What’s New in Publishing for April 2026

Speaker A: Welcome to the High Value Publishing Podcast. Discover digital revenue, audience development and technology strategies to help grow your publishing business. Access show notes and all of our previous episodes@nearviewmedia.com and uh, now here's your host, Eric Shanefeldt.

Speaker B: Hey everyone. Welcome to this week's what's New in Publishing. I've got with me as always, my good friend Jez Walters. How you doing, Jezebel?

Speaker C: Hi Eric. Good to be here again.

Speaker B: Good to see you my friend. Um, we're recording this a little bit different time than we normally do, so I don't have any, any scotch with me that today because it's a little too early for that. So I've got my coffee instead. Um, but I'm excited to dive into this one here because there's a lot of new stories that are coming out right now that are going to impact, um, eventually impacting the day to day operations of media companies. So let's just dive on in here, Jaz, and let's start with what you think is the first one we should cover.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's been a busy month actually Eric out there. It's been an incredibly busy month. Okay, the first story I've got here is that publishers are being tripped up by AI and I'm not talking about small local or business publications. I'm talking some of the most famous in the world. So the New York Times is the latest publisher to be found to be publishing AI generated articles. That's not a bad thing in itself if you're using AI to scaffold the articles, help the research. But um, the New York Times has actually been caught, um, dropping. They've actually had to sack a freelance journalist who used AI to write a book review because the Guardian compared it against their book review and it was pretty much identical. But it's not just the nyt, it's um, um, last month, Ars ah Technica, one of their reporters was caught accidentally using AI fabricated quotes in an article. And um, um, part of those quotes were hallucinated. So it was making up a quote for the person that they were interviewing. And then over in Europe, over here in Europe, the biggest Dutch news brand D telegraphs. So it's a very high brow, you know, it's got a very good reputation. They went one step further and published an entire article on a fictional AI generated woman. And when that came out, they've had to absolutely scrap the entire article, scrub it clean. So what I, what I wanted to say here is that um, Panground Labs, they're um, a research company has found that 9% of newly published, newly published articles are either partially or fully AI generated mostly in smaller and local news outlets. So what the takeaway from all of these errors are is that publishers across the board are using AI to help research, write scaffold articles. But the three takeaways I got really were know exactly how you, you are using AI across every area of your business. What a lot of these publications are finding is that it's particularly tripping them up when they use people from outside the organization. Freelancers, contribut editorial. Create a set of rules and guidelines for your reporters, especially external freelancers. And then finally just consider publishing a how we use AI code of practice so your audience can trust you fully, which is just basic transparency. So that's a story I've got. I don't know what your views are on it.

Speaker B: Well, I mean we've talked about this before. I think, I mean to me AI is a good tool. It's a good tool. It's a good, I think it's a good research tool. It can be a good tool as you and I both know. It hallucinates, it makes stuff up and whenever I've used it in actual practical application, I um, have to use my own expertise to guide it and plan and check it and revise it. Um, so I don't, I'm still not ah, at all against AI as a tool. Um, we've talked a lot about trust and that one of the. Probably one probably that right now the biggest um, and this will be, this will come up in a story later on but that the, the, the biggest capital that any media organization has right now is its trust.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Right. And how are we building up trust with, with um, with readers, editorial teams? Um, yeah, they gotta come up with some, some you need to have some guidelines on how you want to utilize AI. Contributed articles I think are very, very big. I think this is true not only with um. This needs to affect not only our editorial departments but it needs to affect our ad departments when we're talking about sponsored content. And we've got to begin making sure that we're having some guidelines around that too. Um, I'm sure most editorial departments are all. I would hope that any contributor articles or articles of their own, they're using some of the tools out there to check if it was written by AI like GPT0M, you know, copy, uh, leaks, things like that are tools that they're using to check if they're written by AI. Just um, out of curiosity um, um, the Dutch one, the Telegraph, um, did they know that story was being written? AI and it was completely an AI generated story or did the writer kind of snow them over?

