At the Indian Magazine Congress, industry leaders of print spoke about embracing new-age technology and the importance of adapting with time. In a fireside with Dhaval Gupta of Cyber Media, Manavdeep Singh of PubLive spoke about AI being a helping hand in newsrooms.

Gupta asked if technology is an enabler, what publishers should keep in mind when it comes to making technology decisions.

“There's a noticeable shift in the creation, consumption, distribution, and monetization of content, prompting a non-linear approach. While the emergence of Gen AI suggests a change in content creation dynamics, relying solely on AI-generated content like ChatGPT is questionable and not advised. However, AI can empower content teams and newsrooms to repurpose content swiftly, enhancing both speed and quality. With evolving content formats and numerous distribution channels such as Google, social media, and push notifications, diversification is key. Monetization strategies should extend beyond traditional methods like sticker ads, embracing diverse revenue streams. The approach underscores the importance of diversification and reducing reliance on a single platform”, Singh answered.

Singh also spoke about the changing of formats and how a piece of content can be re-purposed into various formats using AI. He said, “Repurposing content is not restrictive.” He later spoke about how creating content using AI without any original content can land publishers in trouble. He gave an example of a US publisher who was using AI and generated 10,000 articles per day and Google flagged it.

He spoke about PubLive, and said, “We are using AI to power newsrooms. AI can be used in many ways like internal linkings, smart links, SEO Optimization, re-purposing the content, and localization of content.”

Gupta later asked, “What is the starting point of using AI in newsrooms?” And Singh replied, “Anything in isolation doesn’t work, AI is the important part of the puzzle but other pieces need to be in place for it to work as well. The important question is do you want to build it or do you want to buy it? If you want to build it then you need the right set of people in-house, like data scientists, AI engineers, and the infrastructure, and there is a massive size of investment, you need to take care of. The alternate approach is to buy it.”

Lastly, Gupta asked him about exciting business models in the current times, Singh said, “It depends on the genre of content that you operate on. You should have multiple revenue streams. Starting direct ads, programmatic display, native, video ads, paywalls, reader revenue, social media amplification, etc. Publishers are influencers themselves, there is a platform called SheThePeople, about 15% of their revenue comes from the website, they run the website in three different languages, Hindi, English and Tamil. 29% is through events and rest everything is from social media. There are 15 different communities they run and brands partner with them.”