Nine’s newsroom views AI technology as an enabler rather than a threat to journalism.
Nine’s publishing managing director Tory Maguire said that AI can help journalists become more efficient in certain tasks, such as researching reams of documents, but will never replace what journalists do.
“The reality for the big AI companies is that their products cannot do what we do,” she told B&T on the sidelines of a Nine Publishing breakfast briefing.
“They cannot walk into a bushfire ground. They cannot pick up the phone and convince 20 young women to tell their story about sexual assault at a hospitality group. They cannot taste test 20 different croissants and write a credible list of the best croissants in Sydney, or dig up information about a politician that is not in the public sphere.
“There is always going to be a place for journalism…AI cannot replace what journalists do.
“This industry needs to be really vigilant, and we all need to work together to make sure that we have the right regulatory landscape and the right commercial posture towards this issue.”
Will GenAI kill journalism?
Maguire was alluding to how large language machines, such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, scours and uses journalism to provide answers to questions without linking search queries back to the source.
This threatens to disrupt how people currently search for information on Google where a page of links is displayed rather than an answer.
Media companies have been grappling with the best way to tackle this issue. Media companies such as News Corp, the FT, Guardian, The Atlantic, Vox Media and others have signed deals with OpenAI that allow it to scrape their content to training its large language machine.
Others, such as the New York Times, hav fiercely resisted such overtures, while Nine, where Maguire works, is working out its own strategy.
“What we need to do is to protect our product when we produce it. And that’s a really tricky thing that the whole industry has got to solve,” she said.
Publications that are primarily subscription based, such as Nine’s metro mastheads and the AFR, have a captive audience and their readership is somewhat insulated from changes to Google’s algorithm and search behaviour.
This doesn’t mean that GenAI technology isn’t being embraced by Nine. Last year Nine released a set of five principles that would guide its use of AI technology. At the time the media groups said it would release a formal AI strategy in FY25.
Nine said it will “build, train and tune models in a closed Nine environment, ensuring the models and data are protected, secured and confidential”, and that it was open to licensing arrangements with an LLM platform.
Nine said that its people will continue to take responsibility for the work and content they produce irrespective of the role AI can play.
AI is more friend than foe
At the breakfast briefing, the Sydney Morning Herald’s chief reporter Jordan Baker said that AI is “getting better” at writing articles in her tone of voice, which is “slightly threatening”, but: “I just keep trying to argue that absolutely nothing is as good as the actual original person writing it.”
On the research front, however, AI is a massive time saver.
“You can upload a whole bunch of documents which would take you ages to go through… now you can say to AI, ‘find me anything in this tranche of documents, like books about blood’, and it can do that work for you.
“In terms of actually using it as an investigative tool, it’s got a lot of promise for us to save a lot of time.”
The Herald’s state political editor Alexandra Smith agreed, saying that GenAI technology can quickly pull together data and research.
“Maybe I’m just being a little bit Pollyanna, but I do think we’re still a long way before it even comes close to producing the work that I can produce. It works on the premise of putting together information that already exists, whereas my job is to give you information you didn’t know existed.”
Lisa Muxworthy, who recently joined Nine as head of growth content for its metropolitan mastheads, said she is excited about AI as an “assistive tool”.
“An example is its ability to turn audio to text and text to audio. It’s these tasks that can make a job easier for a journalist,” she said. “There is always going to be a human element to it; we’re using it to help us in our jobs, rather than to do our jobs.”
Maguire believes that GenAI technology can live alongside journalism rather than replace it. She uses the example of finance professionals who get market updates from tools that use AI technology but will also read the AFR for analysis about the markets.
“I can’t see a world in which people who work in corporate Australia don’t need the journalism of the AFR,” she said.
Earlier this week, Maguire told B&T she is optimistic about the future of journalism and Nine’s mastheads.
