Inside a Local Newspaper's Fight to Survive

has pretty much busted the media business model. Yeah, and journalists they are left. I've had to learn new skills. When you're in you have to you you adapt or you don't surve. The Echo has worked hard to take advantage of new technology. But is the editor Andy Martin told you, Jeremy, the paper is struggling financially. You know me know that revenues walked out the door to a lot of other places in the last ten years, and we haven't quite got our business model right in terms of,

you know, getting people to pay for online news. Yeah, that's right. Faced with collapsing budgets, the Echo has had to let go about of its staff that's made it harder for the paper to fulfill its traditional role of holding people in power to account. Now, the founders of a service funded by Google say they can help local journalists produce more stories without adding more people, but it's

raising new fears even as it tries to solve full problems. Hi, I'm brad Stone and I'm Jeremy con and this week Undercrypted, we're taking a look at how one local newspaper is grappling with new technology and its struggle to survive. There are only about twenty editorial staff left now at the Bournemoth Daily Echo, a paper that want it close to

a hundred journalists when Andy, the editor, first started. That's been a painful transition for The Echo, and one that's played out around the world as journalists have watched jobs disappear. Artificial intelligence is one technology that could help newsrooms like The Echo survived with shrinking budgets, but could automation, which initially looks like an added convenience, ultimately end up taking even more jobs stay with us that deminate So jar me,

you actually went down to board with recently. Yeah, I took the train down from London on a chilly morning in February. So I'm imagining sort of the Cleveland of England. What's born With like, Well, it's not quite Cleveland. Um. It's on the south coast of England and it's a summer tourist destination, has a boardwalk and a fair ground along the seafront. Um. But the city also hosts the back offices of some big banks like JP Morgan, and it's got the headquarters of a few industrial companies and

the born With Echo that's the region's main newspaper. Yeah, that's right, and it's published from this big Art Deco building with a small clock tower in the heart of the city. And he did, hey, Jerry, Yeah, Andy, the Echoes editor came out to meet me. He looks like a grizzled newspaper writer you've seen a film, with the steely gaze and a shock of white hair. He led me through the bowels of the building and up into a big conference room with glass windows that look out

over the Echoes newsroom. How many years have you you've been here at the Echo? Well, this embarrassing. I'm being here about thirty years in April. Wow, Um, what was your first day here? Like? I can really remembered the old style smoke field newsrooms, people you know, slamming your phones down and the saner time writers at the time in the late eighties, the newsroom was big. Years ago, there would have been a hundred editorial staff here. We

used to have the print depressors. You hear the wrong of the primes going up for the first edition of the second edition to go down and get a couple of paper. We get your boak in sandwich come back out of paper. This was a different time for the newspaper industry. The born With Daily Echo had a small number of district offices and it would send reporters like Andy on international assignments too, for about twenty years, so Cyprus, Kossovo,

the Balkans, Bosnia, Belize, Northern Ireland. So I'd got a lot of tours of you know, not tours of duty, but at at with the boys, you know, sort of week two weeks long. After a few years he became an editor on the news desk and as Andy was climbing the mast out of the Echo, something happened the

mid nineteen nineties that would change print journalism forever. The Internet back in the glory days local papers had four main revenue streams newsstand sales, subscriptions, display, advertising and classified. The Internet undercut all four. For example, news Quest Media, which owns the Bournemouth Daily Echo, made a profit of a hundred and sixty seven million pounds in two thousand and three. By that number was just twenty three million pounds ouch, so one seventh of what it once was.

That's right. And as profits slumped, the Echo has had to shed staff. So you're talking reporters, you're talking photographers. Some of those cuts happened through attrition, people who left or retired simply weren't replaced, but there have also been deep rounds of layoffs photographers, probably five or six reporters, a couple of support staff. Um. So yeah, that's been it's been the toughest part of the job, um, in the last few years. I've been here from very long time.

I started at ninety fours up twenty three years. Corn Messer joined the Echo as a dark room assistant. At that time the paper had six staff photographers. Now Corren is the only one left. The last he's seen the staff was left in September, which increases one of those. He was here the day that I started. He you know, I gave the speeches leaving the was that that was very,

very upsetting. Often Andy has been forced to let go of staff he's been working alongside for ten fifteen years, and his own role has had to expand to fill some of the gaps. Well, I'm the editor, I'm also the head of news, but i'm also well today I'm essentially the content manager. So I'm doing all the pages today. So it's um this sort of about four or five jobs rolled up in one to be honest, these days,

in a in a regional news room. Despite that, Andy has tried hard not to cut essentral areas of coverage. Role first and foremost. First and foremost is the whole people's account, whether it's hospitals, the police, fire service, local authorities, any public institution. That's what we're here for. But he admits there are some things he can't do anymore. You know, we can't now say to someone, Okay, go off and research that, investigate that story for two or three days.

