INMA’s data master class for the year just wrapped up, with four learning-packed modules that took us all around the world of data in the month of October. We made a longer stop at generative AI, as this year’s belle of the ball, and I want to share some of my thoughts around this. 

One question I get very reliably is: “Who or where are the most innovative publishers on XYZ topic?” And the answer is often, well, “it depends.” But also I am struck by how often the answer is not reliably who you expect. It’s not necessarily the biggest publisher on the block or the one with the biggest tech organisation. 

And let me tell you, with AI, this has come to be an especially common outcome. The biggest innovators, the ones embracing this newer technology and experimenting with it, stand out for being nimble and proactive — not the ones with the largest balance sheet. 

The first thing I’ll say is: Look to the north — and specifically look to the north of Europe. There is a fantastic group of publishers in Scandinavian countries, in Benelux, in Germany, in Switzerland, who are leading the pack, mounting small and larger experiments like Ekstra Bladet in Denmark; building exploration teams like Aftonbladet in Sweden; relentlessly throwing things at GPT-4 to scale up automation like Ippen Media in Germany; building new products entirely from nothing like Bonnier News in Sweden or Mediahuis in the Netherlands. 

Now, before you accuse me of just crowing for the euros as a French person, I’ll remind you that I also carry a U.S. passport and also that I have been known to diss European publishers when it comes to attitudes around competition or regulation. I’m really an equal opportunity praise and criticism giver. Also, I looked around hard and long when putting together the programme from the master class — months in the making! — looking for exciting things from LATAM, from the U.S., from Southern Europe or Asia. 

And I’m not saying nothing is happening there, because, of course, there are interesting projects outside of European news organisations. I loved AP’s practical approaches to solve problems for smaller news organisations. But the volume of it, and the ambition of it, is really in the north of Europe.

In September, I attended the American edition of Newsgeist, the unconference Google convenes for journalists and technologists. A week prior, I had attended the European edition in Lake Maggiore. And one thing was striking: At the Euro Newsgeist, AI was *the* topic. For every time slot in the schedule, there was at least one if not several AI-related discussion sessions. Meanwhile, at the U.S. Newsgeist, there were not only fewer such sessions but they were also more theoretical.

Perhaps I should clarify here that Newsgeist, as an unconference, has no set agenda until attendees arrive to co-create a schedule together. So, while the method here hardly would meet any criteria for a statistically significant sample, the agenda does in fact tell you something about what is on the mind of the participants.

And I don’t think it was that AI wasn’t of interest among North American publishers, but rather, the topic of trust and fake news — which have all but receded as concerns among European publishers — still got a significant amount of attention in the U.S.

There is some academic work on innovation and turning points. One avenue: incumbents competing more aggressively (see this 2017 paper from McKinsey). I would hardly call mega-groups like Schibsted or Axel Springer incumbent, of course, but in general, European publishers don’t have super heavyweights like a New York Times or a Bezos-backed Washington Post.

And it also reminded me of what happened with the growth of the Internet back in the 1990s and early 2000s: The U.S. got the Internet into the homes of regular Americans first, but Europe got DSL and other affordable fast Internet into more European homes much quicker.

Slower to start, but faster at rolling in the second and third generation (still true with fiber Internet). I’m not comparing this to the practices of news organisations when it comes to data and Artificial Intelligence because there are very different forces in play. But this is all to say that there are many other instances where having had a slower start ends up fueling a more efficient wave of innovation in a later phase. 

One thing that we know, too, is that Europeans have historically looked at automation and Artificial Intelligence more favourably than Americans:

Back in late 2020, the Pew Research Center found that while 41% of Americans were looking favourably at automation and 47% at the development of Artificial Intelligence, these numbers are weaker than what they are in Northern European countries. These same numbers are 66 and 60 in Sweden, and 48 and 47 in Germany.

Polled along similar lines in April 2023 (but not country-by-country), Americans were still more tentative than Europeans, albeit by a smaller margin: 66% of Europeans said they felt AI required careful management, compared with 71% of Americans.

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