The Trump factor – and how the new US president will impact their media businesses – dominated discussions at the World Economic Forum, from which Ringier Axel Springer vice president Jovan Protić shared insights during a webinar.

“Much of the conversation at the event revolved around a second Donald Trump presidency and what it means for various industries around the globe,” INMA ideas blog editor Paula Felps reported.

Protić was interviewed by researcher-in-residence Greg Piechota . “Trump’s decisions, particularly regarding tariffs and trade, have generated a mix of concern and excitement among executives. While some believe these changes could benefit the American economy, others worry about the complexities and potential disruptions they might cause.

“People are nervously excited,” he said, adding that there is concern about how different industries will be affected.

Stargate – a US$500 billion (A$796 billion) infrastructure project that would be used to further develop AI models – would make America competitive with China, but Protić said the potential of AI to revolutionise industries raises widespread concerns.

The presence of CEOs of high-profile tech companies at the recent presidential inauguration underscored the new president’s alliance with them, and they will likely gain more power. While that is cause for concern for news media companies, there may be a silver lining, Protić  (pictured) observed.

“We already had a problem with the fake news, with misinformation, with people being lost and not knowing basically whom they can trust actually in social media,” he said.

Now, with tech companies like Meta choosing to end fact-checking, it opens the way for “mass production of fake news that can be hyper-personalised to any given user.”

However, this ability to manipulate and mislead users could give the news media industry a chance to appeal to new audiences. “I hope that users of this world will get lost and they will need some compass. They will need some trusted brand or source where if they go, they will know that the information they’re getting is the one that they can trust.”

Many discussions at the WEF centred around the transformation being ushered in by AI. “The ‘Intelligent Age’,” Protić said, “is about empowering people with a lot of additional knowledge and basically commoditising knowledge, making it widely accessible to every single human being.”

While he acknowledged this sounds scary, he said it also could create some “amazing outcomes for the different industries and the society overall.” For example, instead of just automating individual tasks, it could automate entire workflows in customer support and other operational areas, improving efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Protić said he has noticed a change in Davos about how AI is discussed: “Last year, and not about media only, a lot of people were talking about AI but there was not a lot of proof that AI is really generating value for different industries,” Protić said. “Now, there is a visible road to this increased efficiency for the different industries and that’s why there is so much excitement, so much investment going in there.”

Protić said Ringier Axel Springer had experimented with some of the new technologies, such as developing tools to help with content discovery: “Basically we are scanning the whole web and looking for the popular topics on a given subject.”

If a writer is looking for a ‘hot’ topic in the lifestyle category, the system will conduct a search and then share a ‘super review’ of some of the latest trends and topics in that category. “So our journalists would get a super overview of what is trending and what they could potentially write about,” he said.

The tool is also good at discovering patterns for investigative journalists, who can plug in statistical data and it will help them find correlations in different data that a human might not have been able to connect.

“I wouldn’t say that it’s 100 per cent successful but I would say in 20 per cent of the cases (it results in) very good stories,” he said.

The company is now experimenting with translating video content for other areas of the world, and with the production of AI-generated sports content. Most publishers were buying rights to sports databases so they could publish basic information about an event, such as where it’s being played, who’s coaching, and who will sing the national anthem. During the game, it will provide minute-by-minute reporting.

“This is thousands of different sports disciplines that we were not able to cover, we didn’t have capacity to do that before, but now we can cover all these matches,” Protić said. “So this proved to be a very successful implementation.”

Diversity within the industry

Piechota asked how the industry will be affected by Trump’s presidency and with large companies, including Meta, already ditching their diversity initiatives: “Is diversity still in fashion?”

Protić said the mood was changing quickly and that diversity had been a common topic of discussion at Davos. “People who are running companies specialising in providing consultancy in this area, they are complaining that it’s very visible how fast the mood is changing, which I think is sad,” he said. One reason Protić was in Davos is because Ringier co-organised the World Women Davos event to promote women leaders.