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The Indy Innovates With AI
00:52:47
The best thing publishers can do with generative AI is experiment with it. If journalists don’t decide the best use of AI in journalism, then others will decide for them, says Christian Broughton, CEO of The Independent.
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- [00:00]
Christian Brutten
Foreign.
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Alison Schiff
Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the.
- [00:15]
Christian Brutten
Podcast devoted to examining the issues and.
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Alison Schiff
Trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you. I'm Alison Schiff, and thanks for spending a little of your precious time listening to this podcast or watching the video version. Our guest this week is Christian Brutten, CEO of the Independent, where he's spent most of his career going from the longest serving T boy, that's his joke. To journalist to CEO of the whole shebang. We'll talk about how the Independent is growing despite a very challenging environment for publishers. And we'll get into the Independent's AI strategy, which is all about experimentation and not shying away from a new technology that's reshaping the business of journalism, whether we want it or not. And Christian makes the case for why we want it. But first, it's time for you to add programmatic IO New York to your calendar. It's taking place in NYC on September 29th and 30th, and if you buy your tickets now, you can save $900. Those great savings will only be available until June 27th. It's your last chance to save mega bucks on your pass to what's going to be a great event. So what are you waiting for? Hey, Christian, welcome to the video podcast.
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Christian Brutten
Hey, Alison, how are you doing?
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Alison Schiff
I'm well. And I'd love to start out by asking you my favorite question, which is to share something about yourself that not a lot of other people already know about you and that is not easily discoverable by Googling your name.
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Christian Brutten
Yeah. So something you can't really find out by Googling me is how I ended up getting to the Independent, which was that I started off as like the world's longest serving tea boy or coffee fetcher, I suppose you might say. But no, I turned up here on an unpaid internship in the 90s, and I opened Post and I did lots of photocopying when that was a thing that no one ever seems to do that anymore. And I did that. And, you know, it was a. It was a thing I did while I was a student, while I was studying. And it was a lot more interesting than bar work or the other random job that I did, which was ski instruction without any snow. So I was also the world's least glamorous ski instructor who never managed to do that job actually, where people should be skiing and only ever did it on those horrible fake slopes. So there you go.
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Alison Schiff
But you slalomed right into journalism.
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Christian Brutten
I did slalom right into journalism, exactly. And I turned up here 90 something. I won't say. Don't know what year would have been, but it would have been turning 96 or something, 97, something like that. And there was this room. I didn't necessarily know I wanted to be a journalist. I didn't really know that I was hugely passionate about journalism at that point. I would have been like 19 years old or something. And it sounded really interesting when I heard that people were really short staffed, so could anybody come along and help out for summer? And it was just this room full of incredibly interesting people. Just fascinating, amazing, amazing people. They all knew stuff that no one else knew. And you'd be having a conversation with someone and a week later the thing they said was gonna happen would happen. And that could be in kind of politics or music or sport or it was just such a buzz. And I just fell in love with the people and the whole atmosphere of the room. And I think that's still what does it for me now, actually.
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Alison Schiff
I mean, I didn't slalom my way into journalism, but I also didn't know that I wanted to be a journalist. I just knew that I liked reading and writing and I fell into it because I couldn't imagine what other job I could have that would let me.
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Christian Brutten
So it was either novelist or journalist.
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Alison Schiff
Was it a novelist or a journalist? I actually went to journalism school in Ireland in Dublin, Dublin Institute of Technology. And I went there because I wanted to live abroad, not because I think one needs to study journalism. I don't think it's necessary to have a degree in journalism. It feels like a very on the job kind of a thing. You, you make the tea, you observe the people and then you put your hands on the keyboard, right?
- [04:43]
Christian Brutten
Yeah. The founding editor of the Independent, Andreas Whitham Smith, when he found out that story, he said to me, that's great, he said, because journalism is a trade, not a profession. It's something that you learn by doing it and by doing it and by doing it and getting better. And I think he felt, and I sometimes wonder whether the very prescriptive routes into journalism, the colleges and that, whether they, you know, you need, as a journalist, you've got to be passionate about the world and about life and finding, finding out, find out things that, you know, the best advice I was given when I was starting out was find out what you know that they don't. That's your break into journalism. And how you get to that point is. And, you know, the writing thing is wonderful. But then here we are being journalist or you're Being journalist in this setup. And we're not writing at all. We're podcasting, and it's about the subject we're discussing. It's about how interesting we can make this. It's a huge amount of what we do now. We're in our podcast studio here in London. As I was saying, just as we were coming live on the podcast, we've got the podcast studios in New York now, where we record as well. That's a massive part of what we do. We've got two big launches this year, which one is Independent Studios, which is this, and one is Bulletin, which is a whole new news brand. So journalism is changing fast, and it's not all about the kind of novelistic writing, although that's obviously still important.
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Alison Schiff
That is true for anyone who is watching and not just listening to the audio version of this podcast. This is my podcast studio. It is also my bedroom.
