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- [00:00]
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- [00:31]
Henry Blodgett
Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start. Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to don't know the difference between matte paint, finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is. With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro, you just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates and read reviews all on the app.
- [00:54]
Jamie Heller
Download Today When Lindy Ocarino, who had been CEO of Twitter, stepped down, we quickly got up a news story and what Emma did was show how she uses custom chatgpt to write that story. And she put the fact in and a few BI stories and wrote a story in like six seconds. And it was good. And so we didn't create this technology. We're not like some conspiratorial thing trying to cut down on the size of our staff like it's here and it can do this. And when technology can do something, you better believe like that's like a tidal wave that's coming.
- [01:38]
Henry Blodgett
How do we adopt AI without making ourselves obsolete? There is a lot of hyperventilation and fear about the opportunities and potentially catastrophic impact of AI on the workplace and our jobs. On this show we believe that predictions of job market catastrophe are overblown. History suggests we will see disruption and change, but ultimately more jobs than we have today. But these transitions can be painful and tough and companies can handle them well or poorly. I wanted to talk to a senior leader in an industry that seems poised for both great opportunity and great change from AI. That industry is my industry journalism. One of the journalism companies that in my view has been very Forward looking about AI is Business Insider. I founded the company back in 2007. I'm no longer with BI, but I'm impressed with the open minded and innovative way they're approaching this new technology. So I asked BI's editor in chief, Jamie Heller to talk to us about it. Jamie has Been a leader in the journalism industry for decades. She worked at the Wall Street Journal as a reporter and editor for 22 years. She took the top editor job at BI about a year ago just as the impact of AI was really taking hold. I think Jamie's been a huge asset to BI and I think her approach to AI is smart. Here's my conversation with Jamie. Jamie, great to have you. Great to see you. Thank you for coming. And so we can just go on and get it out of the way. You are the editor in chief of Business Insider. This is a company that I started 18 years ago, was editor in chief for eight years and then CEO. You are part of the succeeding management team. I did not make the decision to hire you, but I was incredibly supportive of it. And from my perspective, you all are doing a great job making me and everybody else proud every day.
- [03:35]
Jamie Heller
Well, your legacy's there, Henry, not exaggerating. Every day, the impact you and some of the prior leaders have had in the organization resonates daily. Better Every day is one of your taglines and it sticks and it's really inspiring. So thanks for all you created and.
- [03:54]
Henry Blodgett
Thank you for continuing to make it better every day, which by the way, is the only way to survive in this age where there's just so much dynamism and competition. We are going to talk about AI. One of the things I've noticed from the outside, and I've been off of the board for a couple of years at the company, is that Business Insider, Politico, Axel Springer, the German parent media company, very AI Forward right up to the top. We want to embrace AI. It's going to change the industry. We want to use it for the better. BI is at the forefront, I would say, of embracing AI within the journalism industry. So that is why you are here. We want to hear more about that. So why don't we just start with that? Like tell us why is BI actually embracing AI as opposed to saying we will never have AI here.
- [04:41]
Jamie Heller
Two things. One which you will be familiar with is it's a, it's always been a tech forward culture from, from when you and Nick Mac Turner, like the people who started and other people who started bi, it's always challenged convention on how journalism is done and how to use tech. For example, is one of the first digital only publications. It used data to send news out to different platforms, data analytics and news judgment. And that's always been a strength. And AI is a new opportunity to re energize that part of our culture and recapture the pioneering excitement of how to best marry journalism and new technologies. That's I believe, one strong animating idea here. We have this in our DNA to use tech wisely in a good way for journalism. Let's do it. Second of all, from the day one, my focus has been on how do we use, how do we do distinguishing content, stuff that other people don't have that's going to make us stand out and shine. And candidly, when I got to BI over a year ago now, little over a year, for all the reputation of being so digital strong, we weren't where we needed to be. There were areas where we weren't at par with what you need to be to be a first rate newsroom that can not only produce great journalism, but get it out to the world really powerfully. And I see AI as a chance to leapfrog and get back to that. We need AI to support what we're doing so that we could absolutely put our resources as targeted as possible to do outstanding journalism and to make our products really excellent.
