The other day, the world’s greatest human media news curator, Bo Sacks, shared this story about the onslaught of AI slaughtering publishers by the legendary media futurist, Nic Newman. It served up a CEO survey of gloom and doom with a side of ‘slaw and a bottomless fountain drink of your choice. Argh. Sigh. Enough. I can’t take it anymore. This ends now. Well, a few hundred words from now. Because this can’t go on.
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A long ways back, life kinda kicked me in the teeth. I wallowed in self-pity. I cloaked myself in whoa-is-me-ism. Every afternoon when I got up, I looked in the mirror and used what looked back as a reason to stay miserable. This went on for a long while. In the middle of one of my more pathetic life sucks weeps, at the nadir of my bummy moments, my dad had had enough and delivered this Nat King Cole level unforgettable line, “Enough wallowing. Get over it.”
Right now, news publishers are pathetic wretches who desperately need an unmotivating, uninspiring, entirely justified kick in the pants. And, I’m going to play the throw-back dad. Usually, I’m more Debbie Downer than Little Mary Sunshine, so bear with me.
AI isn’t the worst thing to happen to publishing.
Some of you are thinking, I’m playing fast and loose with the word, “Worst.” Platforms, search, the loss of ad dollar intersectionality are worse. So, AI isn’t *the worst* thing to happen. AI is like getting diabetes after you have terminal cancer and a fatal gunshot wound.
First, Exhale. I’m here to tell you that you’ve passed the nadir of your anxiety. AI hasn’t killed journalism. And, it won’t. It’s not the poison pill advertising has been. Or Google. Or social media. Or pivots to video. Or Bill C-18. Heavy debt loads. Falling CPMs. Trust issues. Reader apathy. Or any of the other myriad reasons that the business of journalism has taken it on the chin since I delivered actual paper news more than forty years ago.
And, yes, really, AI might actually be good for publishers. Hear me out.
AI is really new. It’s so new no one knows what the hell they’re doing with it. Google can’t get AI right. Meta is spending so much money that investors are worried. Microsoft’s AI replies in Outlook and LinkedIn are worse than useless. Perplexity makes less money than you do. These are the leaders of the pack.
The big publishers haven’t figured it out. What’s the New York Times’ AI strategy? WSJ? I think it was smart that the AP and Axel Springer sold their old content for cold hard cash, but that’s not a strategy. That’s a short-term cash grab. FT buying visibility may be the first thing I’ve seen that looks like a move to the future. And, at best it’s moving a pawn two squares up.
So, no, you’re not behind. AI didn’t level the playing field. It leveled it. Forget green fields and blue skies. You’re walking around in a post-apocalyptic barren scape. Which means there are no rules. Have fun!
Pep talk done. Now, you need some ideas on which you can build your strategies. I’ll get the ball rolling with these few. Hit me up for deeper dives if on any of these things. Or, if just want to chat. That’s what dads are for. I call mine every day.
First…
Audio.
For the love of all things media, get your content out of text and into talk. You can’t win in text. If you’re small… If you don’t show more ads than MFA’s… If you can’t play the SEO game like Garry Kasparov… you’re done. You won’t get enough traffic at paltry CPMs to pay your bills. Unlike banners, audio has yet to be overrun. Ads can play there.
Two caveats. First. Don’t put an MP3 of your story on your site. There’s no logic in that. Someone on your site can skim it better than an AI will read it to them. That’s why the noise of that hype has gone silent. Separately, audio is for people on the go. No one on the go will navigate to your site to press the, “Play me” button. Here’s the other caveat. Stay short. Listeners won’t listen to AI reading them a bedtime story.
AI is the straw that mixes your drinkable audio strategy. AI can summarize your prose, voice it, and if you like, translate it. You just need to put it somewhere. And, that somewhere is the car. Think of all of this as an audio newsletter. A direct way to reach your audience that bypasses the guardians of the digital ad galaxy.
Next…
Use AI to engage people.
Even in its infancy, AI’s best use case is keeping us engaged. It’s like the first baby in your extended family. The one your brother’s wife’s cousin had. Its movements and abilities are a marvel. We fixate on the stupid sounds it makes and coo at it for hours.
The aforementioned big players gave us bots to chat with about. We marvel at the modern technology and coo back at it breathlessly and ceaselessly. We fixate on its stupid drawings and post its pictures to our feeds like our mothers put our toddler-era macaroni plates on the family fridge.
Perversely, the more the smart bots learn the dumber they get. Which makes AI a great engagement tool… for you.
Chat bots are trained on massive data sets. Which gives them all sorts of contradictory information and leads to the kinds of hilarious hallucinations we read about.
If you train an AI on your stories, you’ll have a bot smarter about the things that your audiences comes to expect from you. If you’re Jalopnick, you’ve written more about cars than just about anyone. Same goes for GearJunkie about outdoor gear. Sportico for sports business. Or The Coast and Halifax Hamburger Week.
That’s what Professor Scott Galloway did. If you don’t know Prof. Galloway, he’s a marketing professor at NYU Stern. He has 600,000+ followers on LinkedIn. He co-hosts a podcast with Kara Swisher. Writer of multiple books. Suffice to say that he’s a marketing genius. Mostly because he knows how to market what he says to people looking for solutions.
He was among the first “brands” to deploy an AI. Yes, he’s a brand. But he’s published material less than you and likely has a smaller or nichier audience than many of you. He trained his chat bot on all those stories and launched his own chat bot — ProfG.ai.
Now, you can ask his bot questions about marketing. And, keep asking. And, keep asking. People send minutes chatting with his AI bot. Which is a whole lot better than trying to get someone to stick around reading one more story on site.com when they got there transiently.
And, since strategies always seem more McKinsey-ian in threes,…
Games.
The New York Times bought Wordle because it entertains millions of people every day. That deal helped remind publishers that games are good. Crossword puzzles and all those other things that filled the back pages of the catchall section of the newspapers are reemerging in digital.
AI can play a role in interactive games. Come from the information and stay for the playcation. It doesn’t have to be Civilization. A lot of people will play all sorts of games with your AI. Tik Tac Toe may keep folks around for a while. Rock Paper Scissors. Guess who I’m thinking of? Twenty questions. Telegram and LinkedIn rolled out games in the last few weeks.
If you’re curious about the pull of simple games, look at a simple game called Akinator. It just asks questions about a person you’re thinking of. It has 100 MILLION downloads at Google Play. It’s making millions of dollars in ad revenue.
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Here’s the best part. Whether it’s audio, chat, games, or anything else you think of, these are not costly to implement. The old AI that got things rolling — ChatGPT 2.5 will handle almost all of this for you for less than pennies.
It takes some time, some thought, and some tinkering. Life is a barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland. Go have some fun.
“Enough wallowing. Get over it.”
Dads. I’m I right?