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Christian Brutten
Authentic. Very authentic.
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Alison Schiff
Very authentic. Welcome to my bedroom. I want to talk a little bit about your trajectory because it's very interesting to me that you went from being on the editorial side. First you were the longest running T boy, I guess, and then you were doing the editorial thing, and then you became, you know, et cetera, et cetera, some stuff in between the CEO. So it's not a trajectory that you see a lot, from writer all the way to the CEO and to spend pretty much all of your career at one publication. And I wonder how your background in the trenches maybe gives you a different perspective on the journalism business and monetization, like really understanding the value of the product, which is what your journalists make, because you were there making the journalism. And of course the monetization is important.
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Christian Brutten
But.
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Alison Schiff
But I think sometimes there are people in business roles that are thinking more about the monetization than about making an excellent product. And if you don't make an excellent product, you don't have eventually something to monetize.
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Christian Brutten
Right. So I always say we need journalism that empowers the business, and we need a business that empowers the journalism. So you're right. I was a journalist for most of my career, and most of that career was spent at the Independent and moves around all kinds of different desks, around sport, around features, around news, around comment, around different places doing different things. And yeah, it teaches you a great respect for the journalists, those people out there who go out and get scoops, who go out and find stuff that no one else knows, whether they're the foreign correspondents or the political reports or their health reporters or whatever. They're doing. It's really tough. It's really hard. Some people are just sensationally good at it. So there are skills in there that you just can't teach. And we base our business around trust because of those people and because of what they do. The independent is called the independent because we back our journalists. We don't have a doctrine, we don't have an ideology here we take an independent view and that view starts with those people. So understanding, you know, living their life, living walking in their shoes, understanding the pressures on their side of the business and what really makes what they do special is critical to the business because it brings us trust. So we, you can look at a business like a news business and you can just reduce it to numbers. You can say, here's its reach, here's its engagement, here's its whatever, repeat, visit, yada yada videos. But if they're not trusted, you're not really getting buy in. And if you don't get buy in, then where's that business going to go? You know, when we, I think you see it in the independent really clearly on things like E Commerce. So we do, we've got a huge E Commerce set up here. We've been doing kind of shopping reviews, product reviews, all kinds of things for many, many years. We got out early in that, in that effort. And if you're really going to trust us for our news, you're going to trust us for our product reviews as well. But it's, you're not going to click through to buy, you're not going to take our word for it unless you trust the place you're arriving to. So trust is everything. And I think that's what it gave me. I do think it's also really important. And you know, it's not, it's not, it's not unique to go from editorial to the business side of things by any means. And I think the people that do so also have to have high regard for the skills and the, you know, what the commercial teams bring, what the data teams bring, all that stuff. It's a great, there's a wonderful picture that made me very happy last night. We won humble brag. I'm going to drop in that we won the AOP Publisher of the Year last night.
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Alison Schiff
Congratulations.
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Christian Brutten
The kind of grand Prix on that. Thank you very much. And it just made me really happy to see the picture of everyone on stage. There are all these pictures of other people winning awards and they were kind of doing the somber kind of here's me standing with my Award. And then I got sent this picture of the independent team up there. It was wonderful. It was kind of commercial, it was data, it was our off platform teams, our licensing teams, it was our editorial teams. And they're like, yeah, they were kind of really going for it on stage because it's happy and they're working together. So I think one of the absolute key things that I've tried to create is to bring everyone in so that everyone understands what they do. Because if you're a reporter and you don't really understand how that feeds into the business, you can't contribute as well as if you understand that. And it's not that complicated. I mean, everyone's a smart person. You know, the commercial people understand, the journalists have huge respect for it. And the journalists understand, if you can get the, you know, the journalists also to understand what the commercial data dev, all the other parts of the business are doing, you get a wonderful, you get wonderful growth.
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Alison Schiff
But let's talk about the how, because growth is, it's difficult in this market. I think a lot of publishers are struggling. So what is your approach to monetization or the independence approach to monetization? And why is it, why is it working? Because like you said, everyone's pretty smart, right? I mean, I think everyone's brain can, you know, hop to E commerce or to affiliate or you know, understand like how they should maybe use AI so that it doesn't, you know, completely vitiate their business. Right? So how are you growing when the market is almost primed to suck value out of publishers at this point?
