Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Peter.
Pugpig is the publishing platform that powers the world’s leading media brands. Get in touch if you’d like to arrange a demo or come and say hello at the INMA World Congress in New York!
Publishers join podcast industry consortium set up by Acast
The Guardian, Times, Economist, Financial Times and Tortoise have taken podcasting “really seriously”, according Acast’s partnerships manager Alex Fuller. Their reward for investing in audio teams and strategies is to have been invited to join the UK’s first Publishers in Podcasting consortium, coordinated by Acast to share best practice, expertise and experience.
We had a conversation about this very idea at our recent Publisher’s Podcast Forum. The discussion was sparked by frustration at the lack of consistent traffic metrics and the solution suggested was an industry group that could work with platforms to help agree standards and best practice.
While we welcome this move, we really hope that it isn’t all about working with Acast. Equally, we hope it doesn’t just focused on the podcasting problems of bigger publishers. While all the publishers on that list are Publisher Podcast Award winners, we also see smaller publishers producing outstanding work. Their experience and expertise will be invaluable in developing best practice for the entire industry.
Twitter Finally Agrees On Something: Hating Musk’s New CEO
This has to be good news, right? Anyone replacing Elmo at the helm of Twitter would be a step up, but a seasoned advertising veteran sounds good. Linda Yaccarino is coming aboard with expertise in brand safety and commercial partnerships, and with more than 10 years as chairman of global advertising at NBCUniversal, she’s got real corporate media chops. Of course Twitter already hates her (left and right), but that’s exactly why I hope she 100% succeeds.
Google’s AI-powered search engine is very nearly almost here
At its annual I/O conference last week, Alphabet unveiled a new version of Google search that incorporates generative AI. The tech giant is hoping to catch up with it new search rival Microsoft, which launched its GPT-powered Bing earlier this year in an upset to Google’s search dominance. I’m not sure that Google is about to tear up publishing’s business model as Chris Stone said on LinkedIn last week, but we’re definitely going to see a shake up of the search-based content discovery.
AI at Reuters: ‘Be skeptical and verify’
There are some interesting articles beginning to appear about organisations trying to reinforce the guardrails around their AI usage. This piece says Reuters is mandating “rigorous oversight by newsroom editors” with a mantra of ‘Be skeptical and verify’. Diginomica goes further, drawing a ‘firm line in the sand’ when it comes to the use of generative AI in content creation: “We won’t be publishing any hallucinations from LLMs, because we will not be using them to write our content.”
More from Media Voices
Read: What does practical AI look like for local media?
Some local media organisations have been benefiting from AI for years. I explore what it looks like in practice in this extract from our new report, Practical AI for Local Media.
Listen: Practical AI – Lessons from local media
Our special Practical AI podcast documentary explores how local media organisations have got started with AI projects, the benefits they’re seeing, the challenges they’ve faced and what advice they would give to other publishers looking to get into AI. This episode and our corresponding report have been made possible with the support of United Robots.
