The town crier used to announce public updates in ancient Greece. The Acta Diurna served as a daily bulletin board in ancient Rome. Humans have always been good at sharing news – provided there is a clear time and place to distribute it when others will be around.
But we now have a fundamental issue with how we deliver news because the modern individual expects it to come directly to their inbox or social media feed instead of seeking it out themselves. Waiting for an audience to come to you does not work in a time of AI.
The future of news and the definition of “newsroom” can and should change to match the technology of our times. Updating our understanding of these concepts will greatly improve how we reach citizens of our world, increase their level of knowledge, and perhaps shape future dialogue in a more constructive way.
Here are five ways news delivery is being or will be reinvented in the coming years under the influence of new technology.
1. Introduce the New Delivery Person
We no longer wake up to hear the newspaper hit our door and then open it to reach down, grab a bottle of milk, and pick up the morning edition. Those days are long gone.
News delivery of the future will be entirely virtual and the delivery person will be influencers who determine the segments we write or talk about. For example, imagine the most influential person in Des Moines, Iowa providing her followers (local citizens) with news every day through her Facebook feed. Multiple this by 10,000 cities and you get the idea. We can increase the importance of local news by embracing a new style of delivery person who will reach our audience and perhaps share in the financial aspects of that delivery process.
2. Create the New CNN
CNN was the first global news outlet to embrace satellite technology and one of the first to deliver news online. Radical at the time. What’s today’s radical?
It might look like building a distribution system of thousands of groups in countries worldwide dedicated to news within Telegram, WhatsApp, and other message platforms. It could also look like developing a news model dedicated to delivery of news to gaming platforms only. Both message platforms and gaming reach more than three billion people worldwide. Where are the media entrepreneurs to build this? Who is the next Ted Turner?
3. Align News and Need
AI has the capability to deliver the headlines in rapid sequence and then go deep on the stories we are most interested in. Journalists can take their column and turn it into a pictograph or a video to further illustrate key points. The entire newspaper or magazine could be delivered in any language simultaneously in any city or town worldwide.
Existing AI technology allows us to deliver news in our individual preferred format in a language that we fully understand. Fully embracing what AI and advanced translation services can provide will only help build news in a manner that can be accessed easily by everyone.
4. Change the News Experience
Inflection AI applied to a newspaper or magazine allows us to ask any question and get an answer based on what is in today’s issue plus relevant points from all prior issues. You can now have an actual conversation with your favorite outlet, which personalizes your experience and provides you with the perspective you are seeking.
News outlets that embrace this capability will come to remember each reader’s questions, so that your experience becomes increasingly personalized. Your favorite news channel has actual memory of what you care about thanks to AI. These outlets will become preferred destinations since their knowledge is deep, easy to access, and reliably answers our questions.
5. Embrace AI Continually
Generative AI will continue to surprise us for many years. News leaders of tomorrow will realize this and continue to integrate the latest AI technologies to improve their experience. They will experiment with customized search engines for readers (imagine one on SEC football), let readers turn articles into visual pictographs so it can be easily explained to children, or enable us to design the news front page that we prefer.
The willingness to experiment will lead to the breakthroughs we cannot imagine today. The next group of Ted Turners are out there. We just don’t know their names yet.