A landmark study of AI in newsrooms reveals they need to be coaxed to experiment with their business models

Link: The News + AI Field Report, by Djordje Padejski for the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

The News + AI Field Report for 2022-2025, produced by Djordje Padejski in conjunction with ASU’s Knight Center for the Future of News, is a landmark analysis of how newsrooms are experimenting with AI. The interactive app is also a really useful way to explore the 160 projects covered by this research.

I’ve been mulling over one of the findings described in the summary:

“Newsrooms are most worried about the business threat from AI and have built the least for it. Interviews reveal widespread anxiety about the effects of AI on site traffic, audience behavior and news business models. Yet relatively few projects focus on revenue, subscriptions or fundraising.”

20% of projects were business-related, but every fundraising project and over half of the business projects were grantees in the American Journalism Project’s AI programs. If those newsrooms are stripped out, the numbers drop significantly.

I think there’s a subtext worth talking about: I suspect the innovation projects listed here (that weren’t a part of a specific cohort) are a temperature check on how newsrooms are building technology / product experiments in general. If that’s the case, it implies that news is sticking to its comfort zone and spending much more time innovating on editorial concerns, and much less time experimenting with solutions for its existential business threats.

Reader-facing chatbots are a different angle on this: I’d call them a way for newsrooms to say they’re experimenting with AI without actually addressing a core user need. Newsroom websites are absolutely not where the chat layer should live (except, perhaps, for the use cases that provide deeper archive search for subscribers): AI users already have their own chatbots, which are the interfaces for all their AI-powered information. There are deeper ways AI could address user needs; the trick is that they would involve experimenting with the fundamental ways newsrooms do business. In turn, that requires both a willingness to do so, and much deeper collaboration between teams to make it happen.

So then the question becomes: how do we not just beef up journalism’s experiments in its business models, but the excitement and appetite to do so? Often the product teams that might be the owners of these kinds of experiments don’t (quite reasonably) own business models; how can those teams collaborate effectively? Funding from AJP clearly made a difference — is outside scaffolding required for this work to take place? How might product teams empower every team in the newsroom to run experiments?

These are much bigger questions than AI – and they’re questions newsrooms probably should be grappling with. In the meantime, I’m very grateful this analysis exists, and I hope it’s renewed to capture the year that follows.