- [06:43]
Henry Blodgett
So if you follow AI on LinkedIn or in the news, what you often see is that senior management, CEOs, editors, so forth, are very excited about the possibilities. Oh, it's going to enable us to do all these great things. And then there is fear and loathing and resistance and often, sometimes a sense that management's clueless from the people who are actually doing the work every day. And there can be a lot of resistance. Everybody's worried might take their job or change their job. So it seems to me one of the first things if you're going to embrace AI is to just establish a philosophy and policy. And so what is that at bi? What do you tell the team?
- [07:25]
Jamie Heller
I want curiosity and open mindedness toward it, but not boosterism. We need to do what's right for our team, for our needs, what actually works. And an important part of getting there is having a very almost scientific and journalistic approach. We really set up a structure where we are exploring very specific tasks and does it work or not? And is it worth, if it's not working, is it worth keeping trying or we're going to abandon that, try something else. Point being, Henry, that we're not doing it for the sake of it. We're not just doing anything and everything. We're trying to figure out what makes the most sense for our goals. And another thing that's been very important to me is that we are in the situation a little bit that you describe where we have leaders who are very excited about AI and we have staffers who are very concerned about it. And for me, I don't look at that as labor versus management. I look at that as my peers in the newsroom, my colleagues, my teammates have real concerns about it. I don't. I don't disdain them, I don't dismiss them. I listen to them, I read their emails, I read their slacks. And I think hard about it. And we're not always going to agree. And at the end of the day, I have to make decisions, but I take their concerns super seriously. And I'm trying to set up a structure where they're heard.
- [09:11]
Henry Blodgett
And so what does that structure look like? Is it. Is there chief AI officer? Are you encouraging individual reporters to experiment and then bubble up ideas? How, how does, what does the actual structure look like in the newsroom?
- [09:24]
Jamie Heller
All the above. I'm the editor in chief and there was just no way that this was going to work. If it was just Jamie make I work a. I work in the newsroom. Like, we had to set up a structure. So we have three people who are the main people leading this, and Julie Zeviloff west. She's our editorial director of strategy. She is the lead in charge with Julia Hood is our AI lead, specifically on AI. And then we have a reporter, Emma Cosgrove, who came to us and said, this is coming. I want to have a seat at the table, take me off my beat for a while and let me really help us experiment. And that was really a gift because to have a reporter who was very, very curious about it, she's in the chair doing what reporters do and is able to really recreate scenarios. So these three people have organized a whole structure around how we look into what's working in AI. One of them is called Sprints, where we say, anyone in the newsroom has curiosity about this, bring us something. So we did a sprint on can AI help us do widespread source reach outs? We'll have someone lead the sprint, look into it, come back and report if it worked or not. And then we have a whole other list of projects that are sort of the next area from Sprints where like, okay, we're going to really, we're doing this, we're making it work. That's a whole other level. So. And we have like spreadsheets, what we're doing, where we're at in the subject, what our timetable is, is it working? Is it not working? So we're being very methodical about it.
- [11:23]
Henry Blodgett
What, what is working? What are you finding that is radically accelerating things or making them easier. What are some of the things that are changing?
- [11:32]
Jamie Heller
Some of the things are pretty straightforward. For example, headlines are very important in digital journalism. As you know, you can do a great story, but if the headline doesn't sell it, people might not read it. So we have a fellow Paul Squire, who's just great at headlines, and we've basically created a custom ChatGPT that sort of downloads his brain into it. Like, what's the bi style? What makes for a good headline? And we've also integrated SEO, which is search engine optimization, of, like, what makes for a good searchable headline into a custom chatgpt that you could put your story in and say, and it'll suggest 10 headlines. And that's a great aid for our newsroom, because it really matters. We also have a Slack channel where we bandy about headlines with each other. And I don't know, I don't want that to go away because that's fun and, like, bringing human minds to it is important. But to parallel track that, that's exciting. We just introduced that. We also introduced a podcast analyzer. So last week, Doug McMillan's retirement from Walmart was announced. So we decided to do a story on what leadership lessons can be Learned from Doug McMillan. So we use this pod, like we use this custom chatgpt to look through podcasts of little tidbits about Doug McMillan's leadership that we could extract. This is the kind of task that could have taken hours and hours and hours before for a reporter. So I asked the reporter, save time, and that's a good thing. So those are two examples of things we have recently launched. I could go on with more.
- [13:25]
Henry Blodgett
Well, we'll talk about more things. One of the things in one of the memos that came out was that you were, I think, the first in the industry to say, it's okay to have your first draft written by ChatGPT. And I think a lot of people looked at that and said, oh, that's terrific. It'll save me a lot of time. A lot of other people said, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's what we do. And now you're replacing us with a machine. And so how's that going?
