The versatile and reliable container of facts and information dates back to public bulletins in ancient Rome, long before the printing press was even invented. They’ve more or less remained in the same format since the 17th century when the first weekly newspapers were published in Europe and America.
Articles have survived radio, television and the internet, with websites powered by the same basic narrative story structure that have filled newspapers for nearly 400 years. But chatbots and large language models — so-called artificial intelligence — are threatening the very existence of what has long been the cornerstone of journalism.
“Why are we still doing articles?” Gard Steiro, the top editor and publisher at Norwegian news organization Verdens Gang, rhetorically asked guests at the Nordic AI in Media Summit in Copenhagen in May. “I started in journalism 35 years ago, and I still write my stories exactly the same way.”
“The article will die, should die, storytelling won’t die,” Steiro added.
Steiro was piggybacking on comments made by Nikita Roy, the founder of Newsroom Robots Labs, who predicted that in 2025, AI will transform news from an article people read into an active conversation.
That’s already happening. Last month, Google rolled out a new feature called Audio Overviews, which essentially turns an AI Overview of a search query into a short, conversational audio response. I tested it out recently by searching “What are the top news stories in Philadelphia.” It returned what resembled a three-minute newscast featuring two AI-generated hosts summing up the cities’ top stories, complete with banter and jokes.
“There was a road rage shooting on I-95. They shut down the highway,” an AI-created male character said. “Talk about a rough commute.”
Yes, the Audio Overview was heavily skewed towards crime (not surprising, since it was built off reporting from several local TV news stations), and it did get some basic facts wrong, such as the Phillies’ upcoming schedule. But it is easy to imagine a future version of this feature where users can ask questions and interact with the AI newscasters in real-time, seeking more information on some subjects or shifting to different topics.
Hence, why Steiro wants to kill the article — so newsrooms can focus their efforts on what journalism is and what it can be in the 21st century. Otherwise, we risk ceding our place in the community to tech giants using our content to keep users engaged on their platforms.
“I think the problem with the next generation is we are not relevant enough, and they don’t really use us,” Steiro told Editor & Publisher in a recent interview. “That was a problem long before generative AI came around, but I think generative AI will accelerate our challenges, and we have to use it now to our advantage.”
At Verdens Gang (generally known in Norway as VG), Steiro and his colleagues have rebuilt their content management system from the ground up to incorporate AI tools that enable its journalists to create different forms of the same story on the fly.
One great example is Videofy, an internal tool that lets reporters turn traditional articles into video content with photos and text, almost like something you would see on TikTok or elsewhere online — liquid content, as Steiro calls it. In Norway, these story forms are distributed on social media and video screens across the country, so people can interact with them (and be reminded about VG’s brand as one of Norway’s leading news organizations) while they’re out shopping or grabbing some lunch — all without requiring a video editor or producer to get involved.
“It’s the same facts. It’s the same news, but they are presented differently to different audiences based on their needs,” Steiro said. “In Norway, you can’t go into a mall without seeing VG every day… I think you have to use your stories and be present in different parts of people’s lives.”
It’s worth pointing out that VG only feeds its internal generative AI program content from its own newsroom, as well as those part of a media group with outlets across Norway and Sweden. Steiro said this has limited AI hallucinations and all but a few issues with the content being factually incorrect or inherently flawed.
However, errors do occur, so VG always involves real journalists in creating AI content. That includes summaries on news articles powered by ChatGPT, which have been popular among younger users on VG’s main news website, according to their internal metrics. VG then compares the final version of the summary with what ChatGPT initially spat out to further refine and train their internal AI models.
Another cool tool VG programmers developed is JoJo, which allows reporters to easily upload audio files from press conferences or interviews and quickly retrieve searchable transcripts. What sets JoJo apart from other speech-to-text apps are two journalism-specific features — a desktop version for sensitive interviews that prevents the audio from being uploaded to the internet and a Slack integration for live transcriptions during breaking news events.
Steiro estimated JoJo alone has saved its journalists over 37,000 work hours, which they can use to focus on more important tasks.
“We see that when we use generative AI in the core of the CMS, not on top of the product as most of us are trying to do, it’s a totally different experience,” Steiro said. “It’s much easier to personalize and to give users a shorter or longer version of a story, and they can go deeper and deeper into a story if they want.”
The company is currently testing a new program called VG-X — “The X stands for unknown,” Steiro said — which involves 700 beta users under age 25 who don’t normally interact with the news. AI is integrated into the core of VG-X, with a reporter tasked with writing the prompts and setting the rules that transform content from VG into an entirely new product aimed at younger readers.
Think of it as some of the functionality and experience of social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram but on a news platform powered by real journalism. Steiro said the result has been a product with much higher retention and engagement rates among younger users than VG’s traditional website.
The death of the article might only be a metaphor at the moment. However, Steiro and others believe a fundamental shift in journalism will occur over the next 10 years as younger readers grow up using ChatGPT and other chatbots. Even AI skeptics, like myself, who think tech giants are overpromising what these programs are capable of, can’t deny their impact on news outlets, from lost Google search traffic to a ceding of attention that threatens our entire industry.
“Without experimenting, without trying to build new products, the only answer will be to build a relationship with them through platforms like ChatGPT or TikTok,” Steiro said. “I think that would be really bad for journalism.”
Rob Tornoe is a cartoonist and columnist for Editor and Publisher, where he writes about trends in digital media. He is also a digital editor and writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Reach him at robtornoe@gmail.com.
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ATLNewsJimD
As a resident old fart, I disagree with at least part of this. The written word has been around since man first discovered he could take a piece of charcoal and mark on a cave wall. Our history is written, staring with cave drawings, right up to today when we have digitally stored PDF's or even microfiche articles going back to the 1800's.
A core part of the mission of any "newspaper" that serves a community should be recording the history of that community. The one where I live in the US came into being in the 1860's. I can tell you very little about what happened here in the first 50 years. But from 1910 until today, I can tell you a great deal about our history.
Why? Because our local newspaper started then, and somebody thought to save a copy of many of the early issues, and nearly all of the last 100 years worth. Want to know what happened locally on December 7, 1942, and how locals reacted in the days after? Go look up the old newspapers, it's all there.
I get the desire to move toward what people want, we're currently expirementing with creating playlists of the audio of our top stories every day, but I disagree with the idea that we should do away with the written part of what we do. As the only constitutionally protected private enterprise in the country, I think we owe it to future generations to figure out how to make this work. We learn from our history only because there are people who take the time to chronicle it for our future selves.
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