A look inside the AI strategies at The New York Times and The Washington Post

Digiday held the most recent edition of its Digiday Publishing Summit in Miami last week, and it’s been rolling out highlights from many of the sessions. You’ll be shocked to learn that one big area of focus was AI. Two of them make for interesting paired reading — peeks into the AI strategies of The New York Times and The Washington Post, the country’s two top general interest newspapers.

First, the Times, where my old Nieman Lab colleague Zach Seward is editorial director of A.I. initiatives.

Using AI for research and investigations is “by far the biggest use of our resources and I think the biggest opportunity right now when it comes to AI in media,” Seward said. His team mostly works by helping a reporter use AI technology for one project, and then creating a repeatable process from that experience for others in the newsroom to use.

The New York Times also has an open Slack channel that anyone from the newsroom can join to ask questions and share use cases — ranging from “How can I get Gemini?” to one bureau chief inspiring another across the world with an idea for how they’re using AI technology.

“We’re not trying to be AI boosters. In fact, quite the opposite. I think there’s a lot of caution. A lot of time we spend cautioning people about uses of AI, both [in the] legal and editorial senses,” he said. “But if we can have you leave a session saying, ‘I’m still pretty concerned about this whole environmental issue and maybe like destroying humanity thing – but in the meantime, it’s going to let me transcribe handwritten notes in Arabic that I took messy iPhone photos of while I was on a reporting trip, and that’s pretty cool.’ And no reporter is going to say no to a competitive advantage, which I think is the theme of what we’re trying to build for them.”

At the Post, Sam Han was named chief AI officer in June after spending eight years in related roles. One of his team’s areas of focus has been on building an AI-powered paywall that can adjust to an individual reader’s usage patterns to optimize when to ask for payment. He said the AI paywall delivers “a 20% increase in customer lifetime value” over its predecessor.

“The best benefit of having that is no more meetings to decide what rules [to set as the basis for the paywall]. Thanksgiving sale’s coming up — how should we change the paywall rules to accommodate more subscription during the sales price? We will have meetings after meetings after meetings, and then the executive with the largest voice will win, right? That’s all gone now. It’s all driven by machine learning.”

“Our subscription marketing team created flexible access products, [such as] weekly pass, daily pass. We are experimenting with pay-per-article now. We want to bring all those into the paywall decision. It’s not just showing a paywall. It’s a paywall containing which products.”

“We have very strict guidelines saying, if it’s business-critical, sensitive information, use a language model hosted by us internally. Otherwise, you can use enterprise version of ChatGPT and so on. If documents are in Google Docs already, it’s already safe, we have correct classification of document and so on, so then you’re allowed to use Gemini to do certain tasks.”