Why using dollars to measure the value of news makes little sense
The global news director of AFP speaks up on Big Tech, the dangers of populism and how he remains optimistic for news telling in the future
This newsletter is close to my heart. It concerns the debate between dollars and sense.
It’s become the trope of tech to argue that news has no value. It correctly points to data that says news doesn’t drive page views, so therefore lacks ad value.
The debate soon turns circular and toxic as passionate advocates from news and tech, who have two very different world views, clash over definitions and detail.
Is the value generated by the story, or by people talking about it? Is the conversation owned by a platform, or by the journalism that reported it? And round it goes.
How it ends though is well known. Big Tech eventually throws its hands up in frustration and walks away knowing that tomorrow will be just fine.
For news, though, not so much.
Hence the situation today where Big Tech generates the income of the entire news industry every three days, and pays little for the coverage that makes sense of the world
Many industry people and governments have tried to tempt me to their side, to go war in the vitriolic tug-of-war over right and wrong, but it’s not as binary as that.
Today I am sharing my views, and my reasons, and why I believe there is a positive way forward for both for the first time in 25 years because of the arrival of AI.
When I handed over the helm of Oovvuu to new management nearly a year ago, I fell into the throes of start-up PTSD. If you’ve done it, you’ll know what I mean.
It hits you when you’re not in the office at 4am, or on your third long haul flight in three weeks or missing tucking your kids into bed again.
It’s when the incessant phonecalls stop, and in the silence, you question whether you were actually any good at all, which spirals into a struggle with relevance deprivation.
As I fought for cogence, I took the advice of a mentor and rang 100 friends and asked their advice.
They said many things, but the most repeated one was that my superpower was being able to act as a translator between the news and tech industries.
I’d built an AI company using an AI that I taught myself, they reminded me, and that it had become an object of jealousy for billion-dollar tech firms.
Use that skill, they said, because the world needs it more than ever as AI emerges.
It led to this newsletter, and like many of the themes in it.
Both news and tech speak their own languages, do so fluently and eloquently, and both are geniuses in their relative fields.
But when they try to talk to each other about the same big, globally important issues, they get lost in translation, that turns into frustration, and no one wins.
It’s a shame because it’s not that they don’t agree, it’s that they don’t understand, and that’s an issue of communication, not one of enmity. This is what needs to be fixed.
Tech’s primary language is money, while media’s focus is on the mission.
The world needs these two giants to recognise the dollars and the sense. Both benefit more from a better and more stable world, so the industries achieve more, together.
And we need to, because of a bloke in London who I’d never met before brought me to tears for the first time in 40 years…
Dollars and sense
London was a rush of keynotes, meetings and dinners. I was late to catch a keynote by the global news director of Agence France Presse, Phil Chetwynd.
What he said changed my perspective on the challenges of tech and media. I reached out on my return, to follow up, and he was kind enough to do so.
Phil. Thank you for agreeing to talk to me. I heard your incredibly powerful presentation, but before we begin, could you introduce yourself and what you do.
Phil: “I'm Phil Chetwynd, and I’m the global news director of AFP, that’s Agence France Presse, one of the three major international news agencies.
“We have a network of 1,800 journalists globally, trying to cover the world in all its complexity, every single day.
“My job is to manage those journalists, and the complexities of their coverage, and all the impact that it has on their lives.
“I try not to worry myself about the individual storytelling every day, but more on the big picture.”
Ricky: Doesn’t AFP have one the largest reporting teams in the world?
Phil: “Reuters and the Associated Press, and us are all of a similar size, around 2,000 journalists, but we're certainly one of the biggest global newsrooms.”
Ricky: How many countries?
Phil: “We’re literally in every country in the world. We even have a small presence in North Korea. We really try to be able to report from everywhere.”
Ricky: That's amazing. I know how busy you are so thanks for taking the time to chat with me. Your presentation moved me, on a day of strange confluences.
I spent the morning sitting outside the Minds conference following Big Tech’s quarterly earnings reports which revealed they had banked $412 billion in 100 days.
Hours before, I had been on the phone to two national governments talking as they sought advice on policies to push tech companies to pay for news.
And at the same time, being from Australia, and working with Canada, I have had a front row seat to hear Big Tech say news has no value and turning off the taps.
So, with my head spinning over tech super profits, government action and news being silenced, I walk into the conference hall and bang… you’re on stage.
As you shared harrowing stories about the personal sacrifices of your reporting team in Gaza, it crystallised in my mind what the problem is here.
It’s a difference of perspective, money versus mission. It’s a failure to communicate. Dollars versus sense.
The work your journalists do is to make sense of the world, but the narrative about the value of that has been hijacked by the scale of the dollars in tech.