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Christian Brutten
So yeah, our growth hacks. What have we got? Right. Well, thank you for saying we are getting stuff, right? The results are there. Over the past five years, we've doubled revenue, doubled profit, doubled the investment into editorial. So we're doing it by building that journalistic product too. And I think there are two things that are very important there. One is to never forget what you're all about. Never forget the mission and purpose of the independent. It is about that independent view. It is about that independent journalism. And that has to be front and center when we think of new products, when we think of new business lines. But equally, you have to innovate. So you have to have the stuff that's eternally there. That doesn't change the principles, the independence of what we do. But we're really getting a big reputation now for relentlessly innovating to change it and change it and change it again. We're in our 10th year now, actually, since we stopped Printing. So in this Easter coming up will be our 10th anniversary of being fully digital. And I think that changes that we're doing when digital rose. Exactly. And that was a blast. That period was very rewarding. So 2016, Easter 2016, we were suddenly paperless. And it was a great test moment. We were the first big one to go fully digital. And I'm amazed that others haven't followed suit, because the focus, it gives you, the real, you know, you're not having. There's no brain, brain power in the building anymore, working out delivery trucks and paper costs and ink costs. And someone said to me, I won't claim this line is my own, but it's right that print is like manufacturing and digital is like a service industry. You just see what your users want and you can provide it to them in a very slick way. So the pace of change, the innovation, the trials you can do are exhilarating. So those years where we were, well, we are just growing, growing in audience and revenue. It's. It's good to get on a roll with that stuff. But it comes down to the innovation. And there are two innovative projects that we're pushing out this year that I think actually each one of them in isolation would have the same power and potential to be as big as that choice to go fully digital. So one of those is Bulletin, which is a new news brand that we've launched. So Bulletin News, it is very heavily leveraging some proprietary AI tools we've got. We've built those in collaboration with the Gemini team at Google. They are. There are tools now to use. And the important thing is we put AI into the hands of the journalists to say, how would you do it? So we. This goes back to a time when I was being. I was being sent a lot of emails from people saying, hey, we've got these AI tools that you should put into a newsroom or change your business. So I was like, hey, this sounds amazing. Let's give it to the. Let's give it to people and see what they think. And we had a hack day and every department of the building of the organization was represented at this hack day. And by and large, they kind of hated all the tools I had given them to use. So it didn't really go to the scripts. And I was chatting to. We had a couple of people from Gemini had come along and I said, oh, how did that go for you? It wasn't really the day I thought it was really interesting, but it wasn't the day I was expecting. And they loved it because they were just getting, you know, we quickly worked out on that day that let's not stick to the program which was to run through these tools. Let's think about what would we, if we could do anything with AI is this all powerful thing, what do we actually want it to do? What do we think serves journalism better? What do we think serves audiences better? What actually solves the real problems we have, not the problems that someone's put in their sales pitch, because that's the thing their product does. So we designed it around our own workflows, our own pressure points, what our audience wants, and we were rolling it out. Where do we use this stuff? And the core thing that we thought was fantastic was it solved a mission that we've been on for about 10 years, which is we think, we've always thought there's a gap in the market to serve really high quality, trusted, truly independent journalism for really busy people. So, you know, I don't know how much time you had this morning. It's very early where you are. I don't know whether you've had, whether you got up incredibly early to read all the really long articles you could lay your hands on to truly understand the world, but that did not happen this morning. It did not. Right. Okay. Well, it's a little later in the day here and I have not had those hours in my day either. But we always assume that the, the long articles are the best ones. And often they are. They don't have to be. So our bulletin engine, one of the things it does is it creates really tight summaries, bullet point summaries of whatever news story we decide to put in it. And it does a much better job. We've tried to do this with humans before and it's very time consuming. It's really hard to do it then. If you've ever had one of those jobs where you're trying to cut huge copy into ideal. No. Than using brief pages. Right? And it takes so long to do it, doesn't it? You think, oh, have I got this right? And then you think I've left out. Have I done. Have I made the right decision? And the engine that we built is brilliant at it. It's only a tool. It's all overseen by humans. So we have a human desk. This created employment. We hired new people, we created jobs by using AI important. And we have this output now in this new brand called. Which is Bulletin News. There's an app launching in, I want to say a month or we're just underway with that and it gives people the option of. It's that kind of very grazable ux. You'll get that kind of personalization so you can tell it what you want. And at any point, if you want to stop and go deeper, you can hit the link, you can get a podcast, you can get a video piece, you can get the. The original article that we used to summarize into the, into the. Into the short version. And we can see people heavily interacting this thing, they like it. So we've got to hear. So we're going to be rolling that out. So that's one piece of innovation. I think that thing could really blow up. The other one is independent studio as referenced. I'm in one of them and we're doing a lot of podcasting, a lot of kind of YouTube video, we're making a lot of documentaries. So it's to lay out the kind of. In jargon terms it is. We're creating valuable IP talent led in lucrative verticals. So you take it for.
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Alison Schiff
That was the bulletin.
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Christian Brutten
That was the bulletin version. There you go. Done. Yeah. So it's. Whether it's entertainment or food and drink or soccer or current affairs, that's your vertical. You get those kind of big personality journalists that are going to attract a following and they drive it. We've got a soccer analysis channel that's on YouTube, ACFC, which is the Adam Cleary football channel. And it's getting the same kind of engage. It's getting like best in class engagement. Mr. Beast shared his engagement scores ages ago on X, I think it was. And the team were very excited when it's like, hey, look. It's like the audience retention after 30 seconds is like 75% plus. We're in Mr. Beast territory. So it's really exciting to see that and it just takes off. So I think studio and bulletin, underpinned by this wonderful thing in the middle, which is the independent, is a really exciting shape of a business for the future. So that's how we're kind of clinging onto who we are and what we're really all about, while also embracing innovation everywhere we can.