- [13:50]
Jamie Heller
Yeah, so I want us to have a culture of experimentation versus a culture of fear. And my sense before we came out with that was people were worried that if they used ChatGPT to help them with their writing, they would get in trouble. And I didn't want to have that kind of environment. Ultimately, if you have your byline story, it needs to Be your. Your work, your creative expression. So there's a couple of levels to that, which is just a certain expectation from a reader that if they see Henry Blodgett or Jamie Heller at the top of the story, they think we wrote it. And second of all, in terms of copyright, Copyright, when you want to protect your ownership of our. We need to protect our ownership of our work, which applies to creative expression, which is human expression and artifacts. So it is important that ultimately the work is your own under your byline. But if ChatGPT could help you get there by sort of being a thought partner and helping you take different, like, explore different ways to do your story, then I think it's okay. People generally say, oh, you can use it for an outline. You could use it for structure. To me, it's like a semantic structure outline, first draft. I just don't want to slice the salami that thin. Like, use it how you see fit, reasonably sort of honor system. At the end of the day, it needs to be your work if it's your byline. And I think some people really were taken aback and unhappy that we went in that direction. And some people were relieved and thought it was the right thing. And no, probably in the next few months, I'll start to take the temperature of how that's actually going.
- [15:44]
Henry Blodgett
I think from my perspective, I get the relief. I think you look at colleges, what's happening now is that there's still this big fight about how dare you use chatgpt, write your paper or draft your paper, whereas a busy student working 18 hours a day would be, in a way crazy not to explore that as a draft or what have you. And so I think it is. I think it's bold, and I think it's great that you've done that. And I do think it'll be fascinating. And let me share some of my own, like, views on this. Like, I am a writer. You are a writer. I learned to write like writing is an exercise in thinking. Helps me think about actually what I think, laying it out. I like to think sometimes I have some style that people like to read. Maybe it's funny or what have you. And so I. When I started to really experiment with a lot of the different systems, part of what it was was it's like, I don't really want to give up this part of the job. I like the job. And at least where I ended up, and I did a lot of experiments on my substack and so forth, where I created an editorial team and I said, okay, we could have a tech reporter and we could have an editor and so forth. We could write news stories, we could write research reports. One of the things I learned pretty quickly with the experimentation was that something like Perplexity is really good at writing in depth research. ChatGPT2 Same with Claude. They can produce in minutes. Something that would have taken me as a junior analyst, very educated, experienced 30 years ago, would have taken me a couple of weeks to produce a 20 page summary of what's out there. Is it brilliant? Is it breaking new ground? No, not that I can see, but it's a great summary of the work. Same with news stories. Way back before you joined Business Insider, when this whole digital media was developing, we used to see news break and then have a really fast, smart analyst reporter on our team produce a story about the news, adding to it. But a lot of it is, this is what is happening. Here's what it means. Up it goes. Those stories did tremendously well for us for a long time. They were very valuable to the audience. Now, at least for me, what I see is that Perplexity can do that in six seconds and it's good. Again, you can fiddle with the language and add to it, but it's really good. It's well organized, it's clear, it's sourced. Maybe there's some mistakes, but as you say, if you own it, you're responsible for the mistakes. So that's the one thing I've noticed and a question that I ask myself is this thing that I thought was what I did, writing, the act of writing, how important is it? And another thing that I thought about is back when newspapers, back 50 years ago, newspapers had things that were like, reporters were out in the field and there was a rewrite desk. And yeah, your byline was on the story, but you were down at City hall finding out what the mayor was saying, you phoned it back to somebody who wrote it up in 30 seconds and up it went under your byline. But you don't write it, you just got the facts. I have not been able to find anything that mimics shoe leather reporting in AI. So to me, that is something that's new. I mean, that's something that is still protected for human beings now. And what I have been thinking about is like the basic commodity writing. It's not as important to what I do as I thought it was. I think I will still continue to write. I like it so forth. I think I'm pretty fast at it. I'm writing a novel, a couple novels now. And a friend of mine who's much more forward AI than I am, he's like, dude, are you kidding me? I mean this is like you are making horseshoes in the 1920s. ChatGPT. You'll be able to write a novel in two minutes. It's good. And then you can reprompt it. To which I said, yeah, but then it's not mine. The whole fun is like thinking about it and writing it and so forth. So I'm trying to figure out how to do that. So all a very long winded way of saying I don't. I think that when I listen to journalists talk about the threat, I think there's often a lot of focus on the act of writing that may not be as important to the great journalism as we think or as it has been in the last 30 years.
