As the global technology landscape continues to evolve, this summit serves as a crucial platform for media leaders to explore AI’s latest advancements, trends, and applications in the news media business. The event saw AI experts from companies such as The Quint, The Hindu, India Today, Hindustan Times, The Morning Context, Engadget, and Newslaundry.

Rajeev Batra, Chief Information Officer, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd., publisher of The Times of India, delivered the opening keynote on Day 1 of the summit

Batra spoke about BCCL’s AI initiative, BEANS, a home-grown platform that offers a range of AI-driven solutions for editorial functionalities, including generation, editing, rewriting, autocompletion, research, transcription, translation, and data analysis.

“AI should only assist and complement the story and writing,” he said, adding a word of caution regarding data security, encryption, and access control. 

“These measures are crucial for the teams developing AI platforms. It is essential to avoid training on data that could negatively impact the language models. Securing developmental practices in newsrooms is fundamental. Ensure that authorisation checks and balances are in place, and maintain continuous monitoring until your LLM is fully developed,” he noted.

Day 1 ended with a panel discussion on navigating AI in the newsroom, moderated by Krishna Prasad, media commentator and journalist. 

Chitranshu Tewari, Director of Product and Revenue at Newslaundry, said that newsrooms are right to be sceptical of AI and GenAI, or any emergent technology, for that matter. “Eventually, AI is a tool. Whether we like it or not, it exists, and it’s up to the industry to optimise it to meet journalistic goals,” he said.

Sannuta Raghu, Lead, AI working group-News & Journalism at Scroll Media India, addressed the strengths and weaknesses of the technology at Scroll. “Its strength is in solving a resource problem for small newsrooms and levelling the playing field for us to try and be in the same zone as a mid-sized publisher,” she said, adding, “On the other hand, working with AI is like training a very enthusiastic intern. It doesn’t have any context of institutional knowledge, which will result in mistakes, and that’s the process journalists need to navigate.”

From a fundamental level of journalism training, we have technology that, rather than letting you improve, takes over from you. How does a cub journalist then enhance their skills? That’s an essential problem right now and will only increase in magnitude,” said Prince Thomas, Managing Editor of The Morning Context.

Earlier in the day, the winners from India at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Awards Worldwide 2024, ‘The Hindu Group’ for Best in Audience Engagement, and ‘Newslaundry’ for Best Innovative Digital Product were honoured on stage.

The second day of the summit started with a keynote address by Parankusha S, Director, E&Y, who spoke about the critical developments in AI and how technology is shaping the news industry. 

He discussed a few fundamentals of AI: “The AI revolution started in 2012. We entered an age of deep learning, enabling us to build AI systems that had multiple functionalities…by leveraging your own private data and building products and solutions on top of it. The journalism industry is sitting on a wealth of such data. When we talk of GenAI and its impact on the industry, we need to base our strategies on sustainability,” he said.

Day 2 also discussed using AI for revenue generation, audience engagement and ethical content generation. Personalisation is propelling Amar Ujala’s subscription goals. These efforts have yielded a 150 per cent increase in CTR, a 25 per cent increase in reading time, twice the number of active paid subscribers, and a 1.35x increase in revenue for the brand, noted Vikas Shekhawat, AGM, Products, Amarujala.com.

Day 2 ended with a panel discussion on navigating AI in the newsroom. The panellists included L V Navaneeth (CEO-The Hindu Group), Deepak Saluja (Chief Executive Officer, Metropolitan Media Company Limited), Mayura Shreyams Kumar (Director – Digital Business | Mathrubhumi Printing and Publishing co. Ltd), and Harsha Mathew (Chief Resident Editor & Director, Malayala Manorama Co Ltd). The panel was chaired by Ritu Kapur (Co-Founder and CEO, The Quint, India).

LV Navaneeth said that The Hindu newsroom uses AI to inform them of propensity models, dynamic paywalls and pricing. 

“We have tried to integrate every content solution into the CMS itself. Similarly, we have also tried to integrate AI solutions to enhance advertising and reader revenue into our subscription management system,” he said, adding, “One of the critical things is to get your purchase decisions on these large pieces of software right. As long as you can build solutions within those architectures, it is far easier to operate than building several isolated solutions.”

“When it comes to pace, this is not the first revolutionary change we will be chasing. We must try our best to make AI an inclusive change, not a replacement one. Do proper research on the functionalities you want to bring this technology into. Do you want this tech to enable your decision-making or have it as the decision-maker,“ said Shreyams Kumar on AI in the Mathrubhumi newsroom.

Saluja said vision and strategy are critical for dealing with AI. Metropolitan Media Company Limited is a part of the Times Group. “For a vernacular language business such as ours, the models still need to be ready for us to absorb it immediately. “However, our parent group is consistently experimenting and dabbling with AI,“ he said.

“We’re using AI for Classifieds and In Memoriam ads for Malayala Manorama. That said, monetising efforts with AI are still a work in progress. Currently, we are concentrating on improving the efficiency and making our users more acquainted with the technology,“ Mathew responded to Kapur’s question about the sustainability of AI in journalism.

The complete details of the programme are available at wan-ifra.org. A photo gallery of the event is available here. More takeaways from the summit can be found on Twitter with the hashtag #AIS24. For a calendar of upcoming WAN-IFRA events, please visit events.wan-ifra.org.

Contact – Inquiries

Please contact: Magdoom Mohamed, Managing Director, WAN-IFRA South Asia, Chennai, India, magdoom.mohamed@wan-ifra.org, or Thai Anban, Business Development Manager, WAN-IFRA South Asia, Chennai, India, thai.anban@wan-ifra.org.

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