Be off diary and at the echo, as it's so many newspapers, the threat of more layoffs still looms in the background. You know what what what's the next thing that's going to be thrown at me, you will have to make more savings. So I think it's kind of just made. I think that keeps me awakenizes really keeping all the plates spinning and the finances. I think Rooney Now. A few months ago, one of Andy's bosses told him about a new type of technology that could perhaps help.

It's an intelligent software that could provide Andy the kind of low news stories that he desperately needs, but that in recent years he hasn't really had the staff to report. And right at first, Andy was wary. Until now technology has been more of a job killer for the news industry than anything else. Well, I mean, you know, I'm obviously naturally skeptical about everything and even in our own industry, but Andy was also curious. I'm always open to looking

at new ideas of new ways of getting information. The Echo has had no choice but to embrace digital technology and social media in recent years, and now it's become one of the first British newspapers to participate in something called Project Radar. That's how I ended up in another news organization, this time in London. The Press Association was built to provide national news coverage for the UK's local papers.

Here in Britain people call it the p A. I went to see Peter Clifton, the p a's editor in chief. The PA is facing its own battle to adapt to changing times. Now that most people get their news online, local papers need less national coverage. I think they've all become increasingly focused on trying to serve their local audience

with more and more local content. Then through in All the Queens, Peter heard about a London startup called Herbs Media that was founded by two news industry veterans, Alan Renwick and Gary Rogers. Here's Gary. I started my career in local newspapers and I did that for three years of my life and then took a attorney to television. Between them, they've got more than fifty five years of experience.

The consumption of news has changed dramatically and radically, but if you looked at the business of how news is produced, actually very little has changed. It still requires a journalist to go and find a story and go and meet people, and it requires phone time and shoe leather, and good journalism requires that. In Alan and Gary had a brain wave, but we were looking at whether there was another way to produce good journalism that would be a little less

labor intensive. They decided to focus on large government data sets that had figures on things like bike theft and childhood obesity, and so we were quite interested in sets of crime data at the time. They thought they could take a single data set and get dozens or even hundreds of local stories from it. I can't remember whether it was me or Alan come up with this smart idea of why didn't we do a snapshot crime profile of every borough. Borough is a city district, London has

thirty three of them. So we started with the humans otherwise known as Me and Garret. But the amount of data they had to crawl through soon became a problem, and I wrote about ten and I started to lose the will to live. Each story was basically the same, but every neighborhood had different numbers. It became extremely repetitive and very boring. We both began to think there must be an easier way to do this, and we came across something called natural language generation, and as a way

to try to turn data into texts. Natural language generation is a kind of artificial intelligence that can write whole reports based on data the way Gary and Allen have designed their program, a human journalist still needs to write the basic template for a particular data set. Then the software fills in numbers and tweets the language so that each story can make sense. I don't know, Jeremy, can the software really convey the nuance and the perspective of

of an actual human journalist. Well, these stories that will see later are kind of dry. I mean, they're they're pretty, They're written pretty straight. That sounds like it can't potentially solve a problem for newspapers. Yeah. The idea here, and what Peter thought is that this new way of writing stories might help his newsroom create more local stories. Um and he decided he was going to team up with Herbs,

and together they created this thing called Project radar. Okay, why project radar, Well, it turns out it's an acronym, not a very great one. It stands for reporters and data and robots. The project received a seven thousand euro grant from Google's European Digital News Initiative to help it get off the ground. Interestingly, Peter's own team got nervous

about this robot taking their jobs. I am probably and wisely made a speech at the Society of Editor's conference last year where I this This was only really a glimmer at that point, but all I said at that conference was that we would be looking at automation. One of the industry websites immediately had a headline of about robots taking over at p A And by the time I got back to work, they've built a robot cardboard

cardboard boxes and put it in my seat. Peter and the guy at HERBS insisted that nobody's job is going to be lost because of Project Radar. Just like your world process. I can just sit on your desk as a tool you used to write what Gary is saying. It is probably true today. I wonder they'll cheremy if it will be true tomorrow as the technology inevitably evolves. Yeah, that's that is how you consider this kinde of technology has a tendency to get more capable over time, and

what it can do it keeps improving. Okay, well, after the break, the Bournemouth Daily Echo starts receiving stories from Project Greater and it raises an old fear for Andy as he starts trying to use the automated stories. Back in Bournemouth. I walked through the video arcade on the Bournemouth Pierre Jermy, why were you in a video arcade? Well,

that's a good question. These arcades tend to be a fixture of British seaside towns and I was actually on my way to visit another beloved British institution, the local fish and chip shop. My name is Chloe and I'm the assistant manager here Harry Robson's. And it says on the science of world famous fish and chip shop? What is it? What is it famous for? It's famous for us secret recipe that we have hair in staff, which you can't tell me what it is, I suppose unfortunately