- [20:09]
Jamie Heller
You've hit on definitely the tension point reporting. AI really cannot hold a candle to that. It can't meet someone for a coffee. It can't meet someone in a parking lot and get a deep throat source. It can't go out to a conference. It can't, can't bear witness if someone's trying to shoot a presidential candidate. It's, it's, it's not even close to that. So reporting is as, as crucial as ever, really more than ever. Because getting new information is, is the highest value now. It's information just ever more accessible. And the writing, the writing's just the tougher call. It's. But right now I still believe that really great writing is part of the joy. And you can feel the human writing, whether it's like in our shop, like Emily Stewart or Katie Nitopoulos or Peter Kafka, like just the quality of their writing is so distinct and that's part of the joy of it. So right now we're looking at using AI to write very basic short things that would be a time saver for us and sort of, as you say, good enough for our audience. And no quality, no quality cost because we just can't have a quality cost in journalism. Has to be accurate and fair. So the future of writing is a fascinating conversation. I don't agree with you about the college student who is too busy to write their own paper. We gotta like, we've gotta develop skills and, or like maybe some people would feel you don't. I'm not ready to just capitulate and not try. Especially in education, like that's too early to give ourselves over to technology. In my view, as you get into the workplace, like what is a workplace's responsibility to its industry for apprenticeship and learning. That's a really fascinating question, and it's not unique to journalism. You see it in law, you see it in consulting. Like what is a workplace's responsibility to bring people along? And how much will skills atrophy if we if we substitute them with AI? And and I haven't totally solved that for myself. I feel Business Insider has always been a great place for people to learn as a journalist, and I definitely want to hold on to that. And I think it can comfortably coexist with what we're doing with AI. But I want to make sure it does.
- [23:02]
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- [23:33]
Jamie Heller
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Jamie Heller
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Jamie Heller
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Jamie Heller
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Jamie Heller
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- [24:40]
Henry Blodgett
So let me go to Peter because I had him on the show and he showed me something. It was an excellent example, or maybe it was on his show, whatever it was. But when Peter interviewed me, he said, I wrote a Henry Blodgett take on whatever the thing of the day was. What do you think of it? He sent it to me. This. He didn't write it. ChatGPT wrote it in 30 seconds. And I read it and, you know, actually made some good points like, yeah, okay, that would. That's a good point. I might want to make that point. This point's not quite right there. Yeah, I'd say this too. Maybe we're going to a little bit that the language kind of dead there. I don't know if I had actually written that, whether it would have been faster for me to just start from scratch or edit what ChatGPT had written, I don't know. And I suspect that a lot of journalists, that's the trade off they'll be making is do I just do it myself or do I actually start with ChatGPT, hone it and then fix it? But I love your view in the end, like, in the end, it's yours. You're turning in. It doesn't matter where that word came from, whether it came out of chatgpt or your head. The fact is it's on the page. There's the story. Is it a good story? Are all the facts accurate? Are you happy with the organization? Off it goes to the editor. And my guess is, you tell me, journalists of the future will be doing that. They will be using both and they will be producing stories that may have a lot of AI in there, but they're still their stories.
- [26:08]
Jamie Heller
I think so. And it's having that ownership, but also that caring for like the flair and the turn of phrase that's going to delight a reader, that I just don't want to live in a world where that goes away. I'll tell you another thing that I think's going on here in the news media, which is there's a lot of pressure for cost savings, there's a lot of pressure to get smaller. The big news media organizations look around at some of the more successful newer organizations to say, well, they're really small and they're really impactful and we're too big. And it also comes as white collar workforces in general are in this, what we've been writing about, the great flattening, which is what's your manager to individual contributor ratio? And is the ratio good enough? And we should have fewer managers, which in newsrooms is fewer editors. And I've had quite a few reporters across the industry tell me sort of how the job has gotten a lot lonelier. Their editors have a lot of people on their teams now they don't have as much time to talk to people. And it's, you have to figure it out a lot on your own. And I, I think ChatGPT is going to be a partner more and more. Like, what do you like this idea? Like that idea, like, give me feedback on my story. And some really good reporters I know are using it pretty actively as sort of second editor. Like not their first editor, but a second editor.