Speaker C: No, the writer snowed them over. What? It was actually, Eric, it was um, a few weeks ago, so when the Middle east conflict was really kicking off in earnest. It was a story about um, a group of Dutch people actually um, ah, subletting a plane in Dubai and um, and essentially to get the um, some of the Dutch individuals out back to Holland.

Speaker A: But what.

Speaker C: A researcher went in and found out the actual plane flight didn't exist, the actual plane model didn't exist. And um, then when they actually used AI to look at the photograph of the lady, it was clearly faked in AI and in fact once they'd gone through the whole article, they find the whole thing was fabricated using AI Even the photos, even the photo, the plane, the story was completely fictional. I mean, you know, it could be passed off as very real, particularly in the, you know, in the heat of the conflict, but actually the entire story. So this is the Dutch equivalent of the Times of London, you know, so it's an incredibly highbrow um, title. So this was a real, real problem for them and it, it um, really hit their reputation.

Speaker B: So I think this is the biggest thing anymore is uh, as a media outlet, especially as a news media outlet. But as any media outlet, I don't care if you're a, uh, B2B trade publication, if you're a local news, if you're a, a uh, national lifestyle publication, if you're a city regional lifestyle magazine, whatever it happens to be, the authenticity and the realism is going to be absolutely critical. And what's going to set you apart and that reputation can be shattered in an instant.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: So I really think every news organization, every publisher has got to pay very close attention to how are we going to verify that what we're writing is actually accurate, is not made up. I um, mean, let me be honest. I use AI in my research for these sessions. Absolutely. But I use it as an initial research tool to find out what's going on. And then I look at every single, every single potential story and I go out and I read the story myself personally to make sure it is what I want it to do. And I've already picked it out, so I've used it as a tool, but not as a replacement for what I'm doing. And so anyway, I think that that's going to be absolutely critical. As we'll talk about here, Search Engine optimization is going to heavily rely upon um, accuracy and trust. Anyway, my thoughts.

Speaker C: Yeah, no, I completely agree over to you.

Speaker B: All right, my first story is going to come from actually a really neat thing that uh, um, TIME is doing. Um, um, so kind of the gist of this here is all right, we can utilize AI in the ad process to really come through and find out what can we learn about the advertisers, the brands that we're serving that are advertising with our publication. And this works in any um, market, whether it's, whether it's niche, whether it's more national, whatever it may happen to be, it works in any, at any level. We can literally go through and, and ask multiple different kinds of questions within various generative AI engines, come up with a report that says here is what people are seeing when they're researching your brand. Right. Um, in this case here, TIME actually created its own little AI visibility tool called Future Optic, which is kind of cool. Um, but you don't need to do that. You can do this using um, ChatGPT, using Claude, using Gemini. You can do this already and just do some quick searches on your uh, on, on your advertisers, how they are appearing and then what you can do there is, you can also um, they, they also are focusing on brand sentiment. Right? How are people talking about your brand, what is the sentiment out there about your brand? And then what I love this is then, then you can sell um, branded content, sponsored content, whatever you need to do in, to help those brands improve their messaging. So the TIME is now leveraging its um, authority in the market. Um, in SEO and generative optimization are very, very similar and so they're, but they're there now, um, um, selling branded content to help improve that particular sponsor's perception in generative AI. I thought it was a brilliant adaptation of the sponsored content model. Another sales point behind sponsored content model, bringing in not just with sponsored content, are we going to get your content published on our brand and distributed to our audience? But we're now also going to look at what, what is truly the perception of your company in your particular market and how can our branded content that we create for you address those issues and help you improve that, that, that sentiment. So I thought that was really, really smart adaptation of generative AI research to an ad product.

Speaker C: Yeah, no, that's excellent. You can see a million ways how that can be used.

