Three years ago Sinead Boucher took over the country’s biggest publisher of news from Aussie owners who gave it away “like a set of steak knives”.
In the absence of big backers and the government backing away from funding journalism, does its future now depend on getting money from Google and Facebook? And does she still have the Stuff staff on board for the future?
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"We have to make sure that (AI) generates value for journalism. Because if we don't get it right, in this current wave of disruption, I think that wave is going to wash right over us," Stuff owner Sinead Boucher told an Asia Pacific summit of the International News Media Association (INMA) in July.
AI services like Google's Bard and Microsoft Bing Chat and Open AI’s ChatGPT respond to simple prompts from users and then summarise information scraped from the internet - including news produced at great cost by publishers.
Boucher warned other media executives present not to repeat the “mistakes of the past” by allowing offshore tech companies free access to their content again.
The likes of Google and Facebook made much more money out of their content online in the past 20 years than the news media outfits which produced in the first place.
But generative AI is also a tool news media are using for journalism. Some are even calling it “an editorial co-pilot”.
When Sky TV appointed a new CFO this week, subscriber service BusinessDesk reported Ciara McGuigan had previous experience in media, telecoms and retail. Sky's CEO Sophie Moloney said she was excited about McGuigan joining the team.
The author of that story was ChatGPT. BusinessDesk uses it to turn simple statements from the stock exchange into online stories.
"They can assist in research or in the creation graphics. They can also allow us to replace a lot of repeatable internal processes,” Boucher told Mediawatch.
“We've instituted a really clear set of guidelines for it to be used. We're very much at the experimentation stage . . . but there always has to be human in the loop,” she said.
Stuff recently cut the numbers of staff producing and printing its newspapers. Could AI be deployed for those tasks?
“We have made a change to our print producing team recently. The production of newspapers is still a fairly manual process. We have a new publishing system, but I wouldn't necessarily describe it as in the generative AI space. It's more of an automation of some of the aspects of laying out and producing a newspaper,” she said.
“We don't use AI to write stories - and lots of media organisations do use some form of machine learning or AI to produce stories out of concrete sets of data. But that's a labour-saving thing and there's no IP in there,” she said.
“It allows journalists to focus on stories about human insight, human creativity, human connection. I don't think that's the role of working with technology,” she said.
Hardly a day goes by without a news story about a new AI innovation - or claims of what they can do.
International media outlets - including Bloomberg and the Financial Times - have appointed correspondents dedicated to reporting AI technology.
“Recently one of our writers in the advertising field used AI to help research a story - and it put in an error that wasn't picked up. That should have really been picked up in normal editing processes - just as if you just type in a Google search.
A recent RNZ story claiming AI can predict when you will quit your job was re-published by several other local media outlets including Stuff. It was based on opinions from one Auckland-based recruitment company.
Do we have the expertise to report AI properly?
“I would say say no - and only because this so emergent. How could anybody be an expert? It’s a bit of an early Wild West kind of era where everyone is really trying to get their head around what this means,” she said
“A couple of months ago, I stepped back from the chief executive role . . . to focus on being the publisher and the owner. And a big part of that is to spend the time educating myself on what this technology really means, where it might lead for us . . . so we can do our job properly. We will really have to think about that in terms of legislation and all sorts of ways - copyright, the future of work - all sorts of all sorts of things,” she said.
Sinead Boucher is also the chair of New Zealand’s News Publishers Association (NPA) representing big and small non-broadcasting publishers of news. Right now it is pressing Google and Facebook’s owner Meta to pay them for their news.
The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, recently introduced to Parliament, is designed to force the issue.
If the Bill becomes law, it may also apply to those AI services like Chat GPT, Microsoft’s BingChat and Google’s Bard.
But if it doesn’t - what then?
The National Party’s spokesperson Melissa Lee has said she does not favour forcing companies to make deals - and even labelled it "a tax".
“I hope the incoming government, whoever they are, come in and they're briefed about how things are working. It is not a tax on tech companies or a way of breaking the internet. It's simply a framework for addressing a bargaining power imbalance,” she said.
“We have been really pleased with the way we've been able to work with Google up to now, arranging deals that give us some security. Meta just won't come to the table,” she said.
“And Meta is putting a huge amount of focus into its own large-language models, training its own AI tools and producing its own products so we need to be able to get some of these organisations to the table for these discussions. And the legislation is how we do it,” she said.
“We also need this because we do not want taxpayers subsidising the work we produce. We want to be independent, thriving businesses in our own right, able to produce the kind of journalism we want to every day,” she said.
One reason the government put up the Bill was because it's not willing to repeat the Public Interest Journalism Fund (PIJF) that ran from 2020 to 2023.
So does the future of Stuff and other news publishers now depend on getting revenue from these big tech platforms?
“There are dozens of businesses in this country who all have different business models and different sources of revenue. But this is a really material issue for all of them,” Sinead Boucher told Mediawatch.
“For some of us, it does depend on that. The payments secured recently in Australia from Google have been transformative. The legislation there has secured north of $250 million a year to news organisations big and small,” she said.
The other critical revenue stream is advertising. In some Stuff papers these days a lot of the ads are for Stuff itself because ad space is going unfilled by paying clients. Coupled with declining newspaper sales year-on-year, questions have been asked about Stuff’s financial foundations.
On his own outlet The Platform, Sean Plunket recently claimed there were “rumors” that Stuff is underwritten by Ngai Tahu. He said this may explain why Stuff had “gone all woke and critical race theory.”
“No, we don't have any financial relationship with Ngai Tahu. This is something that continues to be thrown up by certain parties, ever since I bought the company for $1,” she said.
‘It is what it is. I do not have any other funders, secret backers or not-secret backers - or anything like that. But I feel like there was a certain group of men who present this as: ‘She couldn't possibly have done this herself. Who are the real people standing behind her?’” she said.
Three and a half years after the $1 deal, Boucher still owns the lot, excluding 10 percent of the company put into as staff trust.
Staff were supportive back in 2020 because the company could have collapsed without it. But by last 2022, staff were threatening to walk off their jobs over pay.
Some also complained Boucher and her executives were not backing up their public praise of Stuff journalists and their work. A management restructure just after a rejig of regional reporting that cut the numbers of reporters in local newsrooms further antagonised some staff.
“We've gone through a lot of change over the last several years, as had any other media company. And we will continue to adapt and be sustainable. AI is the next massive digital disruption that we have to deal with,” she said.
“We always do our best to try and be really transparent about what we're doing and why we're doing it," she said.
Some Stuff staff have told Mediawatch they feel news is less valued than the company’s digital content and podcasts.
“I would completely disagree with that. I don't want to diminish how people are feeling. Any period of change, especially in a tough market, is really unsettling for people, when their livelihoods and their careers and everything are bound up with it - and I've been through all of those cycles myself as a journalist,” she said.
“But we have organised ourselves into Stuff Digital and Stuff Publishing - that's for all of our news mastheads - and those businesses are headed by journalists. Journalism is what we do. It's our purpose," she said.
“As long as we're doing a really good job with it, we have the best possible chance. But I can't say we will not change further - and that's no different from any other business,” Sinead Boucher told Mediawatch.