I can't. Chloe said she's a loyal reader of the Bournemouth Echo and she especially likes the traffic updates on its website, especially with the amount of roadworks that we haven't borne from the moment. The online one is always up to date, so you knew where they are, what times are happening and stuff like that. So is that

a big issue of roadworks and congestion? And I think at the moment yes, because there's quite a lot so, especially recently, the Bournemouth Echo ran a storytelling readers just how much of their lives were wasted in traffic jams in an average year. So the congestion one, which showed us just how long emotives would spend in a traffic jam in an average week or an average year in the context of the restructure of the local area, is

one that was particularly interesting. That story, and he's talking about it came from Project Radar. I think it's been a help um in terms of, you know, statistics that we wouldn't ordinarily be able to access or have have the time to assess. I guess, But he says, some Project Radars computer generated stories still require a bit more work. I wouldn't necessarily say yes, I think that's been written by a computer. I would just say it's been written

really straight. So he might ask one of his staff to get reaction quotes from a local official or from residents, or to punch up the writing to make it more lively. Should we do you have an example about one of these Project Radar stories. Actually sounds like yeah, sure, here's one about juvenile crime that Project Radar produced, and the Bourne Meth Echo actually ran. Young people in Pool are significantly less likely to be cautioned or convicted for a

first offense than they were ten years ago. Changes in police policy and overall fallen crime has seen an eighty four percent drop in the number of youngsters entering the criminal justice system. According to statistics from the Ministry of Justice. In the two thousand and six oh seven financial year, two fifty two children between the ages of ten and seventeen were convicted or cautioned by police for the first time,

but by seventeen there were just forty one. We are well should have had you read that in your Alexa voice, But you know it's it's interesting, but certainly not brimming with writerly sensibilities. But it's interesting because this is probably not the kind of thing that the Andy Ors reporters

could have done on their own. Okay, so Andy is using these stories of the Bournemouth Echo and finding them useful, Yeah he is, But out of a d twenty five stories that they publish every week, only about to come from Project Radar. Oh wow, Okay, so that's not much at all. No, and Andy told me he's worried about

using the service too much. Well, we to be looking at doing them, or that it would it would It would for people if you use too many of them, that you'd worry that your bosses or somebody would say you may not need that many staff be a little bit a little bit worried about about them. So even though the p A and Herbs insists the Project Radar is about helping us do our jobs better, Andy is still worried that in his newsroom this technology could take

away even more jobs. Yeah. I think that's always a concern with AI because it gets better and better all the time. As we said earlier, how good is it the writing podcast scripts, Lucky for us, is not that good yet. But the fact is this is a very new and interesting area of technology and it's maturing fast. But the specter of even more job cuts hasn't deterred

the news industry from experimenting with computer generated articles. Lots of organizations are trying versions of this now, like the Associated Press here in the US, which is working with a company called Automated Insights on writing simple financial stories. That's right, and the Washington Post has a software called Heliograph to write stories on everything from high school football

games to US congressional elections. And we should also say that even here at Bloomberg, our own team of Quotas has created software that can take corporate earnings reports or stock price movements and automatically generate news stories from them. Yeah. It's pretty crazy what this technology can do. But I'm pretty happy we don't have to write some of those

earning stories anymore. Yeah, me too. And actually, on that point, I mean, I hope I'm not expressing the hubrists of a human here, but I do wonder if the AI can kind of replace the you know, the creativity and the storytelling of an actual journalist. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot that these these types of programs

are never going to be able to do. They're not really going to be able to do investigative reporting and narrative storytelling, right articles with the beginning of middle and an end and that the you know, convey some nuance about a character. Yeah, I think that would be very difficult. It's certainly the way some of these programs are set up.

