‘AI has made it so that anyone can pose as an expert’ – Media interview with Jacob Granger, community editor at Journalism.co.uk

What sort of relationship do journalists want with PRs now? In an ever-changing media landscape, it can be difficult to know the best ways to make connections and understand what publishers want and need from you. Someone that is seeing these changes take place first-hand is Jacob Granger, who works as community editor at Journalism.co.uk.

Below, he shares some of the ways that the relationship between journalists and PRs can be improved, explains how the industry has changed during his nearly ten years covering it, and discusses the impact that AI has had for both sides.

What are some of the main changes that you have seen during your time covering the media industry, and do you think these have been positive or negative developments?

The buzzword at the moment is the ‘user needs model’. This was developed by a journalist called Dmitry Shishkin when he was at the BBC, and it’s since been expanded from six user needs up to eight. I think this has been transformative for our industry, because it has confirmed something for journalists and editors – people want more from the news than just an update. Maybe they want help connecting, or they want help being distracted, or they want to be illuminated by something. There’s more to the news experience than just updates.

The traditional model has long peddled this view that the metrics of success for journalism is measured by page views and eyeballs and scoops and scandals and the rest of it. This is still valid, but I think something else has emerged. An important metric for success now is value and habitual use and loyalty, and the user need model complements this so much, because it takes away the incentive of visibility. It says, what do the analysis articles do for our publication model? What do lists of ‘top ten experts to follow’ do for our business model? What’s emerged from this is the realisation that we’ve over-commissioned on one type of story.

The penny has dropped for a lot of publishers and they have realised what’s missing in our model. Many publishers have run with it, including The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, The Conversation, Vogue, Berlingske Media in Denmark. There’s so many great adopters of this strategy now, and it’s really feeding directly into newer business models that maybe have different KPIs around subscriptions or memberships. That’s the big change. I’m really enthusiastic about it, and it’s been a really wonderful framework for our industry.

In terms of negatives, we’ve seen a lot of job layoffs in recent years in the news industry. When you talk to young journalists, this is a really big concern for them. Is there a place in the industry for me now? The jobs are so fiercely competitive, but also so fragile in terms of their job security. I worry about this being a really big deterrent for young journalists coming through the industry. We can’t just keep cutting jobs to cost save. We have to figure this out and get our business models in order.

Why is the relationship between journalists and PRs such a key one in the media industry? And how do you think it can be improved further (from both sides)?

I think it’s always good for journalists to have new story leads that they wouldn’t otherwise have considered. It’s always good for them to be introduced to sources that may not otherwise come into their world. The problem with this is that PRs tend to come to journalists and newsrooms with ulterior motives. They’re wanting publicity or wanting something in exchange.

Some of the best PRs I’ve worked with, you go back to them and say, this isn’t a story for now, but let’s come back in three to six months when we’ve got some results to show. They say, okay cool, let’s schedule a call in that space of time. At that point, I’m saying that there is a story we could publish, but who does it serve beyond just your publicity? Our job as a journalist is not to give publicity to PRs, it’s to serve our audience. Where there is that clear value exchange, and they’ve thought about the audience, and there’s some exclusive data or access to an expert, that’s legitimate and fine as far as I’m concerned. But there has to be that negotiation between both sides, and there has to be some way of meeting in the middle.

I’ve met some PRs who are very insistent on their marketing lines, and they sit in on interviews, and they interject, and they do all the things that journalists hate. You just end up canceling the interview. My advice is to go into these interviews with some curiosity and be open to the possibilities from the interview. Don’t be afraid to try and change the angle. I’ve got an interview to do tomorrow and this is the second time I’ve spoken to them. It came to me through a PR agency, but the main angle that they approached me with when I had a scoping call with them, I could see it doesn’t really do much beyond trumpet your own cause. I’ve gone back and said there’s a better angle to this conversation. This is one that I think will serve our audience. How do you feel about this? And I’ve got a green light. I think that’s the way to handle these things.

AI and its use in the media has been a hot topic for the last year or two now, what are the main ways that journalists and publishers are using it? And what impact does this have on the PR industry?

I think it’s useful for doing the things that journalists either can’t do or they spend too long doing. I’ve sat there, like any journalist, and transcribed an interview manually. It’s awful and it’s a waste of time. Put it through an AI and it will give you a good transcription. You can also use AI to crawl through a data set to try and find some meaningful data points and statistics. It would take you, as the journalist, ages to do that. There’s no need to waste so much time doing that if you can reliably use a trustworthy AI and corroborate the findings afterwards.

If you’re lazily using it to turn out AI slop, then it is probably not the best idea in the world. I think you could train an AI model to write quite closely for your publication. Train it on a user needs model and your own previous writing, and get it to emulate that fairly closely. You have a first draft, and then you can go in and work from that sort of standpoint and that’s all right in my view. Plus, it’s good for translation, particularly for very niche languages. You know, we did a piece last year about a publisher who was using it to transcribe Greenlandic. You might be able to get some translators, but if you’ve got a reliable AI to do this, then it will save you a lot of hard work in the long run.

In terms of the PR side, the arrival of AI has made it so that anyone can pose as an expert. I think journalists now, with a lot of the scandals that have emerged from journalists being hoodwinked and deceived by sources that are just using AI, probably have their guards up. If you’re a PR, just be aware of this. There would probably be extra credentials needed to prove that you’ve got a legitimate source to speak to, so be prepared to show your credentials and the qualifications of your expert. That’s one impact I think AI has had on the PR world.

Journalism.co.uk offers courses and training not just for journalists but also for people in comms and PR. What are the main skills that a media professional needs nowadays when communicating with the press?

The main skill is to be digitally literate and realise that not all journalists want to have a text interview. Perhaps they want to do a podcast or maybe they want to do a live video, or just do something a little bit outside of the realms of possibility. If you’re a little bit more digital savvy, you can clip it up for social afterwards. It’s good to have those production values in mind about what’s going to look good visually and what’s going to sound good. That’s another thing, get yourself a good mic. A lot of times I’ve been set up with interviews and they’re using iPhone microphones or whatever and that just doesn’t do the business. So being aware of the production values and the different platforms that journalists want to be across, is a very good skill set to have.

I would also be remiss not to give my colleague, Ophelia Birch, a huge shout out for the work she’s doing on revamping our training across the board. I saw one the other day that I thought was really cool, which was about interviewing advice for panel podcasts and about how to do an interview for different scenarios. It’s good to be upskilled in that area I’d say as well.

For more on the modern media landscape and how it’s changing, download our Vuelio report ‘How news travels in today’s fragmented media landscape‘.