Independent CEO Christian Broughton said editors making full use of various in-house AI newsroom tools are now “six times more economically productive” than those who don’t.
This was among the insights shared by news media leaders at Press Gazette’s latest Future of Media Trends event in London – a forum to discuss how publishers can best respond to the latest technology challenges and opportunities.
Other speakers included Metropolis CEO Andrew Marr, Reach chief content officer David Higgerson, VP of product management at Stibo DX Marie Bering and Reuters executive editor Nick Tattersall.
In its 2025 financial results, The Independent revealed that 7% of the company’s £55m annual revenue was now derived from AI (nearly £4m). Broughton told the event AI revenue had grown to “a lot more than that” in 2026.
Its AI experiments began in earnest at the start of 2025 with the launch of Bulletin – a website and app publishing AI-summarised versions of Independent articles which are overseen by human editors.
Broughton said The Independent uses “a lot of AI tools” which are generally developed in-house with strict guardrails around where the AI can source information from and always subject to human editorial oversight.
He used the example of the way The Independent leverages its 40-year archive. This began with vectorising the site last year – a process whereby articles and pictures are converted into data which can be easily searched by an AI system based around meaning rather than simple keywords.
This led to the creation of an in-house AI agent which effectively acts as a repository of institutional memory.
He said: “It can prompt busy journalists and say, ‘The Independent has written about this before. This is what you said about it. Here’s a little bit of extra context, do you want that in your article?’
“Obviously, it is the human’s responsibility to say, ‘Yes, I want that’, or ‘no, I don’t’. But it means that, even when the journalists are having to move fast for breaking news, we publish richer journalism and more in-depth articles.”
Using AI to automate some of the technical aspects of content production like adding tags and SEO metadata to stories has freed up resources for long-form investigations, he said, such as the recent podcast investigation SAS: The Shadow War, by world affairs editor Sam Kiley.
Broughton said: “The cumulative effect of all our work with AI is that human editors who use our tools are now six times more economically productive.”
Reach AI tool found story about café closure buried in planning document
Reach is also making wide use of its own in-house editorial AI tools including story drafting tool Mantis Scribe and editorial dashboard Launchpad.
Reach chief content officer David Higgerson said: “Our starting point is how do we free up journalists to the things that the journalists add most value to?”
He said: “We have tools now which will go through council agendas and call out lines that you might want to pursue in a bit more detail.
“If it’s a tool and it’s been used as part of the process, we expect our journalists to be very transparent with their line managers about what they’ve used. We’re very clear about which tools we can and can’t use.”
Mantis Scribe is used to automatically rewrite the same story for publication on multiple sites, tailoring it for local markets.
Higgerson said it can also be used to “take a very detailed document and give you a first taste of that article”.
He said: “We played with it last week using a 35-page planning document about a mill that was going to be knocked down and replaced by industrial units.
“On page 33 of it there was a line in there that they were going to demolish the local café at the entrance to the site as well. It built up a ten-paragraph first draft of the story and called out at the top that this café was going to be demolished.
“We published that on the relevant brand’s Facebook page and the woman that runs the café now finds out that her café is going to be demolished. Crucially, the journalist isn’t just in the loop, the journalist is in control of what is published.”
Launchpad replaces the need for separate logins to the CMS and other tools, meaning that within one environment, a journalist can access AI tools, Getty Images and analytics.
The analytics chat feature means journalists can get instant answers on their metrics questions.
It also provides journalists with a tailored feed of relevant press releases and shares insights from coverage elsewhere and ideas for what to cover next.
MCP plugs Reuters content into customer AI systems
Reuters executive editor Nick Tattersall said the agency has internally developed a number of AI tools including one that suggests different headlines for a story to an editor, and another that extracts and suggests newsworthy facts from source material for a journalist’s consideration.
Where AI tools are used to augment manual journalistic processes, as in these two cases, Reuters journalists make the final decision on publication and are responsible for the content. The AI tool use is logged internally but not communicated to readers.
In “very limited” cases Reuters uses AI for “foundational” purposes “where we are essentially creating a piece of content that wouldn’t have otherwise been created,” Tattersall said. This is disclosed to readers.
For example, automated translation enables Reuters to publish stories based on quarterly earnings reports in multiple languages (beyond the original report) near instantly.
On Reuters consumer platforms, readers can choose to have a story narrated and are informed that this is done by an AI-generated synthetic voice.
Reuters has also launched its Model Context Protocol server, a service that integrates Reuters journalism into the AI workflows of its clients.
Tattersall said: “This essentially is a mechanism built from the ground up for agentic AI systems in our customer newsrooms.
“So it enables an agentic AI system within a newsroom to search, to query, and to retrieve using natural language, our archive and our live content.
“In practice, what that means, for example, is if you’re a journalist in a newsroom that’s using Reuters and you’re working on a breaking story, you may be writing a text version of that story, and your agentic system in the background will be searching the Reuters live feeds and archive to find relevant video content, pictures, data, graphics, and so on.
“It’s a way of preparing for a world in which more newsrooms have agentic systems, but making sure that what those agentic systems are drawing on is… trusted, verified, accurate content and information.”
Vice president of product management at publishing platform Stibo DX Marie Bering said best practice around how and when to tell readers when written articles are AI assisted is still emerging.
But she added: “When it comes to video and imagery, I think it’s a little more black and white. Is it a fake image? It’s a fake image, right? And we should probably disclose it.”
She added: “We also work on industry standards like content credentials, for instance, making sure that as far as we can go, these signals travel with content throughout the value chain.”
AI chatbot has fielded 1.5 million reader questions at Metropolis
CEO of Metropolis Robert Marr said the UK-based B2B publishing group has launched ten new apps and seven “newsletters with personality” led by particular journalists in response to the challenge of falling website traffic.
He said that website clickthroughs are no longer a newsletter metric they look at because they are focused on audience quality, rather than quantity.
He said that AI is helping them deliver individually tailored content recommendations on newsletters and to streamline the research and production process around launching new events. Metropolis launches up to 20 new events every year.
The Miso in-house chatbot has been rolled out across the group and prompted 1.5 million reader questions over the last two years.
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