So, let’s cut to the chase. On stage, you talked about some of your reporters based in Gaza and their experiences. To help us understand the sense in news, can you please share it again?
Phil: “Thanks Ricky. One of the things we have to realise is that this is about real life.
“It’s not about journalists going to hunt for stories in some faraway place. It’s about the war coming to their lives.
“Our team didn’t travel to Gaza to cover the war. They live there. It’s their home.
“When the war comes, it comes to their streets, their schools, and families. Everybody they love is involved in that.
“I think we need to consider how we would react if the same thing happened to us. I live in Paris. What would I do if there were tanks on the Champs Elysees, and if my children were under threat?
“We have to turn that around, and instead of thinking of these journalists as some kind of other creature. They are real people living real lives.
“The reality for our team in the past six months is that nearly all of them have had their houses destroyed.
“All of them have become refugees internally within Gaza, moving from place to place, living in tents, living in cramped apartments.
“Our office was hit by a missile strike. That had been a place of comfort for them where they thought they would be safe.
“There was no one in the office at the time but that still symbolically added a massive sense of insecurity.
“And that family group, which is nine staff, and their relatives, about 60 people on the move all the time looking for shelter, and food every day, trying to stay safe.
“That group has probably lost 50 to 60 other members of their family. That’s the human impact.
“Everyone's lost friends, everyone's lost family members, neighbours… The level of impact on them and that society is absolutely enormous.”
Ricky: Thank you for sharing, and I'm so sorry that's happening. I've run newsrooms, and had staff in conflict zones, so I have some idea of what that feels like. Are they still filing their stories? And if they are, how, and how are they faring on the frontline?
Phil: “It’s been a source of amazement throughout these past six months that they are able to continue doing their jobs, when they’re worrying about the safety of their family and trying to stay alive.
“But they have been filing non-stop. I think that's probably the thing that maybe keeps them going and keeps them sane.
“They know they are contributing to their mission as journalists, their important mission.
“They're obviously Palestinian, so they want to tell the story of the Palestinian people.
“And that primary journalistic mission is probably the one most journalists have in them, when they set out on this path.
“That mission is very strongly anchored in these people, and their colleagues.
“They have amazingly been able to keep going throughout this entire period despite the horrors that they're seeing every day.”
Ricky: How are they getting a signal out to you? How are you receiving their reports?
Phil: “They’ve been buying sim cards. Different sim cards work in different locations. They can be Egyptian sims, Palestinian sims, Israeli…
“There’s a battle every day to find a network, but we’ve been able to do it non-stop.”
Ricky: I’ve spent most of my life amid the camaraderie and respect that emerges among journalists when they work in the field, but it can be traumatising for friends and colleagues safely back in the office. How has the impact been felt?
Phil: “It’s enormously emotional. You know that what we do is very much mission led.
“We believe in journalism, but the plight of our Gaza staff has been a long and painful story over the last six to nine months.
“There is tremendous support within a newsroom.
“One great frustration is that in previous Gaza conflicts, we’ve been able to send people in from Jerusalem, or from Egypt, or other parts of our network, to work alongside them.
“That acts to validate their work, to provide them moral support, to allow them to have a good night's sleep. All those things.
“This time though Gaza is completely sealed off. They've been very, very alone, and that's been very hard for people trying to help them. There is very little we can do.
“That brings a level of frustration, and pain honestly, which has been very hard.”
Ricky: I wanted to ask you what's different about this war? It feels different to others that I’ve been involved in. I think you feel that too, right?
Phil: “Yeah. I've been managing the coverage of conflicts for the last 20 years in senior positions, and this is different for a confluence of causes.
“I think the Israeli Palestinian story pushes buttons that others don't. It’s such a global story, there’s so much history, so much complexity.
“But this particular Israeli Palestinian story arrives on the back obviously of such a horrendous event on October 7 which stirred so much emotion.
“But the other context is populist politics, in Europe and in Israel, so you have politicians really fuelling the debate in a heightened and emotional way.
“Also, tremendous amounts of misinformation on social media. Again, the tech platforms are not being called to account for that.
“We’re all able to follow these conflicts on social media as it has become so much more of a part of the way people converse.
“It’s a forum where people converse in an extremely heightened, emotional, and not in a factual way.
“That leads to this pressure on people to act, and I think it influences decision making.
“The confluence of factors, you know, history, politics and tech, have come together to make this war very different.
“The other thing I would say, and we saw this in the Ukraine too, is the influence of technology and drones.
“There are drones everywhere and therefore no one is safe. No one is safe. People feel all the time that somebody is watching them.