Speaker B: Mhm. It doesn't need to be expensive or fancy to do this. You just got to know the right kinds of questions to ask in generative AI to do that and then we can see uh, all different kinds of things that we need to do with it. So very, very slick. We'll put this link um, in the uh, show notes when we're done with that. So I will turn it over to you now.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's an excellent story Eric. Um, okay, the next one. Um, I really like this one. Um, so Shipstead, um, they're one of Europe's most famous um and renowned publishers really. They're a big, big publishing house. So they have Open Sourced on GitHub, an AI tool that turns news articles into videos. So essentially they've taken the time to develop this technology and they've now made it available to fellow publishers worldwide. So let me tell you what, what the uh, tool is. So it's called VideoFi, um and what it does is it automatically converts text based articles. I'm going to run a depth into ready to publish news videos in just a few minutes. So essentially what it does is it pulls content from a published article, it generates a script for you, it matches images and video, produces a voiceover and assembles the final video before it was reviewed by you as a publisher. And it just takes minutes. So I just really love that uh, I don't know what it is quite in the States but over in Europe YouTube is absolutely the biggest broadcaster now. I think it is the biggest broadcaster globally. I think Americans. I think the data here I've got now spend around three hours a day watching video and I find for publishers video shorts are um, particularly effective to bring people into articles. So I just really like that that Shipstead have really made this available to fellow publishers to you know, to answer a pain point and uh, to make it available really for smaller publishers I feel who perhaps don't have the resources to employ or even license commercially available um, um options.

Speaker B: I am 100% in agreement with you on this Jaz. Um, I um, use a tool called descript for this. Um, does it does a good job of doing the same thing but I um, love that they're doing this. Um, I'll have to dive in this a little deeper and understand. Oh here we go, here we go. So they're using OpenAI for this or 11 labs. Okay. So that's who they're using. So you probably have to have obviously your own paid open AI account to make this work. Yeah, I would assume very um, very slick though. I mean I, I love this tool. I'm, I'm 100 in agreement with you by the way. Short form video, what is YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels or TikTok are absolutely critical to reaching the upcoming generations of media consumption they're fighting. People are discovering over there. Um, now you got to find ways to get those um, those people back into your ecosystem and not just consuming content on those platforms or, you know, it's hard to monetize that unless you're an individual creator. But I think this is brilliant. I love this. So this is Shipstead. Yeah, we'll put this in the uh, in the show notes as well. Absolutely love this.

Speaker C: Great. Yeah, I thought it was a great tool and you know, hats off to them for making it um, generally available. I think that speaks highly of them as a publisher.

Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean that's very cool that they would actually open AI that. Yeah, sorry, open source. It, um, okay, my next, um, one. Guy I have a friend I know, I know well is um, Sean Griffey. He's the uh, co founder, uh, and former CEO of Industry Dive. Very, very sharp guy. I love Sean to death. I love what he's did with Industry Dive. If you haven't checked it out, you got to find out what he did over there. Sold it to Informa a few years ago for a crazy amount of money. Um, he's a very progressive thinker when it comes to media, but a practical. This is what I love about Sean. He's practical. It's not just pie in the sky kinds of stuff. Focuses on B2B. But he had a really interesting just post, just a musing he did a few days ago talking about the Washington Post and what they're going to be doing with dynamic paywall pricing. Dynamic subscription pricing, which, you know, um, we talked about dynamic pricing. Dynamic subscription pricing is a very big issue right now. We had one a couple weeks ago. Jaz, you were talking about one though. There was all kinds of problems with that, uh, one particular platform. Right.

Speaker C: Yep.

