CNN chief executive Mark Thompson has suggested artificial intelligence could become an “even better” way of connecting journalism with audiences than Google has been.
But his argument produced sharp rebuttals from BBC News chief executive Deborah Turness and Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, who respectively claimed he was wrong or making a moot point.
The trio of executives were speaking at the third annual Sir Harry Summit in London where BBC analysis editor Ros Atkins was moderating a panel about how legacy media is adapting to the modern age.
Asked by Atkins how AI was going to impact referral traffic, Thompson said: “One of the faults of the reporting of legacy media, by legacy journalists, is we tend to focus on the negative.”
He argued that in reality there was “a kind of dialectical process whereby, constantly, environments like search and social are changing, and you have to adapt to the changes and find new pathways for people to find you”.
Discoverability was “one of the fundamental challenges” they all faced, he said, likening modern journalism to “a bookshop with a million books in it and nobody to help you find what you want”.
AI, he said, was “potentially a better way of solving that than Google search in its traditional form” and the industry needed to be “more sophisticated” in how it approached the technology.
Turness disagreed, saying “I think AI, actually, is the greatest threat to discoverability”. Turness wrote earlier this year that AI distortion of trusted journalism “threatens to undermine people’s ability to trust any information whatsoever”, following on from research by the corporation showing half of all AI chatbot responses contained “significant” issues.
Thompson, a former BBC director-general and New York Times chief executive, responded by comparing AI to Google, which he said had helped drive The New York Times “from being the fifth most-popular newspaper in New York City to having over 100 million users around the world.
“Google search turned out to be immensely valuable for journalism, as well as a threat.”
But Minton Beddoes said: “That is, with respect, blindingly obvious.”
She said that “of course” every threat is an opportunity, “but we should acknowledge that we are going to see a dramatic change in search. We are seeing it, and we’re going to see it at a pace.
“That is something that is not, for many organisations… a burning thing. But nonetheless, it’s going to happen.”
Numerous publishers have expressed a concern that AI-enabled search services like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews are diminishing their referral traffic because they answer user queries without them needing to click through to sources.
Minton Beddoes continued: “What matters, I think right now, is if you get your subscribers to use your own properties, you’re in a good position… but in terms of getting new subscribers, search is going off a cliff.”
In such a situation, she argued, “brand matters”. But it was also “important in this world to figure out how to become discoverable…
“You’re right, AI is a huge opportunity. But you have to think about it in terms of: what do we need to do to make sure that tomorrow’s listeners and viewers and readers know about The Economist, know about CNN, know about the BBC and know that’s where you have to go? And that is going to be different than it is right now.”
[Read more: OpenAI content boss on Google ‘ten blue links’ and arrival of ChatGPT search]
Economist’s Minton Beddoes: Legacy media can thrive by making clear how they differ from the competition
Minton Beddoes said The Economist is growing and profitable, adding: “To thrive in this medium, in this moment, I think there are two key things.
“First of all, you have to know what it is that you do. You have to be clear what you do and how what you do differentiates you from other media organisations.
“In our case, what we do is help people – help our subscribers make sense of the world by providing them with authoritative, fair-minded analysis which they can trust, and by being genuinely global in our view.
“And also – and importantly – by having a clear viewpoint. We are unashamed supporters of free trade. We’re unashamed classical liberals. We believe in free markets and individual freedom.”
She told Atkins that “in five years’ time we will still be printing” the magazine.
“But the way we’ve transformed in the last ten years has been to meet people when they want it,” she said, citing the publisher’s app, podcast and shortform video output.
“I think it’s kind of a mindset thing – you can’t be everything to everybody, so you’ve got to know what you do. But then you’ve got to make sure you are flexible in innovating how you get your journalism to people.”
One way in which The Economist had been changing, she said, was its approach to anonymity.
“We are changing the relationship between the individual journalists and the subscribers. The core of what The Economist produces is anonymous.
“But you can’t have anonymous podcasts, anonymous videos, anonymous newsletters. So we are increasingly, and very happily, personalising newsletters from people. Obviously social videos have people in them.
“I’m delighted if our journalists have their own brand – many of them have big brands of their own. That’s great.
“For me, the core of our analysis – the output, the discussion, the hive mind – that is still anonymous, because that’s a collective endeavour. And I think that balance is shifting for the better.”
BBC News will put more content on YouTube but ‘not the farm’, says CEO Deborah Turness
Thompson said that “legacy media can succeed – but it requires proper investment, proper strategy and proper commitment”.
He recalled: “I arrived at The New York Times in 2012 and I was told that the Huffington Post was going to replace the Times. Oops!
“Then BuzzFeed was going to replace The New York Times. Then Vice was going to replace The New York Times. And The New York Times is doing better today than at any point in its 180-year history.”
He said a consistent issue for the media had been making a change “and thinking it’s over, and declaring victory and smiling with relief. This is a relentless process of experimentation”.
Turness said the BBC faced a different challenge to CNN and The Economist because under its charter it had to be for all audiences, so “we do actually have to try to be everywhere and serve something to everybody… so we’ve got to work out where the audience is”.
She said the BBC also wanted “to prioritise our owned and operated platforms. Bring people to us where they understand they’re getting real value for their licence fee – we can also develop a relationship, we can collect their data, they can sign in”.
The BBC is doing well at reaching all audiences, including young ones, she said, but the metric she was more focused on was time spent with the brand, which among young consumers was dominated by platforms like YouTube.
Asked by Atkins whether that meant the BBC would put more content on the streaming platform, Turness said: “I think we are… but we want to develop the relationship and not put the farm on there.
“We’re going to bring them back to our farm by going out there and developing a relationship so that they will come back.”
Thompson described this dilemma as “trying to manage an ecology” in which publishers are “expected to use TikTok, expected to use YouTube and all the rest of it”.
The way to navigate that, he said, was “with a thought-out strategy about how you use those environments to get noticed and to try and fraction out key audiences and attract them to environments which are partly more economically favourable to your business”.
Asked about the BBC’s retracted Gaza documentary and CNN’s interview with a Syrian man who had falsely claimed to have been imprisoned by the regime, both companies’ executives stressed a need for greater on-air transparency and broadcasting of journalistic processes, as exemplified by BBC Verify.
Thompson said “it’s 2025 and honesty and candour about the frailties of news” was called for. But he added: “I don’t think we want trusting audiences. We want critical audiences, and we want to acknowledge that their desire, the questions, the interrogations and challenges – these are positive things.”
But Minton Beddoes said: “I don’t recognise the description you gave. People subscribe to The Economist and they trust it…
“What matters to me – and this is a mantra: even our Republican readers who support Donald Trump, because there are many, should find our journalism useful and important and authoritative and trustworthy, and so we need to have the analysis that is good enough that even our critics – and if you’re a viewspaper, as we are, there are lots of critics – that your critics still want to engage with you.”
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