How big’s your circulation? How many clicks / opens / hits / likes / listens / views do you get? How many articles a day do you publish? Are your numbers going up or, heaven forbid, down?
The publishing world has long been obsessed with quantity, but that’s now changing.
When a majority of online content is already generated by AI, professional publishers need to find new fronts to fight on. Quality, trust and humanity are the substantive advantages that publishers have over the bots and we should play to those strengths.
That means that publishers need to focus on:
- Quality over quantity. The aim should not be to produce as much content as possible, but to produce the best content possible and engage more deeply with our audiences. For many, this will mean producing less content but making it better. Creating exceptional content – text, visual, audio – is a defensible publishing strategy.
- Trust. Bots are incredible, but they are not trustworthy. Our legacy publishing brands have deep wells of trust, which must be preserved and deepened. The trust is based on our expertise, in many cases long standing, the investment we make in recruiting and developing exceptional talent, the quality controls and codes of practice we have in place, our professionalism, honesty and transparency, and our commitment to the truth. Some of that might sound a bit hackneyed, but it is our USP.
- Unique, non-replicable content. Generic, bland and superficial doesn’t cut it. AI bots are doing that already, quickly and easily, and flooding the zone with it. You shouldn’t try to compete with that. Produce content that AI can’t. Content that relies on human expertise, human interaction, human legwork, human brilliance.
- Humans! AI is remarkable and forward-looking publishers are using AI to improve performance across the board, but AI does not have expertise, is not natural, not authentic, not genuine – all things that human beings are. People crave people, their expertise, their presence, their humanity. As columnist Caitlin Moran said, “do you really want to listen to the confessions of a robot?” The best publishers employ great people who create amazing content, build strong communities and convene gatherings of like-minded humans. AI can do many things, but it can’t do that.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
