Indian news leaders discussed opportunities and challenges of AI and its impact on journalism during a session at WAN-Ifra’s AI Forum in Bangalore.

Executives from Mathrubhumi, Manorama Online and Dailyhunt joined a panel exploring how AI can enhance newsrooms without compromising journalistic integrity.

While AI-powered tools can streamline workflows and cut costs, publishers must also tackle challenges such as bias, content ownership and their evolving relationship with big tech.

“AI can be a best friend, but it will become your worst nightmare if you expect it to do everything for you,” said Mayura Shreyams Kumar, Mathrubhumi Printing & Publishing’s digital business director at the forum in Bangalore last month.

AI promises to make newsrooms more efficient than ever before, but it also brings with it a number of critical risks and challenges, ranging from concerns over bias, copyright infringement, the potential dilution of journalism’s core values, and worries over the industry’s reliance on big tech.

What’s more, she said the entire field of AI technologies was evolving at an incredibly rapid pace, making it a particularly challenging issue for news leaders to navigate.

In the face of this uncertain landscape, panellists stressed that publishers would do well to keep one key idea in mind: when it comes to employing AI in the newsroom, AI should not be used as a replacement for journalists, but rather as an enabler.

“The way we need to see AI is that it’s a tool for empowerment,” said Ravanan N, executive director of content and news aggregator Dailyhunt, and chief executive of news website Oneindia.

AI can simplify workflows thanks to its ability to reduce and automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks – “grunt work,” as he put it – which frees journalists to focus on more valuable tasks.

An example of this came from Manorama Online, which is working on an AI tool with text-to-voice capabilities to streamline the creation of audio content. The digital arm of the Malayala Manorama company is also looking at translation and many other AI-powered initiatives, its chief executive Mariam Mammen Mathew said.

Meanwhile, Ravanan N said that Dailyhunt had managed to reduce operational costs by 50 per cent, thanks to AI-driven data processing, storage, and other heavy lifting on the engineering front. He emphasised that these savings were not the result of cutting back on human resources.

Will AI dilute journalism? Apart from workflow efficiencies, the panellists also discussed their concerns about the potential impact of AI on the integrity of journalism and the media business as a whole. They highlighted journalistic credibility, copyright and content distribution as specific areas of concern.

“We are a newspaper that is 130 years old and prides itself on journalism with a human touch. So all our AI efforts are ‘AI with a human touch’,” said Manorama Online’s Mariam Mammen Mathew.

Despite AI’s powerful ability to analyse, translate, and transform content from one format to another, it works best as a complementary tool and, crucially, cannot replace on-the-ground reporting, the panellists agreed.

“You need people talking to people to get the actual insights… Without that layer, what’s the point of any content?” said Mayura Shreyams Kumar.

Ravanan N added: “[AI] has improved processes, made it more efficient… while we are keeping the whole heart of journalism very tight and protected.

“What has helped us is that [AI] makes workflows far more efficient and leaves the thinking and creativity to the journalist,“ he said.

Lately, the relationship between news publishers and tech firms had become increasingly tense, and the rise of new major players in the AI arena had only exacerbated this. For publishers making sense of this complex terrain, it was essential to know the value of your content, Mariam Mammen Mathew said.

“A lot of us learned that lesson with the first wave of search. We have something that they want, and we have to put a value to it. That is something which you have to be very clear about,” she said.

An important part of this relationship was the direct answers and AI-generated summaries that AI chatbots provided, which could radically reduce traffic to publishers’ own sites and lead to a significant drop in advertising revenue.

However, language might provide some protection against this: Mariam Mammen Mathew said that an English-language publisher she’d spoken to was expecting a 30 per cent drop in traffic over the next two years. She estimated that companies like hers, Manorama Online, a Malayalam-language publication, were in a somewhat different position.

“I think we have a little more time,” she said, compared to English language publications.

How ever quickly these developments take place, it seemed inevitable that AI will eventually have a significant impact on the financial sustainability of media companies.

AI-powered automation could create efficiencies and reduce operational costs in newsrooms, but more broadly it also threatened content ownership. If AI-generated responses disrupted search behaviour and drastically cut referral traffic from platforms like Google, publishers could face a major decline in ad revenue.

In many parts of the world, publishers were looking to build up their paywalls and subscription strategies to strengthen reader revenue as a revenue stream. This trend is catching up in India as well, the panellists said, even if local audiences are used to free news.

Beyond reader revenue, media companies are mostly in a testing phase when it comes to finding AI applications for monetisation. “Everybody is experimenting with different things… Right now, we’re throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks,” said Mariam Mammen Mathew.

The rapid pace of development made it very difficult to predict exactly how AI would impact the news industry – or any industry – in the future. What was clear, however, was that there would be more experimentation beyond automation, for example in the areas of content customisation and hyper-personalisation based on real-time user behaviour.

“I believe we’ve just scratched the surface, and there’s so much more coming up, especially in the consumer-facing area… and it’s coming up at a fast pace,” said Mayura Shreyams Kumar.

Teemu Henriksson/WAN-Ifra, with thanks

Pictured (top) Mariam Mammen Mathew; and (below) Ravanan N and Mayura Shreyams Kumar