- [27:41]
Henry Blodgett
I think it's terrific at that. And as a first editor, hey, what do you think? Yeah, I started using it that way. I published because I'm on my own substack. I've written some things, some of the things came out like, oh, it would have been great to have a smart editor there. Would have saved me from looking like a bonehead. And so some of them are now sticking to ChatGPT or Claude. And it's good, it's very helpful and so that's good. So, yes, I think there is room on the editing side, no question. And to cut right to it because again, I know the fear is there and I want to talk about other technology transitions, but just like, has BI ever fired anybody and replaced them with AI?
- [28:19]
Jamie Heller
Not since I've been here.
- [28:21]
Henry Blodgett
Well, definitely didn't happen before you got.
- [28:22]
Jamie Heller
There, so I think that ties us up on that. But Matthias Dopner, our CEO of Axel Springer, was in our offices about 10 days ago and someone asked him a similar question and he said, AI is going to affect how we hire. My hope is that it'll also lead to new hires and new jobs. And he said, I hope we employed more people. And from, from BI's point of view, I focus so much on what is our excellent journalism, what is, what is. What would I would call our nines and tens versus our six and sevens. Like what is our really best journalism. And I want everyone to participate in that. I want all the reporters and editors on our team doing very, very high quality work. Not like just the investigative team or just the enterprise team. So that's the kind of thing that AI is so far from replacing. But are our jobs going to change? Are things going to change? Of course, that's industry wide. That's like white collar wide. So people do decry, you know, if they, if you're decrying the fate of journalism in this way, like we're writing about this in every industry every day. I don't think it's unique to the media.
- [29:36]
Henry Blodgett
Definitely not unique to the media. And from a distant perspective, what is Happening not just because of AI, but also because of all the radical changes in digital distribution in the last five years. Is that the middle stuff that is not particularly differentiated, it's not originally reported, it's not super smart or stylistic or charismatic. And your favorite writer, that is the stuff that is super under pressure. And when I use the Internet or chatgpt or what have you, Google will now write me an article on the thing that I'm looking up. And is it wrong sometimes? Yeah, of course it's wrong sometimes, but it's good, it's very clear, gives me a good picture. If I need to go deeper, I can go deeper. Five years ago I would have been searching for an article to go click on. I would read the article, the publication would get the view and make some money and that's how they compensated. That is going away. But as you say, what is not going away is the high impact original reporting, the storytelling, the human to human charisma where we listen to podcast hosts and so forth. And so for a while it seems to me that is very safe. And if you are taking the newsroom and focusing them on that really high value added piece of it, that seems much more sustainable.
- [30:58]
Jamie Heller
So just to challenge myself, that is the ideal in the actual plying of the craft. You just don't come in and hit a home run every day in order to get the sourcing and the ideas and the authority to have the really most impactful work. You need to have a lot of singles and doubles. You need to just be out there writing day in and day out and learning your subject matter and getting your name out there and getting people to call you back and, and so that's also just also how you get better and get your reps in. Which comes back to the training thing that I mentioned before. So that's something that we have to find a business model for if we're going to keep shining a light and doing the important journalism we're going to do. Because like, even if you have a news organization like a ProPublica that like can do like the big things, I mean people have to get their training somewhere and learn and, and I think that has to be something that we think about as leaders of the business.
- [32:13]
Henry Blodgett
And the reporting is again, as we were saying, AI is not doing that right. You actually have to go do it. It's just the actual raw writing piece that is the thing that seems to be done faster and with not as much style and so forth and on that I would say it has been now 40 years since our iPhones can whoop us at chess. Chess is more popular as a human game between humans than it ever has been. We still love to play it. So the idea that because ChatGPT can write a solid draft in 10 seconds, to me, it doesn't mean we're not going to be writing as we've talked about, like you learn from writing and so forth. Certainly not going to touch the reporting, it's certainly not going to touch just a great commentary or analysis piece. So all that's going through. So I want to come back to. Obviously there's fear, folks are, I think, in saying we don't want to change. The idea is that if we don't change, our jobs will be safe forever and they won't change. Change is always scary. I would suggest if you look at the history of technology transitions, and a lot of this comes from David Deming, the Harvard professor who studied it, you see very consistent patterns of what happens, which is when a technology is ultimately going to replace an existing job. Nothing can stop that. It's just a question of how fast it happens. And the companies that don't embrace the technology soon cannot compete. So the jobs disappear. So it doesn't mean it's easy. And in fact, I had an epiphany recently with the Luddites because I had always grown up thinking like, oh, the Luddites, they just don't like technology. They don't understand how great it can be. Actually, it's much more serious than that. It was in Britain during the Industrial Revolution and these are craftsmen who, when they installed the big looms, their livelihoods disappeared and there was no safety net and they had nothing they could do but attack the factory because it was taking away their ability to live. And so it gets much more serious. So the angst around it I totally get. It's just that the problem is you resisting it doesn't make it any more give it any more longevity either. So how do you talk to your team and convey that this sort of experimentation and using and figuring out the technology is a good thing that will actually help preserve jobs, better skills for this era going forward.