But they are getting more sophisticated all the time. And I know that there are some researchers working on on this type of technology and academia who think you could create, you know, a narrative structure, at least teach these programs to create a narrative structure. Now you're getting a little

too close to home. But let me ask you, Jeremy, I mean, is there a reason to worry that if the AI is doing the kind of grunt work stories, that some perhaps young reporters aren't getting the kind of training, you know, being able to cut their teeth on these kinds of stories because the AI is taking over. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a bit of a double

edged sword. On the one hand, it means that those those entry level reporters don't have to do a lot of that grunt work, and maybe they don't get his board with the job and maybe they get to move on to higher value added skills earlier. But but they

also might not learn the basics. And I think that's an issue in a lot of professions as AI kind of takes over, is you know, all of that stuff that's being automated was how people learn the basics of their job, And there were a lot of important skills that they might have learned that they're now gonna have to learn some other way. Right, But the big issue here is of course fixing the business model does the

does Project Rador do that? I mean, do you get the sense that this technology can solve some of the problems at a newspaper like the Born withth Echo? Well, I think it's helping the echo just at the margins, really, I mean, it's helping it fill in a few stories a week, but it's not solving that the underlying business problem. And I don't think any of these automated soleations really are. I mean, they help newspapers produce a little bit more

with fewer people. Um, they take away some of the grunt work, which maybe frees up people to do some some higher stuff. But but it's not fixing the fundamental problem, which is if you don't have advertisers willing to pay that much money to to run ads against something online, you're just not gonna be able to pay for what you produce. Yeah, and articles like the one that you

read about juvenile crime. It's probably not solving the other basic issue, which is kind of preserving that relationship, that very powerful relationship between the local newspaper and the reader. Yeah, no, not at all. These programs aren't going to know about the local community. They're not going to have that sense of place at the Bournemouth Echo. The staff who remain have tried their best to adapt changing times. Yeah, take

Cora and the last photographer on staff. He told us he's moved from taking still images to mostly shooting video video. It's been costizing, it says, it's more of a challenge, you know, learning Learning video is something that really really interested me. In fact, Coran's video skills were in such demand. The Connett that's the company that owns news Quest Media, tapped him to shoot video for USA Today and the rest of the Ganet papers at the World Economic Forum

in Davas, Switzerland. You know, if you were going to stay static and say I'm not learning this, I'm not changing this is not something I'm going to do that you are. You know, you're probably playing the last pan in your career. Cora and has helped train the rest of the Echoes reporting staff and photography skills, and he oversees this thing called the Echoes Camera Club that's a group of readers and amateur photographers who contribute images to

the paper. While he's had to adapt, Coran still enjoys his job. Mari Hart is with the Woman Dirt Echo. If there's if there's a massive news story going on in town, I'm going to get some to it. If there's if there's an interesting, you know, photographic assignment to go to, I'm going to get to go to it. In many ways, Andy says, the Corn's story is really the story of the Echo in microcosm. I can't think of any other business though, where it's such a short

space of time. People have to learn a whole range of new skills, and they do it day and day out. They're the phenomenon. The paper has managed to build a decent online readership. The Echoes Content and Audience manager Katie

Clark walked me through a few of the numbers. So monthly we're looking at like one point two to one point three unique million uniques um and page views are somewhere anyone, kind of anywhere monthly between like ten million and like thirteen million, depending on how much breaking news we've had. The Echoes sports coverage has also helped it to attract online readers. Bournemouth has a Premier League soccer team now Louis Cook Cook Well, that might be a

brilliant ball. It is. It's Calor Wilson, It's laid off rid first. It's a historic win for they're nicknamed the Cherries, and fans around the world go to the Echoes website to follow the team. But as we said, the problem is that advertisers pay a lot less per click than they do with print ads, and many sites have become dangerously dependent on third parties, especially Facebook, to drive readers to their sites. We are looking at kind of how

we're talking to people, engaging with people on Facebook. We're putting a lot more emphasis on Twitter coming in the last kind of month or so. Facebook recently tweaked its algorithm to prioritize posts from friends and family in users news feeds. That's making it harder for publishers to use social media to promote their stories. So you've gotten used to seeing a slight decline last year because of the

Facebook and trying not to panic about. To be honest, if you panicked every time Facebook changed their algorithm their user if you're screwed. And finally, print circulation continues. It's long decline. Meanwhile, in Bournemouth, and he says he has no choice but to stay optimistic about the future of journalism and the future of the Echo. To my point of view. I love the paper, I love what we do. I love seeking it to people and holding people's account

and you know, getting things done. Um So I think by large you have to be in this business. You have to be an egoistow wow. And that's it for this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. We always want to know when you think of the show. You can write to us at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net. I'm on Twitter at Jeremy a Con and I'm on Twitter at Bradstone. Please consider leaving us a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts or any of your favorite

podcast apps. It really helps us find new listeners. This episode was produced by Pia Gutkari Magnus Hendrickson, Liz Smith, and Christie Westgard. Francesco Levie is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.