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Alison Schiff
And as you're embracing innovation, are you also in lockstep thinking about how to make money from it? Because. Oh, sure did do that.
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Christian Brutten
Of course, of course, absolutely.
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Alison Schiff
So.
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Christian Brutten
So we've never had that moment which a lot of the kind of digi only media companies had where suddenly kind of riches flow into the business. So we're a very lean, very agile how we use cash to develop products and then Back them. We have to be very nimble in that way. Well, you know, it's all cash flow manager. If you don't manage the cash flow, you haven't got that future. So it has to monetize. It has to be good for. It has to fundamentally be great for its audience. Because if there are. There are some kind of hacky revenue things that people have done over the years that come and go, and the reason they go is because they were probably based on things that aren't truly great for the audience, you're not really serving that audience. So if you don't believe in your new content offering, if you don't believe. I hate the word content, let's call it journalism, shall we? If you don't believe in the journalism.
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Alison Schiff
The word content, too. I was just talking about this with somebody. I had the CRO of Puck on this podcast.
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Christian Brutten
Yeah.
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Alison Schiff
The episode right before this. And I said, I didn't like the word content. I liked stories. I like journalism. And she said, no, I like content because we do have a product to sell that is our product. Like, okay, that's. That's a point of view, but I'm with you. I. I don't really like.
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Christian Brutten
Journalism can be your product too. Right. And I, you know, it's a bit.
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Alison Schiff
Of a thing, right? Like, it's something you manufacture. I'm like, no, it's. It's more than that.
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Christian Brutten
There's a little bit of passion and soul in there, too, isn't there, surely? But, you know, let's take the example of. Of Adam's YouTube channel. It's. He is. Are great. He's just got this kind of entertainment gene. So he's great. He's not like me on a podcast. He's like, there, and he's performing. He does it in the room next door to this one. But he's kind of standing on his feet and he's got this fantastic presentation. But what makes it really work is his knowledge. So, you know, I was a sports editor for people who comment on how good a sports editor they think I was, no doubt the people who worked there with me at the time, but we had some fun back then, and we were doing a lot of analysis of how teams were playing. Right. And Adam's knowledge of that stuff is second to none. And the kind of video graphics he uses to explain that is a really good medium for telling people about the world. And that's the core mission of journalism. Right? So, yeah, it's. It's very different. It's not the printed page. And it's not lots and lots of words trying to describe how this team's set up, but if you can show someone and demonstrate it, you're doing something actually, which is the mission of journalism, which is to explain, is to take the world and complicated things and to explain it. And that's what's fun. Learning is like, the learning side of what we do is really fun. This podcast, I think this set is set up for the season sessions podcast, by the look of it. And that is one of the podcasts that we do, where there are life stories in there that are incredibly revealing and amazing to relate to. And it's like the features journalism. I see a lot of what we were trying to do with the features journalism back then, but having people on a screen and actually listening to their conversation is really. You can unpack a lot that way. So I think you have to think about it is journalism, because by doing so, you think about the best way of actually conveying the purpose of that content. So if it's a, you know, if it's a podcast about the movies we love, then you've got to have the visual layer to it. If it's a, you know, a soccer analysis channel, you've got to see, you know, with the little counters showing where everyone stood, and you've got to kind of pull apart the video. If it's a. If someone's telling you their life story, you want to hear their voice. It's really powerful to hear their voice, not just read the words. Now, the written word is powerful, too. Of course it is, but we have new tools now, so we should use them.
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Alison Schiff
That's a good place for us to take a quick break. And when we're back, we're going to talk a lot more about AI. There's a ton more to say, and we'll just see where it goes. So stick with us.
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Christian Brutten
Great.
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Alison Schiff
All right, we're back, and I want to. I want to take us back to bulletin those AI generated summaries that we were talking about during the first half. There's a big challenge that publishers have now. They've always been really reliant on referral traffic, and generative AI search is changing that game completely. I'm curious if this new news service is driving traffic for you. You were saying that some people do click in, but you might also be training people for a behavior that is more about consuming little quick hits and being comforted that there is a link they could click, but then not actually clicking it. Because as we've established they are very busy people.