Speaker B: I'm a fan of the kiss principle to keep it simple. And what I loved about what Sean wrote is he said, hey look, the Post has lost thousands of subscribers. Okay. Um, he said, he said the biggest goal the Post should have right now is to earn their business back and get rid of additional cancellations, little things that will help them connect, connect with their subscriber base. And I love this quote. Dynamic pricing is the exact opposite. It simply treats its subscriber base like airline passengers. And nobody loves airlines. I think this is brilliant. It treats your readers as commodities. This is where we talked about the trust, uh, factor is coming back up. As media brands. The media brands that are going to succeed and continue to thrive are the ones that are going to continue to build trust with their readers. That can happen in the case of, um, of AI, like you were talking about earlier, in the case of making sure your content is completely trustworthy. It can also happen though in the case of dynamic pricing, which by the way is also usually kind of an AI driven kind of algorithm. And he's like, look, it's media is trust and connection. That's why he said here, Washington Post is trust and connection business. And they're short of both. This is the wrong signal. And then to add on to this, another person, uh, who I really highly respect is uh, Rafaat Ali over at skift. He's the CEO founder over there. Love him. He's a very, very smart, practical, brilliant kind of guy. And he's popping in here as well. Totally agree. Dynamic pricing is what happens when all you have is a transactional conversion, short term mindset. And so this comes back down to, um, things you and I have talked about. Um, one, keeping it simple. And keeping it simple means your technology isn't expensive or complicated. And then number two, it's transparent pricing, it's transparency, it's trust, it's rebuilding. And I think Sean hit this nail on the head with this post he did a few days ago. So I wanted to bring that out here and encourage publishers. Don't get caught up by all the flashy gadgets, those shiny objects. Keep it simple, focused on the trust and the relationship with your readers in all ways. That's my thought on that one. What do you think?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I think, I think you're exactly right. I think that's excellent. And I could probably, couldn't put it better. I think it is all about trust. And as you say, no one likes airlines.

Speaker B: No, they're very transactional, that's for sure. All right, what do you have? What's on your plate next, my friend?

Speaker C: Right, the next one. Um, of course I haven't got a link to show you because I'm actually writing this myself. So I'm currently in the, uh, process of researching and writing it.

Speaker B: Ah.

Speaker C: And interviewing the people concerned. But it's DPG Media, so I'm going back to the Netherlands for this. There D Telegraph were perhaps the biggest news brand, you know, the New York Times or the uh, you know, of, of the country. But DPG Media are the biggest publisher within the country. So they do a lot of new local news titles. They uh, they do a lot of mass market titles and they have a couple of news brands at the top tier as well. So they are a huge publisher in the Netherlands. They've got a real problem in that the younger generation coming up are not consuming their, their media. They're not finding it, they're not buying it. They're just, it's just become irrelevant to them. So they were working out a way to how to reach them. Now what they've done before is they've done heavily discounted offers and they found that they haven't worked. You know, they've probably got a few hundred, a few thousand at most that people just aren't buying it. And what they found is that people, particularly of the generation who are student age are expecting news to come to them for free on their social media feed. So DPG Media just made a complete strategic about Turner and what they did is they made their entire swathe, their entire portfolio of titles free to students. So they um, they partnered with a tech company called Sheer id. And uh, Sheer ID are specialists in verifying age ranges and things like that and student credentials. And they signed up 93,000 I think within a week in fact they had such a rush of subscriptions.

Speaker B: DPG did, yeah.

Speaker C: And they, they found they had such a rush of subscriptions that they actually tasked somebody to actually look at their tech stack because they thought they had a problem. So they got 93 signups, um, which they're of course um, delighted about. And what they're finding is that it's brought in a complete new strata of an, of a generation that previously were ignoring their news brand. Now where they've got a task now is when these people actually end their education is converting them into long term subscribers. But what they were saying is that if they can create a habit of over time and people trust their journalism, they've got a much better fighting chance than if they're not discovered at all. And I just really liked it as a story. 93,000, that's you know, that's a lot.

