What's the most important question right now?
How do we use AI to be better, not just more efficient?
Rushing to implement the most obvious features and viewing AI primarily as a cost-cutting opportunity will only weaken media organisations in the ongoing struggle with big platforms. Just one, particularly ironic example: While media organisations are using large language models to more efficiently optimise their content for search, Google is busy implementing AI Overviews to send ever fewer people to news sites.
In recent years, news organisations have become much better at putting users and their needs at the centre of what they do. Let’s not backtrack and rigorously focus on applying AI where it serves our audiences – and thus strengthens our mission and business model.
That requires strategic leadership, but most importantly: a culture of curiosity and experimentation instead of fetishising or demonising AI.
What do you wish you'd known a year ago?
How much of a game changer Cursor is for people who like to code but aren’t great at it (👋). I started using it a couple of weeks ago, and it has made all the difference: Lots of ideas for little web apps that would have stayed somewhere at the back of my head are now out there on the web with a couple hours’ work.
What future are you looking forward to?
A future imagined by optimists, built by realists, and scrutinised by journalists. (Oh, and emissions-free, and run by women, for a change.)