- [34:53]
Jamie Heller
Getting them involved in the process is the most demystifying way. And that's why these sprints open to everyone we meet every Friday. It's open to the whole newsroom. Come see, come participate. That's one of the main things. Like, there was, I think, concern in our newsroom that management wasn't being straightforward enough. I never intended that. But I'd like take the criticism. And we're being extremely open. Like, not only do we want to be open, we want you participating. We want your feedback. What are the problems you're trying to solve? How can we use this to help you do your job in one of those sprints? Henry Emma showed how a custom chatgpt that she created that we're calling the news assistant, wrote a story. And the example we used was when Linda Ocarino, who had been CEO of Twitter, stepped down, she put out a tweet that she was stepping down. And I remember that day, we quickly got up a news story and then we did a bunch of more distinguishing coverage. And what Emma did was show how she uses custom chatgpt to write that story. And she put the fact in and a few bi stories, and I think there were over 90 people on the call. And she showed right there on the screen, it wrote a story in like six seconds. And then she said, read it. And it was good. And so as you say, like, we didn't create this technology. We're not like some conspiratorial thing trying to cut down on the size of our staff. Like, it's here and it can do this. And when technology can do something, you better believe that's like a tidal wave that's coming. So deal with it. But there's a lot of ways for our newsroom for people to still totally thrive, which is pick up the phone, go out, go to a conference call somebody, reach out to human beings and find out things that that technology isn't close to doing. And that's what we're doing, which is terrific.
- [37:07]
Henry Blodgett
And that is great for people to have those skills. And what you hear from other industries too, is as some of this stuff gets automated, what is more and more important are those human skills. And we've seen great journalists work who can get build source networks where sources trust them. They can tease out stories that are incredibly meaningful. They treat people well. Like that is a. That is the core skill and I think will be the core skill going forward. And I don't coming back to it like you, you look at the transition often studied in this context of phone operators. Phones didn't exist then. They existed. And it was a. They were. All the calls were connected with a room full of people who took a wire and they stuffed it into a hole. And suddenly thousands and thousands of people were employed doing that. Then somebody figured out electronic switching and no need for humans anymore. So studied what happened to those people. And basically the people who had been doing it for a while and were really set in the ways, like, this is what I do. I grab a wire, I stick it in another hole. I don't know anything else. I'm going to resist the change. Those were the ones who, going forward, when the jobs were eliminated, which they were, couldn't find new employment, the younger people who had just come in and were sort of more open quickly learned, okay, okay, this isn't going to work. But some of the skills that I have are going to work doing something else. And so to the extent that there is disruption, I think we will see that as well. You'll have this generation of journalists who are really adaptive and learn to use the tools and will then succeed extremely well because the demand for the journalism is not going away.
- [38:52]
Jamie Heller
Matthias, again, the head of Axel Springer, which owns Business Insider, he talks a lot about AI, but what he talks, at least to me, more about is what are our big stories? What is the journalism that's setting us apart? What is the absolute, like, talk of the town journalism that we're doing? And that's the goal here. That's the mission. And AI is just not close to that. And we just have to keep front and center that it's a tool that's going to save us time from doing the other stuff, make more time for that. And that's where we have to just be staying up at night about, like, what are the stories we're covering and how are we going after them? So that's. That's really paramount. The other thing I think is just worth just getting into here is there are people in journalism who are worried about their jobs. They're also worried about what it's going to do to journalism. Like, is AI going to undermine trust in brands? And just like, AI slop, Like, is it just not good? Like, so that's like a very interesting. That's very interesting thing to. To think about. And for me, the way I think about it is we'll be judged on the best stuff, and if it saves us time, we'll be judged on that. But I think it is a question for the industry. Is AI going to just tarnish the industry?
