With the 13th edition of the Indian Magazine Congress rapidly approaching, media and publishing industry stakeholders around the country are gearing up to rub shoulders and exchange views at the all-day symposium organized by the Association of Indian Magazines.
Among the many sessions to be held over the course of the day, Dhaval Gupta, Managing Director, CyberMedia, will engage in conversation with Manavdeep Singh, Founder PubLive, about how AI-powered tech is enabling publishers. Given the ubiquity of Artificial Intelligence and its applications in today’s media cycle, Gupta is firm about AI’s place in the newsroom.
“In terms of the journalistic ability of humans to understand and verify facts, and therefore write content - I think AI is not going to be able to replace that anytime soon. At the moment, AI is at best an assistant, which can significantly amplify and also speed up the repetitive work. Now copywriting is something which has been a manual process, and AI is ideal for that,” says Gupta.
However, he says, creating engaging immersive content for readers still firmly remains the purview of humans. “Getting to the bottom of the story, investigating more facts, speaking to the relevant people associated with the story, all those aspects are going to continue to be powered by journalists themselves.”
Another instance of AI being used, notes Gupta, is in note taking. With smart AI-powered assistants and note-takers, long meetings and briefings can not only be quickly recorded and transcribed, but summarized with important points highlighted.
“So, these are very two simple examples of how AI can smoothen things. I think the question that newsrooms need to ask is, how do they create an integrated newsroom? And what are the number of stories actually by a journalist, or in other words, how does productivity now get measured from a journalist's point of view?” muses Gupta.
“So, we have to imagine a very different kind of newsroom moving forward, where the quality of the story is the most critical element. But the repackaging and reprocessing of it is something that can be done through a lot of AI powered tools. And I think newsrooms need to be the gatekeepers that not only do good quality content, but in fact, protect against AI generated content produced by bad actors,” he adds.
Outside of AI, another issue critical to the publishing industry is that of engaging with new cohorts of digitally-native audiences and finding subscribers in a market used to free, if not exactly quality, content.
“When it comes to the media industry, subscriptions are still a much smaller contributor to overall revenue. But I think things are starting to firm up. Indian audiences are starting to pay for content across different kinds of formats, and even publishers are starting to explore new business models,” points out Gupta.
“Just to name a few, there’s social commerce, assisted commerce, community driven activities, the effective monetization of data, and even content that can be done on video in a more powerful way. There are a lot of these new business models that are coming about and I think different media houses are exploring that,” he says.
The Indian Magazine Congress will be held on Friday, May 3, at Mumbai’s Taj SantaCruz Hotel.
