Premium journalism may see a renaissance in the Generative AI era

Could generative AI (GenAI) actually herald a renaissance in quality journalism? It may seem counterintuitive, but some of the news industry’s top leaders see a silver lining.

While there are fears that GenAI will flood the internet with low-quality content, these leaders believe the value of premium journalism and content will instead become even more apparent, returning the advantage to the reporter.

“More of a premium may be put into original, fact-based reporting,” said Nicholas Thompson, CEO at The Atlantic, during a panel at Web Summit in Lisbon in November. Christian Broughton, CEO at The Independent, shared that sentiment, predicting a “big shift back to news gathering instead of just reporting.”

“Create the complex stories that are hardest for LLMs [large language models] to create. If you’re doing something that is replicable by AI, you’ll be wiped out,” added Thompson.

It’s easy to see why original reporting and news gathering could gain back prominence after the surge of news aggregation and listicles in recent years. Large language models rely on huge amounts of data to power their responses. Often, these sources of truth come from the world’s top newsrooms. And, as voracious as AI is for new information, it takes real reporters to walk the beat, talk to people, investigate and write stories to add net new content to what already exists.

Companies like OpenAI have realized they need a pipeline to access the best of journalism and, with that in mind, have struck deals with several publishers, including TIME and The Atlantic, gaining access to enormous back catalogs. And potentially, content yet unwritten.

It’s not clear yet just how lucrative these deals are — sums reportedly range from $1 million per year to $250 million for multiyear deals. But unlike the focus on SEO-optimized content that has characterized digital publishing in recent years, the creation of deeply reported content may help news organizations attract more readers and advertisers with high-quality news as a differentiator.

Thompson urged news organizations to do deals with AI companies, adding that this way they can help shape AI products to bring in new readers while getting paid to train AI models.

However, some publishers, like the U.K.’s Reach, are more skeptical, with CEO Jim Mullen saying last year that he would like to avoid a repeat of the dependence publishers have had on Google and Meta for traffic in recent years.

For now, media owners have three choices, said Jessica Sibley, CEO at TIME: litigate, negotiate or do nothing. “Do nothing: It’s game over. Litigate: Some publishers are pursuing that path,” she said. “We are pursuing all ways we can keep TIME around for 100 more years. These companies need to be commercially viable, sustainable and profitable.”