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Christian Brutten
Yeah, actually that was one of the things that made me happiest about the launch actually, is in the UX of Bulletins. So you get the bullet points and then underneath it there's a link back to the original, the long form version of that article. That little card, that little unit has got the one of the highest interaction rates with any of our research units across our real estate. So sure, you don't want to do it on every article, but people are hitting something for a few swipes or for a few clicks that they want to go and read. So it's wonderful to see. I guess Bulletin is, you know, it's kind of an offshoot of the Independent. It couldn't exist without the Independent and it's paying back into the Independent that way. So there's great referral going on between people on the Independent inter Bulletin and from people on Bulletin into the Independent. So it kind of creates a very complementary ecosystem. And I think, look, I think you have to kind of remember human behavior in this and what life is like. Like you can get very dry about it and you kind of end up. I end up staring at grids of numbers for an awful long time trying to work out exactly what's going on here. Anything. Is that surprising? Well, no, because sometimes, sometimes I do want to read long and sometimes I just don't have time to. So it's just a natural thing. So I think we're seeing that balance. But it's, it's been a bigger hit than we thought. It's been a really big hit. People are consuming the short form.
- [27:21]
Alison Schiff
I haven't thought of it as a kind of closed loop system because it's using AI based off of Gemini to summarize your existing stories. People click into that and it's separate from search. So let's talk about search for a second. There have been so many changes to how search operates and Google sometimes just does what it does and almost like, I don't know, some kind of document found in a cave in, you know, Egypt. You know, you have to get the archaeologists out and then you have to interpret it, like, what does it mean? Does Google want us to do? It becomes very challenging and very confusing even for SEO experts. But what are you guys seeing in terms of referral traffic from search just in general over the past few years? Because sometimes those changes feel inscrutable and also because of the rise of generative AI search.
- [28:21]
Christian Brutten
Yeah. So I was having a conversation with Chloe Hubbard, who's our UK Editor on this very subject. I think it was Monday and I'd had a long conversations with the data team and the SEO team, the audience team. So I wanted to hear about it from the editor's perspective. And she said, you know, and by the way, Chloe, when I was editor, she was, you know, my right hand during that process. So we go way back. And she said to me, you know, we've seen turbulence, haven't we seen. She likes to remind me of the fact that when Facebook kind of went away, she remembers the exact date because apparently I was on holiday, I was on vacation. And she says, yeah, thanks for that one. So she always likes to drop that little fact in.
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Alison Schiff
Can I just.
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Christian Brutten
As a quick sidebar to deal with that.
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Alison Schiff
I was not in the office when Google, this was big news for Ad Exchanger, announced that they were going to delay their planned deadline for the deprecation of third party cookies. This was like one of the biggest stories, I guess of 2022. And I happened to be out that day. So.
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Christian Brutten
And I also, for the other thousand times that is true cookies. And what was happening next was the top of everyone's.
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Alison Schiff
I was also on vacation.
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Christian Brutten
We had a lot of news on.
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Alison Schiff
Cookies that the amount of news stories I've written on cookies, I innumerable, I could not count them. They are the stars in the sky. But I was also not working the day that the verdict came down in the Google Ad tech antitrust trial. I was in Florida visiting my mother and I happened to get a text from a friend that said, oh, that's crazy about the verdict. I'm like, what? Like, immediately I went to my computer, I'm like, well, I'm working this morning and like wrote a story and then I went to the pool, which was really nice. But I managed to be out of the office on two incredibly important ad tech news days. But continue. I, I digress.
- [30:27]
Christian Brutten
So I was asking, I was just asking Chloe for her, her, her observations, you know, what's working, what's been, what's been hit, what's been, you know, what's going on. She said, you know, she said it feels, it feels there's a similarity between other things that have happened, which is when you've got a story or you've put in really great work, you've really done the journalism on it. It's a story that people really care about. That stuff's going to break through. It broke through on Facebook, it broke through on when Discover came out, it broke through when top stories came out. And it's it's still great. Journalism gets cut through. And she also said to me other things. She said, can we credit humans with some. Can we give them some respect and credit, please, in this. In that not everyone's going to want a monolithic AI chatbot experience for their news. And I think it reminds me a lot that one of the things I used to like about social, I was editor in those years. I was online editor from 2012. And then when we closed the paper in 2016, obviously it was all digital, so there was editor. And then I stopped doing that about five years ago. So when I was editor, it was really the kind of. There were big years for social growth. What I used to like about it was if you sold that story well, you could really pack a punch with exclusive stuff, things that people weren't looking for. So there's a pull and a push, right? So search is like pull. You go onto a search engineer and you look for it and you pull back the answer. And push is when we're, you know, we're sending the story out there, you know, so you may not know to look for rscoop, because you know what, it's a world exclusive and you had no idea it was coming. So you don't wake up that morning thinking, oh, tell me about this story. So you're not going to write that into a search field. You want to know about it. If your journalism is well known enough and if you stand for something and people understand the purpose of your brand and you're really adept at using all the levers you can, all the platforms you can to deliver your journalism, you've got to back yourself to be able to. And that's what Chloe was saying to me. She was like, ah, you know, I think people are going to want to see what we have to say today. And I think there's some sense in that. I really do.
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Alison Schiff
What do you think though, about the different publishers now that are suing the LLM providers for scraping? There are a few different lawsuits going on.
