News Corp Using AI to Generate 3,000 Stories per Week

A worker disassembles a Christmas tree outside Fox News headquarters, in N.Y.C., on Dec. 8, 2021. (Richard Drew/AP Photo)

News Corp Australia CEO Michael Miller has revealed the media giant is actively using artificial intelligence to create 3,000 local stories per week for audiences.

In a speech to the World News Media Congress last month, the CEO said part of the company’s focus on local content to drive subscription also involved using AI to cover daily topics such as the weather, fuel prices, and traffic conditions.

“For some years now, we have used automation to update local fuel prices several times daily as well as daily court lists, traffic and weather, death, and funeral notices,” a spokesperson told The Guardian newspaper.

“I’d stress that all such information and decisions are overseen by working journalists from the Data Local team.”

Mr. Miller revealed that News Corp Australia’s focus in the immediate future was to focus on “hyperlocal” audiences to generate subscriptions and service 75 mastheads for small towns with less than 15,000 people in Australia.

“They are in progressive communities with active sporting, political, business, and tourism interests and lower social media engagement,” he said.

Google’s New AI News Tool

The presentation comes after The New York Times revealed Google had developed a new AI tool, Genesis, to assist newsrooms.

According to the report, the tool can absorb facts and write news feeds. Media executives from The Times newspaper, The Washington Post, and News Corp were treated to a demonstration of the program.

The shift of the news industry towards using AI has been gradual, with some companies taking a careful approach with human oversight and others delving headfirst into the technology.

Germany’s largest newspaper title, Bild, has embraced the technology with its publisher axing several hundred roles and replacing it with AI.

The company said it would “part ways with colleagues whose jobs will be replaced by AI and/or automated processes in the digital world, or who do not find themselves in this new line-up with their current skills,” according to an email obtained by German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine.

“Roles such as editors, print production journalists, proofreaders, photo editors, and assistants will no longer exist like they do today.”

In March, CEO and publisher Mathias Döpfner issued a stark warning to staff on the impact of AI.

“Artificial intelligence has the potential to make independent journalism better than it ever was—or simply replace it,” he said in an internal letter to employees.

“Understanding this change is essential to a publishing house’s future viability,” Döpfner added. “Only those who create the best original content will survive.”

Many Publishers Careful About AI

In contrast to Döpfner, the heads of U.S. publishers have been more careful about AI’s application.

Publishing giant Gannett and newswire service Reuters have said they would include AI in story production but only with human oversight.

“The desire to go fast was a mistake for some of the other news services,” said Renn Turiano, senior vice president and head of product at Gannett, in comments obtained by Reuters.

“We’re not making that mistake.”

While media mogul Barry Diller, who co-founded the Fox Broadcasting Company, warned that AI could wreak havoc on newsrooms.

“Unless publishers say, ‘You cannot do that until there is a structure in place for publishers to get paid.’ You will see another wave even more destructive,” he told the Sir Harry Evans Global Summit on Investigative Journalism.

Diller compared the impact of AI to that of online news on the traditional media industry, saying there was “enormous destruction” of newsrooms.