Speaker B: That is a lot. Well, and I love the fact we think our brands are well known and they are, but we've had to continually re reintroduce our brands to new people who are coming into the ecosystem, uh, younger people who are, are going to be moving up and becoming members uh, of the community. Members, um, in the business community, whatever it may happen to be. Um, I love this idea of student subscriptions. I remember when we first talked about this I said well, um, two questions I had were okay, how what Is it, what does the conversion funnel look like? Right. How does that, how are they then converting those people into um, into full blown subscribers to the brands? Um, so I'm very interested to learn more of that as you learn more on that. Um, the second question I had was how do they know if these people are students or not? And you answered that question is through the accommodation with a technology partner called Sheer ID that specifically works on that. So I, I think this is a fascinating um, concept. It fits perfectly with the idea we've talked about, about how are we going to reach, um, continue to reach the upcoming generations. And um, one we talked about was what you talked about before with the video, short form video. How do we get our stories more discoverable on platforms like YouTube shorts like Instagram, Reels like um, you know, like TikTok and, and get our brands built and our, and our discoverability built on those. But then we always talk about, well, how do we move them off of those platforms and onto our own platform and our own relationship? And that's where this comes into play. How can we get students to come in and become part of our brands in a way that is free to them to start out and now they're going to be more, more likely to convert into a paid subscriber post subscription. That's what Spotify does.

Speaker C: Yeah. Um, um, and um, what um, DPG Media are also doing, which I haven't mentioned, is that they are using this cohort as for behavioral insights as well. So the 93,000, they've asked a few of them to be on uh, publisher panels so that they can interview them and really look at them, but they're looking at the usage patterns so that they can then adapt their own content formats. So they're not just using it, you know, as for Discoverability, they're also using it for audience insights for this generation coming up. It's a two prong play. I, I just think it's very, very intelligent and smart what they're doing.

Speaker B: I love it. I absolutely love it. Um, that's something I had not heard about, so I'm looking forward to that story coming out. So I think you and I both had on our list the same story for the last one. So let's dive in. I'll let you take the lead on it. You want to talk about the Reddit thing?

Speaker C: Yep. Okay. Um, so Reddit Pro. So Reddit Pro opens to all publishers and adds new features. Now what it means is that publishers can access Reddit Pro tools free with rss Posting, AI, community targeting, and analytics showing where content, um, spreads. So essentially it's a centralized tool to track how consumers are using, um, Reddit, how, um, you're using it, and really to find the right communities as well. Basically, it transforms Reddit from a manual posting exercise into a structured distribution channel. I don't know whether I framed that correctly. Eric, you, um, take over.

Speaker B: No, you framed that absolutely right. Um, so I'm actually in the process of implementing this with a couple of my publishers. And there's the Reddit, here's Reddit Pro in here. And we're able to. The other thing we're able to do is we're able to also track topics. So there's also an editorial angle to this that we could do. Um, and, uh, so anyway, we're diving in on this. Um, the thing that I like about this is, um, the way that they're going about it. So they have a whole set of pro tools, they have a whole set of, um, where was it here? Whole guidelines. Oh, I reached my limit of free articles. Okay, Press Gazette, let's see how good a job you do of, uh, uh,

Speaker C: they don't do a particularly good job, Eric, let me tell you.

