Generating key takeaways...
If you’re invited to speak at a conference, you really don’t want a slot at the end of the day when delegates’ energy has dropped and the darkness of the auditorium becomes soporific. Even worse is to be the last speaker in the last session on the last day.
At WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress in Marseille this week that poisoned chalice fell to Rainer Esser, former managing director of Die Zeit. But undeterred, he looked at the hardy souls before him in the main auditorium – both of us 😉 – and delivered a bravura performance.
Indeed, I’d say his speech was both a literal and metaphorical argument for how we should approach the future of journalism in the age of AI. He was bold, without being overconfident, positive, but also realistic, and very human, in a way no bot could be.
He was bold when saying that AI will not kill journalism but make it more valuable than ever. Every wave of journalism has seen journalism “shed its skin” and find new ways to show its value, he argued. The reason is that “at its core it’s about human connection”. That’s no different in a world of AI because “when you automate the ordinary, you make the extraordinary more valuable”.
Esser was uncompromising in saying that journalistic organisations should know their worth and demand it be recognised. “We should not approach the Silicon Valley giants as beggars – we should walk in with our heads held high. Their highways are empty without our vehicles. They have the reach, but we have the souls.”
He was realistic about what the relationship between the AI platforms and publishers will look like. “The future does not belong to the tech platforms alone, nor to isolated publishers but to both acting together,” he said, noting that both will prosper if together they combine reach and accountability. “Truth is the only currency that cannot be algorithmically produced: an algorithm cannot report; it knows probability but not the truth.”
Esser also used a personal tale to describe how AI is being used by newsrooms to produce new and important journalism. Die Zeit recently released a tool whose headline tells you everything you need to know: “Use our tool to learn about your family’s Nazi party history.”
Esser paused briefly to compose himself before explaining how he had researched his grandfathers. One, he said, was an “early adopter” of Nazism and had joined the party in 1932 before Hitler came to power and died a few years later in a Russian camp. The other was a staunch Catholic who resisted the Nazis. “So I’m 50% okay,” he said.
Huge credit to Esser for exposing himself like that, but it was also a tale that no algorithm could tell, and certainly not in the disarming way that Esser told it.
In questions afterwards, Esser was asked if we, as an industry, are talking about AI too much. He replied: “I think we are talking about it adequately. When digitisation started in about 1996 people said: ‘Maybe the internet will go away.’ At Die Zeit we only got into it in 2008. If we wait 12 years this time, we’ll be gone.”
Behavioural economists will tell you that you only really remember the emotional peak and the end of a speech, an article or an event. Esser managed to combine both for the congress in Marseille.
There were plenty of thought-provoking presentations to which I’ll return in the coming weeks, but I felt Esser captured the emerging spirit of self-confidence and not a little defiance in the face of AI that was one of the hallmarks of the event. For that, it was definitely worth staying until the very end.
Alan Hunter is a co-founder of HBM Advisory, which helps organisations navigate the transformation of their content businesses, from finding the right strategy to producing the right content, and of course everything AI. Contact us for more information at [email protected]
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