The Poison Metric That May Kill Your Newsroom: Podcast

Paul Gewurz, the host of “Small Press, Big Ideas” and I discussed how data & analytics are leading news publishers to ruin their relationship(s) to their audience,

Podcast available on Apple

Podcast on Spotify

A sample, where we discuss where so many organizations are going wrong with AI

… and what we might be able to do differently – and better

But where I think that where I think there’s an opportunity is where we can

start using AI not to just do the things that solve the problem of how can I get

a VC to write me a check with nine zeros on it.

Let’s figure out how do I use the AI in a way that solves the problem with

my community? How do I use the AI to figure out how to or my problems? How do I use the AI to figure out how to get

more people from being driveby readers into being subscribers or members or donors? Can we start using the AI to c

build customized sales funnels? Can I start using the AI to send out more customized emails in the email

newsletter with, hey, look, here are the things that are actually relevant to you. here are the things that’ll

actually that you don’t usually pay attention to, but we really think that you should take a look at this thing.

You know, start using AI to solve the problems inherent in the local news

space rather than just, hey, look, how can I use the AI to shave an hour off of

my reporter writing the story? That’s still legit in some cases. You can use

the AI to summarize, you know, a 9-hour meeting and tell you certain things. Oh god, I hope there isn’t a 9-hour city

council meeting, but who knows? 5 hour, 4 hour, 3 hour, whatever, however many hours it is. Summarize it. Give me a

precis of it. What happened there? And and uh then have the reporter follow up

on these things. That’s cool. That’s a good use of AI helping, you know, with

content generation in a way where it isn’t replacing the human. It’s augmenting the human.

Yeah, we both have really nice audio setups, because we both have pretty good voices. Also, Paul is a great interviewer, and let me go off at length about some of my favorite subjects.