Mario Garcia<\/a>, speaking earlier this month at WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille.<\/p>\nYou might dismiss this as hyperbole from some, but Garcia, the Columbia University journalism school legend, is in a better position than most to judge. At 79 years old, he was one of the few delegates \u2013 perhaps he was the only one \u2013 who could actually remember 1957.<\/p>\n
He got me thinking about what journalism will look like in 2057, or \u2013 given the pace of change we are experiencing \u2013 rather earlier, and how few pointers we actually have.<\/p>\n
First, though, Garcia\u2019s thesis. He said he had lived through six journalistic revolutions: hot type to cold type; typewriters to computers; black and white to colour; the internet; and now the mobile revolution and AI. Of the present, concurrent ones he said: \u201cThe other revolutions never affected how you write a story.\u201d<\/p>\n
He went into a long explanation of how newsrooms, with a few honourable exceptions, were failing to meet this challenge. Among other things, he lamented how \u201ceverything is produced horizontally, but consumed vertically\u201d on mobile screens. And the various different elements that we can now use alongside text \u2013 video, audio, infographics etc \u2013 are treated as add-ons rather than an integral, indivisible part of the creative process.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I walk into a newspaper and they say, \u2018You\u2019ll meet the multimedia team at 2pm\u201d, I think the elephant in the room is a big print elephant,\u201d said Garcia. His point was that we have not truly assimilated the requirements of mobile storytelling and still treat it as something separate from the main form of journalism: writing articles.<\/p>\n
This came to mind as speaker after speaker spoke about the atomisation of news and the death of the article. \u201cThe future of journalism is not the article, but everything around it,\u201d said Ezra Eeman, who leads WAN-IFRA\u2019s AI in Media initiative. He meant provenance, context and rights, but either way I see little sign of this becoming a reality any time soon.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not saying that it won\u2019t \u2013 and you could argue that video is becoming that form as I type this newsletter \u2013 but very few have truly broken away from the article.<\/p>\n
Sannuta Raghu, from Scroll in India, spoke in Marseille about how they are trying to become a \u201ctrusted workspace\u201d for people interested in studying South Asia in depth. The workspace for each subject covered by Scroll comprises different layers of content: Mini \u2013 which is headlines, key facts, key players; Core \u2013 a traditional article; and Deep \u2013 a curated dossier of collected materials and which explains what Scroll does and does not know about a topic. Note that Core is an article.<\/p>\n
I thought back to Circa, the ill-fated Silicon Valley atomised news app of 15 years ago. Ultimately, the atoms of news it published would roll up into an article. We seem hardwired to see completion in this form of journalism.<\/p>\n
I say this not as criticism but more because I find it really difficult to imagine how an atomised world of news will work in practice, rather than theory. I get that reporters will file snippets of text, or video, or audio, or photographs, or data and that these could be assembled using AI-driven models to provide individualised news experiences.<\/p>\n
But how will this content be verified? How will it be paid for \u2013 surely a publishers would want to charge more for a 50-word snippet than the fully immersive 10-minute video, graphics and audio version? Will there be a general release version that anyone can access and goes into the historical record? Will there be recognisable news brands at all, or will they all effectively be wire services feeding into the AI giants that own the user relationship?<\/p>\n
There are some stirrings on these questions. Jessica Davis of USA Today spoke in Marseille about agentic AI \u201cneeds a new model for oversight\u201d. She and her team are working to \u201cprotect trust without capping AI-enabled value\u201d by automating evaluations of content produced using AI. In short, remaking the human in the loop in bot form. Others are working on this too.<\/p>\n
Eeman said he \u201cwouldn\u2019t disown the idea\u201d of agentic subscriptions, where you\u2019d buy agentic access to the content of, say, the Wall Street Journal, or New York Times, or The Guardian.<\/p>\n
At the Signals at Scale workshop in Copenhagen the week before, there was a lot of focus on the need for a payment layer for atomised content, but no answers as yet.<\/p>\n
I guess I\u2019m just being impatient for wanting to \u201csee\u201d this future landscape and that it\u2019ll emerge over time. Until then we\u2019re in the world of the vague. Near the end of his talk, Garcia said of the AI revolution that \u201cwe need to put the scent of humans into stories\u201d. I smiled at the time but on reflection am not any the wiser about what that really means. As Jane Barrett from Reuters said, the road to our AI future is a little foggy at present.<\/p>\n
My closing thought is a simple one: the news industry shouldn\u2019t leave the navigation of that road to AI giants who might not have our best interests at heart.<\/p>\n
This first appeared in our weekly newsletter Editor\u2019s picks. Sign up here<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWe are still writing like it\u2019s 1957\u201d was the blunt assessment of Mario Garcia, speaking earlier this month at WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille. You might dismiss this as hyperbole from some, but Garcia, the Columbia University journalism school legend, is in a better position than most to judge. At 79 years old,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25114,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-publishing-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/lap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/lap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/lap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/lap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/lap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/lap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25115,"href":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/lap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25113\/revisions\/25115"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/lap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/lap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/lap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/lap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}