Monday 29th July: Inside WaPo’s first AI chatbot experiment

Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Esther – the last daily one from me personally!

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Earlier this month, The Washington Post debuted its first generative AI chatbot, Climate Answers. The chatbot pulls on years of reporting from the climate desk and was built in collaboration with the newsroom’s beat reporters.

I have to confess to still being sceptical about the long-term value of home chatbots for publishers. Perhaps the appeal is in pre-empting that change in consumer behaviour from search to chatbots, but will people really go to a single publisher to find answers like this? Depends how crap the rest of the internet gets, I guess.

Still, there are some interesting nuggets here in WaPo’s approach to AI and chatbots, including its success metrics. “It should lead to growth, it should lead to more engagement, it should lead to more habit building, but really, it’s about our customer and giving them more value for their money, giving them more reasons to get the right answer from us,” the Post’s CTO Vineet Khosla said.

Now the Olympics are under way, I’m curious how you all are keeping up with it! Gone are the days where viewers would be glued to linear TV – I spent Saturday evening frantically painting the fence in our garden before the next rain shower so ended up catching up with the opening ceremony highlights on various Instagram channels. But I’ll likely be dipping out of various live blogs over the next two weeks.

Having a product mindset means producing content based on a deeply understood knowledge of who the customer is, what they want, how they want it and why they want it. Publishers that have gone down this path appear to be doing very well, and it’s not difficult to understand why. writes James Evelegh. Everything they produce meets a clearly defined customer need and, unsurprisingly, those customers are prepared to pay for it.

I have to finish on a positive one, right! Here, Marcela Kunova has listed some new campaigns, courses and products that are worth highlighting, from spreading the word about journalism to early AI-powered audio journalism.

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