What I’ve been reading: Google’s latest experiments and potential AI content throttling, private sharing growth and is more content always the answer?

I’m on a period of leave at the moment, one of the benefits of this is having some time to read around and there’s interesting links below that I’ve stumbled upon. If you’re in the digital media, digital journalism, social media, digital comms space then I hope these are a good reading list. I’ll try and post these as frequently as I get chance, and if you find them useful let me know. And if you spot something I should include, or you’ve written something that you think should be shared then drop it over. I’m on edward_walker86 AT hotmail.co.uk

You can also receive this digest of interesting links by signing up to my email newsletter – just tap here to subscribe and I’ll pop it in your inbox each time I publish.

What happened to search rankings when AI content was pumped onto a website – Martin Jeffrey – There’s lots of excitement about an explosion of AI-generated content, particularly written content through the likes of ChatGPT. But anyone who thinks the likes of Google won’t be wise to this will be in for a short, sharp, shock. This post from Martin Jeffrey shows how although it is a relatively small website they were publishing AI content directly. He suspects the AI-content has triggered the Google ‘spam’ update essentially wiping out his content. Content has always been king and will the AI-revolution make human-written and curated content even more valuable and sought after amongst a web awash with AI-content?

It will also expose ‘lazy AI’ content versus real in-depth use of the prompts within AI to create content that really adds value to readers. This piece from Dietmar Schantin is a great place to start on utilising the prompts and AI for adding value within newsrooms. Will we see being able to grasp and utilise AI tool prompts as becoming a must-have skill for journalists/editors in the future? In the same way we’ve seen video, social media and other skills being added to the journalists armoury over the past two decades.

There’s an interesting event coming up about journalism and AI, the Media Innovation Studio at the University of Central Lancashire is running an event titled Media’s Next Chapter: Relevance, AI and Impact in conjunction with the Google News Initiative, Media 24 in South Africa and Stellenbosch University. It’s available to join online too. Details here.

Google tests adding a Discover Feed to its valuable desktop homepage – The Verge – while the majority of audience is on mobile, there’s still a very sizeable desktop audience out there (and pages per session for many desktop users remain stronger than mobile or distributed platforms). The Verge has a piece about how the Google Discover platform is potentially being incorporated into Google’s desktop homepage (it’s already often there on the mobile homepage). This would be massive potentially for publishers, giving further exposure to stories which are already performing well within Google Discover.

Private social sharing is the growth area – Tim Gatt/Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism – while the overall trend on public sharing of news content is down (I think in large part driven by the changes with X, Facebook and also people’s growing consciousness about how what they share can impact on future employment/how friends/people think of them and growing digital media literacy) the uptick is in private sharing. When creating content then it’s thinking about who the audience is that might then share on this content is key – and makes it highly shareable. And being on and enabling sharing via these more private platforms (Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp etc) is becoming the next battleground for publishers and wider media/communications companies. WhatsApp channels in particular feels like the game-changer in this area, and there’s a good deep-dive from Press Gazette here on how Reach, in particular across their regional network of titles, is making good use of WhatsApp already to grow engagement.

Is yet more news the answer? – Alastair Otter – this post really made me think, as we often think an increase in volume is a way forward (more people are showing an interest in climate, let’s do more on that) and so on. But Alastair’s piece got me thinking that is it often about packaging and reflecting what audiences are interested in that’s just as important. The Times with its digital strategy, around subscriptions, leaned into the idea of ‘digital editions’ so having packages for set times of day and building expectations around this. Instead of reaching for the accelerator on content, a natural thing to do for journalists, do we need to take a breath and think about what we can package differently instead?

Reminder – you can have this dropped into your inbox by subscribing for free to my newsletter.