AI's New Opportunity for Media: Deepening Audience Engagement
The use of AI in media has often focused on efficiency, but its true value may lie in deepening audience relationships and creating new digital products.
For the past three years, discussions around AI in media have predominantly centered on efficiency gains, such as assisting with story ideas, research, and writing. While these applications aim to speed up existing processes, AI offers a broader potential to fundamentally enhance how media connects with its audience.
Publications are beginning to leverage AI to transform their archives into interactive products. Nursing Times, a trade publication, launched an AI-powered answer engine that draws from its extensive clinical and news archive. This feature has handled hundreds of thousands of queries and directly contributed to new subscriptions, demonstrating a new way to engage specialized audiences.
Similarly, Skift's "Ask Skift" feature utilizes over a decade of reporting and research data to answer travel professionals' questions. Lenny's Newsletter offers paid subscribers access to its archive through personal AI tools, allowing users to invoke expertise on demand. These examples highlight archives becoming valuable products rather than mere content repositories.
AI is also revolutionizing video production. Tools are now capable of automatically editing raw footage into concise, shareable videos. This allows newsrooms, even those with limited resources, to produce short-form video content, a format increasingly favored by audiences. Reporters can become more visible in this medium while the news organization maintains control over the entire production pipeline.
Ultimately, AI presents media companies with an "opportunity AI" to move beyond simple efficiency and create deeper, more valuable relationships with their audiences, fostering engagement through innovative, productized content and services.