- [33:10]
Christian Brutten
Yeah, many. And obviously, as you referenced, we just had all the lawsuits with Google. There's a lot of that happening. There's a lot of power shifting happening, isn't there? I do think it dominates a lot of headlines. Checks and lawsuits dominate a lot of headlines when you look at the publishers. Right. And I think, you know, Richard Gingris, who's just stepped down as the kind of, for many years, the, the lead kind of thinker about news in Google, on his way out the door, I read an interview from him. And I really respect Richard, and he said just in passing, and I don't think it is looking to be flippant or antagonistic with this comment. I don't want to take him out of context here, but he just mentioned getting a check isn't the future business strategy for all of journalism. Right. We can't just be, you know, dependent upon that. And we've seen before where platforms have given payments to regular payments to publishers, and then they've stopped. So I think what's really important and what gets overlooked is how you're using that technology. So if I look at our approach with Bulletin, our use of AI this year is going to bring us in more revenue than we would have got from a check. Now, we didn't deny, we didn't turn down a check. We've done some deals with some AI companies, sure, we don't have a big arrangement with OpenAI like some publishers do, but we've created a product with a future and an audience, and it stands for something. And it's doing great journalism. And you know what? Its margin is great. Its revenue is growing. So I think that the. To answer your question, I think that the legal suits and the checks and who's fighting who, sure, we have to follow those things and we have to stay up to speed on all that stuff. But if that's the sum total of our attention on AI and journalism, that really depresses me because I think journalists have got to lead our use of AI. If journalists don't decide how AI is going to be used in journalism, well, who else is going to? And which route forward do you want? Do you want the AI firms to be just dictating how it's used everywhere, or do you want journalists to set out the best use of AI in journalism? And that was really the starting urge behind what became Bulletin.
- [35:54]
Alison Schiff
And you hired people for Bulletin, and they're obviously using AI because that's what the whole thing is. How are other journalists in your newsrooms using AI? Is there a policy? Is it just about experimenting now?
- [36:12]
Christian Brutten
No. So there's a lot of experimentation. Very controlled. You got to say what you're doing. You got to get approval from. It's quick. We're not like really super heavyweight about it. It actually doesn't. It's not like a. We don't have internal court cases about this, but you just have to log with the managing editor what you're doing and why and how you're using it. We have to check what happens to that Information on the other side of the divide, you know, what's the LLM doing with that information? So we have to be clear on that. But we encourage curiosity. Journalists are curious people, why not? And also the rest of the organization, it's not just a journalism thing, but it's radically changed how we make video, for example. So I mentioned that we're hiring creators and, and talent to lead our verticals in, in independent studio. And an awful lot of that video editing is now done by, by an AI based editor. So not the traditional, quite high cost, quite CPU intensive, slightly more old school way of doing it. So it's is democratizing who gets to have that final cut of that video actually because you don't have to have the same level of skill set as you would to be a video editor on traditional video editing software does so much. I mean everyone's been on Capcut, right? I mean everyone's had a go at that. It's so easy to make really compelling video edits now. So it's not Capcut that we use but for that purpose. But it's. Yeah, the world's changing fast. Everyone's got to engage with AI. And the actually the AI tools that we built with Bulletin in mind are also being put to use in selective ways on the Independent because if you can take some of the kind of time consuming labor out of it, you can serve your audiences better. And why wouldn't we want to do that? But we're not kind of, no one's being forced to. People are adopting it because it's exciting.
- [38:11]
Alison Schiff
I've been messing around with it myself. I've talked about it on this podcast. We don't have a policy per se and we're quite small. We are a six person editorial team at Ad Exchanger. So if we want to try something, I slack my editor and say, hey, I might want to try this thing. And she says, yeah, okay, tell me.
- [38:33]
Christian Brutten
How it goes, right?
- [38:35]
Alison Schiff
I've noticed some wild six people can.
- [38:37]
Christian Brutten
Do a lot more. You can do a lot more with six people if you have the right tools.
- [38:40]
Alison Schiff
Oh yeah, I mean that's true too.
- [38:43]
Christian Brutten
You can do more as long as you're not producing so much. You can't stay across it. Oh, that's not a problem because it's got to be kind of human. It's got to be signed off. Everyone talks about attribution in the world of AI, right? Well, give it a byline. Journalism has attribution. It's always had a byline at the top of the Copy and you know exactly who to blame when it goes wrong or who to applaud when it goes right. So there are some really great newsroom principles that have a whole new meaning in the world of AI.
- [39:19]
Alison Schiff
I do like the idea of an AI byline. Like just this. This is what it is. Take it for what it is. And it's fully labeled, just like you label sponsored content.