- [40:31]
Henry Blodgett
Yeah. And I think that some of those concerns are coming from AI models of a couple of years ago. And I think, as you said in the beginning, it's all about doing great work. You can publish slop, but you don't have to. It's not that you have ChatGPT sitting there writing every story that you produce. You've got people who are trying to Use it to create good stuff. And so I think that's under everybody's control.
- [40:57]
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- [41:27]
Henry Blodgett
What are you hoping for today in the founders? Scrappy, traction oriented grinders and hustlers who will blow through every brick wall in this building to get to where they need to be. Welcome to the pitch season 14 where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest on this season of the show. 10 VCs, 7 startups with one shot to build the company of their dreams. Oh my God, we built the entirely wrong product. Two shots to build the company of their dreams with that intro. Let's go. Season 14 is available now wherever you listen to podcasts, so subscribe to the Pitch so you don't miss it. This season is presented by Adobe.
- [42:10]
Jamie Heller
So you're about to make a trade based on a friend's text. But which u do you listen to is it we could buy a house in Tulum, get optioning those options. We could lose everything. Or let's do a little research, get your head in the trade and make the investment decision that's right for you. Learn more@finra.org TradeSmart.
- [42:40]
Henry Blodgett
Before we talk about the future, which is what I want to talk about, where we're going, I would have said a year or two ago, you know, the things that you're talking about where we're going to get back to the folks who are great writers or charismatic podcast hosts or audio video hosts. Those guys are going to do great, you know, and we're going to get out of some of the commodity writing, it's going to speed things up and some of the commodity background research and so forth. But the real really skilled stuff isn't going to go away. Like that's human to human. ChatGPT doesn't have that view of what's the most important story. And yeah, that sounds optimistic. And then somebody pointed out to me a week or two ago, you know, recently two of the best selling country music hits are AI bands and I had listened to an AI band a year ago and said, wow, okay, it doesn't sound so bad, but, you know, it's not the real thing. No one's going to care about that now. It seems like this is going pretty well. So how do you deal with that? A. Do you think that that is something that is ever going to happen? Can. Can these. Are these models going to get to the point where they actually can do great work? Where it is a beloved columnist who can synthesize everything and have a view that's provocative and worth reading and you like them, and they have a personality and maybe even a headshot, maybe it's even a video personality. Do you think we get there?
- [44:08]
Jamie Heller
There's definitely some really fascinating experiments going on. One of our partners, one of the publications at Axel Springer in Germany, it's been using kind of avatar to do a newscast. So. And if you look at it, it looks pretty convincing until you look at the eyes. And those are, to me, still the giveaway. Like, are those human eyes? Like, right now? Henry, the competition for talent in the industry is as fierce as ever. It's for all that people decry, like, the fate of journalism and, oh, the layoffs in such a rough industry. It's actually an insanely competitive industry with incredibly good people. And the competition for talent just never recedes. And it hasn't in my lifetime. And I remember during the depths of the financial crisis when it felt like the economy was going into a tailspin, like competing, trying to get Emma Moody to come over from Bloomberg and work for us. There's just always, no matter how bad it is, there's always this hunger for talent. And that's because there's an unquenchable human need for objective, accurate, reliable information that right now I think people are, like, very favorably disposed to provide. And so, I don't know, I don't consider myself like a futurist so much. And I could just say right now it's as great a time to be a journalist as ever.
- [45:50]
Henry Blodgett
Let me second that, because I am now a journalism consumer as opposed to producer.
- [45:54]
Jamie Heller
And.
- [45:55]
Henry Blodgett
And I have to say, the amount of incredibly high quality smart journalism in text, video, audio produced every day now is astonishing. I subscribe to a whole bunch of publications including Business Insider, Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic. What the stories look like, the professionalism, the relevance, the smarts, the bold reporting. We are in an extraordinarily privileged position with all these journalism organizations thriving and producing great stuff. And it's a refrain that you hear, particularly in political service. The media's dying, especially the left wing media. It's just a bunch of crap. I mean, it's amazing the quality of stuff that's being produced. And to your point, it's all being produced by humans. This is not a chatgpt journalism. So I think journalism's in great shape. I do think for journalists it is as competitive as it has ever been. I know you got in the industry a long time ago, as did I. This was before digital created a lot of new opportunity. It was tremendously competitive and difficult then to get into it, and it is now. And it's tremendously difficult to carve out a niche for yourself and an audience so forth. That isn't changing. But boy, what a privilege to work in the industry. And I just have to say, you all are doing a great job. There is so much more great stuff that I want to read every day that I just, I don't have time because I don't have five hours to spend reading it. But it's astonishing.
