinctively we are able to parse these perspectives and biases and determine their value to us. The rise of creators only shows how this is part of our skills as social animals. We want to hear what people have to say. Bots will never have that. As Gert Ysebeart said at the beginning of the day, "human judgement is scarce and valuable". There is hope for us yet.
Thank you to Danny Lein, Dana Nastase, Sarah Cool-Fergus and everyone at Twipe for organising the summit and for naming me a "Hero of Twipe" for our collaboration over the years. I was both flattered and honoured.