- [39:28]
Christian Brutten
Like, but if I. Well, by the AI byline, I mean it's a human byline. Like if I wrote a story about, I don't know, AI in journalism, and I wrote a long version of the story, and then I use AI to summarize that story, and I checked it over and said, fine. And an editor looked at that version too and said, fine, then why not have the attribution to me? I'm the author of that. That's my work. Right. Don't rob me of that byline. So it's important to have the human link all the way through. Absolutely. Is. This is not a new comment to make. It's kind of an obvious comment. But, you know, currently the LLMs are very good at processing language, but it needs input. So the input we make into bulletin is it's all based on journalism that we're really proud of already. So it doesn't do that thing where if you ask an LLM a very open question and you expect it to go research the whole web instantly and come back with a brilliant answer, and hey, you know what? It made a hallucination, like, surprise. That's not what we do. So we design the whole process as well as working on the tool is the workflow as well. So it only looks at stuff that we've already published. It only looks at a very small amount of things that we're really happy with. So we're not asking it that kind of huge open. We're not asking it to do the journalism job, if you like. The journalism job is to go out into the world and find out facts are true. Yeah. So that's not what we're asking AI to do. We're asking AI to do a kind of processing thing. And it's labor saving. And it's terrific at it. It's better than humans at it. I can't replicate how well it does it with our humans. It's very good.
- [41:16]
Alison Schiff
I have noticed, though, some wild behavior, not hallucinations. And I will admit to doing this. And it was a mix of curiosity. I didn't have a subscription to this publication, and the thought popped into my head, I Wonder if I could just ask Perplexity to summarize this link for me. And I put the link in and it summarized, it summarized an article that was behind a paywall. And all I had to do was ask.
- [41:48]
Christian Brutten
Living with yourself.
- [41:49]
Alison Schiff
I just, just the one time. And I felt terrible about it. I was just curious if it would do it. And it did do it. And so that just makes me think about what you were saying before. Right. I mean, if you're a journalist, you do have to use these things, find out where the weirdness is and then advocate for yourself because subscriptions are important and paywalls are there for a reason.
- [42:11]
Christian Brutten
Right. We're, and I think again, we've got to be really innovative in that space and we've got to be super aware of what our consumers want, what our, what our audience wants. So we have Independent Premium, which is our paid for service, which has got some content we keep behind a paywall. You also get access to the Daily Edition app, which looks a bit like a newspaper if you want that experience for how you want to consume news. And you get no advertising on the pages. So that's the kind of, there are some other things or some exclusive emails, that kind of thing. But they're the core perks, if you like, of an Independent Premium subscription. And then we're also bringing out a subscription layer on the Bulletin app because, you know, we think it's of great value. We think people really like that and that's worth paying for. And we'll also have membership in Independent Studio, so we're launching that soon as well. So, you know, you can hold back an episode. You can. And part of the thing about the studios thing with podcasts and with video and with email newsletters is there's a joy in consuming it, right? It's not just, there's not much, it's very good. AI results are super convenient. You know, they're really, really easy to get information. And if it's a complicated thing like I'm planning a trip or something and you want loads of different information points and you want it to kind of process that for you, you know, great. I mean, I would like to have a little bit of more of my own personality in the trip that I'm planning. I would like to know whose choice that was. So you might want to go to one of our travel, you know, our travel talent who could also set this out for you. And you kind of know them because you've been listening to their podcast for five years or something and you've you know, you want to take their specific advice, so it's a choice we have to make. But if you want just super convenience, it's quite vanilla, isn't it? Right. And you certainly don't get any of the joy of that process of like, sure, you know, I can say, AI, summarize this soccer analysis piece for me and tell me why Manchester United lost this match or whatever it may be that could happen. Sure. It's kind of a bit soulless, isn't it? Is kind of not really what I want to use AI for. So by being more human, that's actually a great foil against the coming wave of AI. So we back our journalists, we put our talent on camera, we engage with them, listen to their hour long podcasts, get their newsletter right in your inbox. It's quite a kind of personal link. If it's in my, I always think those, those kind of the email newsletters I follow from people, that's quite a personal thing. So my friends also email me and my, my colleagues email me, me and there it is right there in my email inbox. So it's hard to replace that personal touch. Right. And it's hard to replace that sense of endorsement from trust. Come back to the idea that what we do with the independent, what we always think about with the independent is trust. And how much do you really, how much do you know about it? I mean, look at the food on people's plates in a restaurant. We want to know exactly the farm, where this, these ingredients came from. We want to know the, the progeny of our, of a product, of our produce and for good reasons. Right. Well, you know, we're going to want to know where our information comes from too. So journalists, publisher, brands, yeah, they've got, we've got to change, we've got to adapt. Of course we have, but that stuff's really important and it's not going to go away.