- [47:30]
Jamie Heller
That's part of our challenge too, is we have to be so indispensable that you have to just stop what you're doing, drop your jaw and read it.
- [47:37]
Henry Blodgett
Right. Which does happen.
- [47:38]
Jamie Heller
Thank you.
- [47:39]
Henry Blodgett
All right, so the last question then. So looking forward, the technology is progressing extremely quickly and a lot of the slop and oh, they hallucinate. All that stuff has gotten a lot better in the last couple of years. The video stuff is amazing. We're starting to see synthetic people who, as you say, are fairly convincing. What do you think happens over the next three to five years in terms of how the industry changes?
- [48:05]
Jamie Heller
The. The cream just keeps rising to the top. Like it will be just that much more important that you're just exceptional at what you do. But those people will continue to stand out. And when you mentioned just. It's very like hard, hard to get into it, I feel. So when I graduated from college, which was around when you did so long time ago, compared to a lot of people with whom we work, the alumni editor said to me, they'll always tell you that it's a bad time to get into journalism and it's always a great time to get into journalism. And that morsel of wisdom has stuck with me the whole time. It's just, I. Perhaps I'm just an optimist, but I just feel like it's an absolutely crucial. It's a crucial craft to our world and I see its future bright.
- [49:02]
Henry Blodgett
I agree. And I'll go back to just tell the story. When I got into it, I was a local reporter on a newspaper in Massachusetts, and I covered clamming in and high school football and art and plays. What a marvelous job to start with, that you get to look at and be a voice in a community. Everybody reads it, of course, because it's about the community. You get to go out and learn about cool things and then tell people the cool things. AI is not changing that you can learn. At least for me, it's remarkable what it can do for background research has nothing to do with going out and watching the people dig clams and what that is and the photography that goes with that and so forth. So I agree. And I think that to the extent that journalism looked for a very brief period like an industry where there was just massive opportunity for people who could write come in, that was an unusual period. And we're now back to what it was 30 or 40 years ago and probably will be going forward.
- [50:04]
Jamie Heller
Writing is a great gift if you have it. But when I interview people for the jobs, the newsrooms, which I've edited, it's reporting. Like, we can work on your writing, but you've got to do the reporting. And maybe that comes full circle to where you started. Is the future of writing Interesting. Maybe a little bit of a tougher question. I still see a world for it. Reporting in news, reporting is the ultimate.
- [50:36]
Henry Blodgett
Primary skill, and in analysis and commentary, it's to your point. It's knowing what matters and knowing how to provide a view of it that is valuable to readers or the audience, whether or not they agree with everything they think.
- [50:50]
Jamie Heller
Yeah, okay. All right.
- [50:51]
Henry Blodgett
Made me think a little bit differently. Certainly worth reading. That's the trick. And I think that that is the something that as yet, we're not seeing ChatGPT able to do. Jamie, thank you so much for this. Please keep innovating. It is the way forward. It's great to see and I'm so impressed and proud to hear how you're going about it because it sounds like one of the best ways. I know a lot of organizations are struggling with this. Sounds like the way you're approaching it is the best way you can possibly do it.
- [51:20]
Jamie Heller
Thanks, Henry. Thanks for the encouragement and the inspiration. Always.
- [51:23]
Henry Blodgett
All right, great to see you. Thank you.
- [51:25]
Jamie Heller
You too.
- [51:27]
Henry Blodgett
Solutions is produced by Meghan Cunane. Jim Mackle is our video editor. Our theme music is by Trackademics. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Thanks for listening to Solutions from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm your host Henry Blodgett. We'll see you.
- [51:49]
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- [52:24]
Henry Blodgett
Hi. Welcome to our PE Pathways Podcast series where experienced dealmakers share their thoughts on current private equity and M and A trends and developments.
- [52:34]
Jamie Heller
Thank you for listening to our podcast. Please keep an eye out for additional episodes of PE Pathways where we bring experienced deals dealmakers together to share their thoughts on current private equity and M and A trends.