Speaker B: That's all right now. I mean, I still like Press Gazette, but come on guys, you got to figure out a better way to do this. This is why I don't like metered paywalls, by the way. I hate metered paywalls because they're way too easy to, um, bypass. But anyway, if you get into the whole, um, publisher dashboards, you know, they have different tools that, that they're, that they're talking about. Um, there's all kinds of, um, guides on how to, and how to get involved in Reddit as a media company. Dive in. I'm diving in right now. It's under distribution. It's not as easy as, like on Nextdoor, where you're creating a profile on, uh, Nextdoor and you're linking your RSS feeding, just feeding stories into Nextdoor and the Nextdoor distributes them. That's very simple. Reddit is not as simple as that. It is definitely more about you getting involved, um, in specific subreddits that are on your particular topic or your particular market, um, and diving in a little bit on those. So it's like here, like San Francisco News, that's not owned by a media publication that is its own subreddit. So they're teaching you as a media company how to be a good Redditor, how to participate within these not spam the crap out of them and how you got to build up authority over time as you're, as you're in here. So anyway, some, some really interesting things that, that we can do. Um, uh, we'll, we'll put the link to the story but also the link to um, Reddit Pro and how to sign up for it. And this is, this is the start pages where you sign up for it, um, how you can, you know, share your news on this, highlight your content in here and then all different kinds of resources over here. Uh, how to get your newsroom, how to find the right audiences, how to, how to engage and then even how to source stories coming out of Reddit. So, so really kind of a very good resource, uh, overall for publishers. Reddit has become quite this juggernaut, uh, for discoverability that most publishers just don't have a strategy for. We got a strategy for Facebook, got a strategy for Instagram, got a strategy for LinkedIn and X, but very few have any kind of a strategy for Reddit because we don't understand it.

Speaker C: Yeah, when I did some research, uh, for the podcast actually, I mean it's very big in the US I mean 50 of Reddit's traffic is based over, um, over the pond. But it gives publishers access to a disproportionately high yield audience once they're converted on site. And um, this is the real trick really with, with the Reddit audience is high intent because they're looking for research and advice driven but, but they behave like search traffic, low loyalty. So their value depends on what you do with them once they come onto your platform.

Speaker B: I would suggest for every publisher's even thinking about Reddit to first of all, start using Reddit. Right? Start having your, have some people on your team start using Reddit and actually, oh, check this out. What's trending for the Washington Post? There you go. Um, but you know, you can start, start to see what's going on here and begin to see how people are actually using Reddit. It is becoming massive and Reddit is huge when it comes to generative AI and when it comes to even SEO power.

Speaker C: Yep.

Speaker B: So uh, yeah, yeah, I think that's absolutely something publishers need to do. And this fits in with this overall. We need to look at our website as our home base, but we need to look at how are ways we can make our content discoverable, distribute and discover content across multiple platforms, whether it's news aggregators, social media, Reddit, you know, search engines, generative AI. If you want to play that game. Other places that you can make your, make your content discoverable. That's the name of the game right now. It's all about content discoverability on different platforms. And that's where that video tool comes in that you shared. It's where Reddit comes in, it's where the next door news stuff comes in. Um, all that is about making your content more discoverable on different platforms.

Speaker C: Yeah. Excellent. And there are more and more tools becoming available now that are free and open source and I just urge publishers to take advantage of them.

Speaker B: You know what, Jaz, the biggest thing I'm finding though is it's starting to overwhelm editorial teams and editorial teams. Um, I'm beginning to see, even in smaller niche publishers, I'm beginning to see more and more um, separation of responsibilities where focusing editorial teams on content creation using tools like Nextdoor or Reddit or other tools for um, ideation, coming up with what are the things we want to write and cover about what's trending and creating content. But then when it comes to the distribution, the social media posts, the Reddit contributions, even, even the, the website posting and the email newsletter stuff and anything that may happen as far as the content distribution discovery, that's a separate team or separate person. Yeah, separate role. Um, because to try to expect um, editors who are great at creating content, curating and creating content is what our editorial staff should be focused on, not distribution of that content. In my opinion, they're oil and water and they don't mix well.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's really well put.

Speaker B: So, all right my friend, that's all I had for today.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's all I have for today. And that was excellent. And you'll be posting some of these links down in the um, down in the comments section.

Speaker B: Yeah, all of these links will be in the show notes, so go out and check them out guys. And we will connect next month with Jez and uh, I. In the meantime we'll have some other uh, kind of how to kinds of sessions coming up starting next week. So Jez, hope you have a wonderful evening and we'll talk to you soon.

Speaker C: Yeah, thanks again Eric. Good to see you.

Speaker B: Cheers. Bye.

Speaker C: Bye.