- [45:47]
Alison Schiff
I do think though, and I, I say this as not really a young person because I'm in my 40s, we do need to educate people about, you know, AI, like literacy. Right. Because otherwise the, the inclination won't be there to consume news in the same way that you're talking about. And the concept of, the concept of trust starts to change. Right. Like what you trust is a definitive answer on the page. I asked a question and I got an answer. It must be correct. It's too simplistic. I think it's not really fair. I don't think everyone's just going to, you know, hook Line and sink or eat up everything they're told with a spoon. You'll have to learn how to ask questions. But it is really important to make sure that people are asking questions of their information and not just taking it as the received truth because it's like a conversation they're having with someone. So it's, it feels very believable. Putting aside that it's quite, quite vanilla, actually, that the fact that it's quite vanilla makes it almost more believable because it feels so stripped down.
- [46:55]
Christian Brutten
Like, here's a fact, you raise some really interesting points there. First of all, you, you mentioned a kind of generational thing and I always feel obliged to. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm sure I'm older than you are, so I'm not claiming that I am Gen Z here by any means, but I always kind of want to speak up for younger audiences because media bias is not new. You know, I am a Brit, spend a lot of time in America. Obviously, you know, our audience is as big as it is in the uk. In America, you know, we're right up there, you know, somewhere just under. But closing on really big titles like the Washington Post. Now, in terms of, in terms of audience, we had huge engagement growth in the last year actually over the election cycle because we're independent. And I would say that, you know, you can see the media bias, let's say, on broadcast news in the US and you can see the same kind of left right bias in UK print media. There's nothing new about that. Like the Internet did not invent partisanship. And actually I would say the open web is an era where you can read around. So people talk about kind of information bubbles and kind of influence bubbles and stuff. Well, people who just only ever picked up one print title and that might have been very right wing or very left wing. There's a bubble right there for you. If people had a favorite broadcast TV outlet in the U.S. there's a bubble right there for you. And actually I think there's something in the way the generations who have grown up with, with Internet news, I think they do, they're conscious of where they're getting their stuff from. They know that they're on earth. You know, you can read around. We're actually, we're using. We've gone live with a. We're a development and design partner with my good friend Adamson Golda, who is the CEO of Taboola.
- [48:54]
Alison Schiff
Yeah, I know him. He's been on this podcast too.
- [48:56]
Christian Brutten
Has he? Oh, fantastic. Oh, Definitely. I'll clip back and watch his. Absolutely. I love Adam and I love the way he thinks, because he thinks he really appreciates. First met him when I was editor and just loved this guy who was trying to work out how to present great journalism to readers. And he called me up a couple of weeks back, maybe a bit longer than that now, I guess, a couple of months back, and said that we're working on this AI implementation and it's going to be called Deeper Dive. And I was like, okay, tell me about that. And he said, well, I don't like the way that AI engines try and give you one answer. They try and give you this monolithic truth. Yeah, this one thing. So I take your point. It's quite kind of. It may be quite vanilla, but it's just a single viewpoint that it gives you. I don't know. Adam's a massive open web advocate and he says, you know, I like the fact I can go on the Independent and I can get one answer, and I like the fact I can go on, you know, another title and get another answer, and I can kind of weigh that up. And I'm not passive anymore. I'm thinking, I mean, I do what humans do best, which is to interact with the world and go. And, you know, he said on his post on LinkedIn, I think it was yesterday when he launched it. So the Internet's not just said to be summarized, it said to be explored. And I think there's something in that. So on this particular engine, it'll sit on our homepage in a test and we'll see. We love it. Our teams have been really impressed with it. We've been working with Taboola on it. And you go in and rather than trying to give you everything in the AI answer, it gives a very, very short answer. It's only referencing the Independent, so it's not taking in any info. We don't. I don't want to vouch for other people's journalism. I'm sure it's great you can go and experience it on their site, but I want to vouch for the independence. So it summarizes what the Independent thinks of that subject. You can even ask a particular to summarize a kind of particular reporter's take on that. And then it will just give you lots of links to articles where you can read more from the Independent. Now, isn't that great? A little bit less so. It's a nice way to explore. It's the same kind of experience, but it's much more about you know, now go and read further than it is. Like, we're trying to give you everything you need to know in these four, five, six paragraphs. So I think that's really innovative. So if people are gonna, you know, everyone's using that stuff now to a degree. If people like that, if we can give them those kind of experiences on our site, great. Come and explore, come and click around, come and read. But I like, I love it when I really mean it. That thing I say about journalism, that empowers the business and a business that empowers journalism. If you've got tension in that, it won't work. But fundamentally, if more people come and explore our journalism, I believe that's a good thing for humanity, and I think that's a good thing for our business. So great. It's working together. The more people consume of our media, whether they're paying for that and not seeing advertising or whether they're choosing to see it with advertising and not paying, it works for us. The more people engage with our content. And if it's content. I said content. If. The more people engage with our content, but the more they do it, the more it's better for everyone. Right? And if AI can help create that on our pages, it's great.
- [52:20]
Alison Schiff
So everyone read the independence content and consume this content, please. Christian, thank you for being on the podcast.
- [52:31]
Christian Brutten
That's great. I have fun. Thank you. Thanks.