Civic duty or community hub? Sam Guzik’s two-question compass for the AI era
As news publishers survey the uncertain horizon and the myriad challenges and opportunities ahead, answering two key questions can offer valuable insights into their priorities and guide them towards a successful path forward.
The first of these questions is: What is your mission as a news publisher? Is it to provide essential civic infrastructure, or build a community around your content?
“I think there’s a lot of ways to define journalism, but those two definitions really stand out to me as the core things that we’re trying to do,” said Sam Guzik, Head of Product at the New York Public Radio station WNYC and Senior Expert Advisor at the Future Today Strategy Group.
“Either we’re there to enable democracy and provide that infrastructure for our world, or we’re trying to build community and define a sense of place,” he told participants of WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Asia conference in Manila, Philippines.
The second question is: What are you best at? Is it breaking news, or explaining things?
“These don’t have to be a binary, but it helps to force ourselves to think” about the general ambition and drive behind our reporting, Guzik said.
Once you have your answers to those two questions, you can place them in a two-by-two grid, which gives you a framework for mapping out your organisation’s profile and what priorities emerge from that.
“Obviously, every organisation may be a blend of these things. Some organisations may be mostly providing breaking news and civic infrastructure, but they’re doing a little bit in other quadrants,” Guzik said.
“You don’t have to just pick a single quadrant. But once you have these quadrants, you can start to think about what the different ways to meet the moment are,“ he said.
“Because where you find yourself in this chart is going to dictate the threats and opportunities you face,” he said.
Framework to choose where to compete
Most news publishers would most likely define themselves in the top-left quadrant, Guzik said: “We think about ourselves as being mainstream news outlets. We’re in the business of providing breaking news. We’re in the business of providing civic infrastructure.”
Some of the threats that are particularly relevant to this category include zero-click search, where search engines provide answers directly and preventing a click to the publisher’s site, and AI platforms that risk breaking the relationship with readers.
“But the power of this framework … is that when we see this laid out, we can start to think about how we choose to compete,” Guzik said.
For instance, many organisations have chosen to focus deeply on civic information, which can offer big opportunities for all publishers, he said.
“You can double down on what humans do best. You can provide context. You can develop sources. You can tell stories in a new way.”
“And in this quadrant, AI can be a force multiplier. It can help you analyse patterns and do data analysis that wouldn’t have been otherwise possible.”
The bottom-left quadrant of the framework relates to creators and other forms of journalism that mainly exist on third-party platforms. Here, creating journalism may be “very resilient against AI,” Guzik said, with most creators emphasising the authenticity of their voice, but how they reach their audience is impacted by algorithmic shifts.
Finally, the bottom right category includes companies such as the Philippines’ Rappler – the “best example” of a publisher that excels in explanations while also building a community, Guzik said.
“I think this is one of the places that’s most resilient to the AI future,” he said, even if Rappler has had no shortage of other kinds of threats.
Read more: Rappler shifts away from platform dependence amid AI, algorithm disruption
Strategic priorities, from audience ownership to purposeful AI
When situating yourself in the framework, Guzik emphasised the importance of identifying the relevant opportunities, “because the work that we do is so important. News is far too important to just assume that it’s going to be OK. And in order for us to keep doing this work and keep finding a vibrant future for it, we need to double down on this work of picking where we compete.“
For example, “in the creator quadrant, there are organisations that can find success by giving up on distribution and really focusing solely on being authentic, building community, and trusting the platforms to send audience, because in that particular quadrant, that authenticity aligns their interest with the platforms’ interest,” he said.
“Similarly, for organisations that are trying to be very civic-minded and explain things, the question of how do you reach organisations or an audience … you have to talk to them directly,” he added.
Another example: “If you’re breaking news, maybe you can just break news on social, or you can break news by providing structured data. I think there’s a range of tactics that people can pick.”
Beyond the quadrant-specific opportunities, Guzik also discussed areas that have potential for just about any publisher. First of these was owning your audience and how it accesses your content.
“Wherever you fall in this framework, think about understanding how your audience comes to you, and being responsible for that,” he said.
Another broadly-applicable recommendation was relentless focus – “on your audience, on your mission, on your community,” Guzik said.
As for AI, he underlined the need to use AI to solve real problems rather than “going off searching for things that AI can do.”
“In each of these quadrants, there’s a lot of ways that [AI] could be relevant, or it could be a threat. But just because other people are using it is not a good reason to use it,” he said.
“Where can this have value for our organisation specifically? Not just, ‘Hey, we can set up a really cool experiment,’ but ‘What is relevant to a problem that we’re facing today?’ ”
