From The Guardian, June 20:
Publisher Axel Springer announces reorganisation of regional business and outlines plans for digital future
Germany’s Bild tabloid, the biggest-selling newspaper in Europe, has announced a €100m cost-cutting programme that will lead to about 200 redundancies, and warned staff that it expects to make further editorial cuts due to “the opportunities of artificial intelligence”.
Bild’s publisher, Axel Springer SE, said in an email to staff seen by the rival Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ) newspaper that it would “unfortunately be parting ways with colleagues who have tasks that in the digital world are performed by AI and/or automated processes”. The short-term job-losses, expected to be in the region of 200, are due to a reorganisation of Bild’s regional newspaper business and are not believed to related to AI.
The moves follow an announcement in February by the chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, that the publisher was to be a “purely digital media company”. AI tools such as ChatGPT could “make independent journalism better than it ever was – or replace it”, he said.
He predicted that AI would soon be better at the “aggregation of information” than human journalists and said that only publishers who created “the best original content” – such as investigative journalism and original commentary – would survive....
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Axel Springer is already pushing ahead with AI at another of their properties, Insider.