“Could the drones be watching somebody next to them? Is there a target nearby? Are they a target? Does their camera look like a gun to a drone?
“I think that we can underestimate the impact of this non-stop drone activity, this surveillance, above people.”
Ricky: Interesting. Can I just pick up on something you just said? You said the emotional clamour of conversation on social media was leading people to make decisions. Do you mean politicians? Is this a new form of populist influence?
Phil: “It’s having a very negative impact on the political debate, especially in the populist context, because people are being asked to make binary decisions. You know, are you pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian?
“That’s really not the question to be being asked at this time. The question needs nuance, and context.
“There's this phrase that is very relevant for these times, that was coined after September 11 when the world was asked by the US, are you with us or against us?
“It was called the scandalisation of context. This attempt when you say, yes I condemn that, and it’s appalling, but it’s complicated, but no-one wants to hear the but.
“It is simply are you on this side, or are you that side, and again the populist politics plays into that, and social media plays into that.
“If you're looking at TikTok videos, or you're looking at the conversation on X, that’s not a place of nuance. It’s not a place of discussion. It’s not a place of news. It’s a place of anger, and emotion, and commentary.”
Ricky: And it’s your job to try to find a way to bridge that, to bring some common sense to what is an incredibly chaotic, and dangerous place, with your people right in the middle of it. How do you balance that, and how do you sleep at night?
Phil: “I have to say it’s not easy, because if you try to tread the middle ground of fact-based, fact-driven, impartial journalism at this point in time, you will be attacked.
“There is a tendency in the world towards autocracy, towards the far right, towards populism, and anyone in the middle, where a lot of serious journalism is trying to tread the line to explain the world with all its nuance, comes under tremendous attack.
“It can be unpleasant, and particularly unpleasant for your staff. It can ultimately be extremely dangerous for your staff, and lead to real world harms. So it’s a very complex environment in which to work.”
Ricky: You've just been telling me in detail about the very real harms your team in Gaza is experiencing. How do you support them? Is there anything you can do, or just wait for a window to rescue them?
Phil: “Well, we’ve just managed to get some of them out. Just in the past few days, but our work continues.
“We keep doing whatever we can, that includes diplomatic pressure, trying to pressure different governments and so on.
“Then the challenge becomes how do we keep covering the war when we take people out? We need to keep finding new people, keep trying to work the story virtually and also on the ground. You have to keep going.”
Ricky: Interesting. I want to return to tech. Future Media is focused on the collision of Big Media and Big Tech. We've reached the point where a few tech companies represent the vast majority of the wealth of the world. All the spoils are being syphoned out of the media to them. Thousands of jobs and global titles are being vaporised, and the discourse represented by journalism is under unprecedented threat.
What I'm trying to do with Future Media is to open a dialogue for tech and media to talk together to find a sustainable outcome, because a happier world creates a better civic and commercial environment. Everyone wins.
That is what my theme about dollars and sense is about. You are striving to make sense of a world in chaos, and they are making billions of dollars a day. These two things cannot co-exist for much longer.
Do you have any thoughts about that? Have you had any contact with the tech companies?
Phil: “Yes, we’ve had significant conversations, contract discussions, and so on, with the Big Tech platforms over the last five or six years. Some progress, and some frustrations.
“At this point in time, we feel that the Big Tech is pulling back even more from news than in the past. In a sense, it’s too complex for them, it brings them too much trouble.
“And what we’re not seeing, and this is particularly vital when we’re looking at the future AI world, is this sense of societal responsibility.
“And of understanding that when you play such a massive role in the information ecosystem, which of course Big Tech does, that they have a societal obligation to ensure that there is quality content on their platforms.
“There was a flirtation I felt with this idea, from Google and from Meta, in recent years but it feels that they’re backing away from that now.
“That’s extremely worrying. And we need a signal from the AI companies that they see that they have an extremely important role to play in ensuring that there’s a healthy information ecosystem too.
“That healthy information ecosystem comes from making sure you’re taking down deep fakes and using technology to stop bad actors.
“But it also comes from making sure that people have access to good information, good quality journalism, that informs their lives.
“For me, the worrying thing is that I don’t see that from the leadership of these companies, no signs that they feel that sense of responsibility.
“And by the way, they need to know that they do have that responsibility because of their scale. They are morally obligated to have it, because of their scale.
“If they were a small tick technology company, just a business doing their thing in a corner, that's different.
“But their scale, and the impact they have on all our lives, means they have more of a responsibility than they are owning up to.”
Ricky: Do you ever allow yourself a moment of optimism that they might come to realise this? Or do you think it requires wholesale, government and societal change?
Phil: “We're more in a downswing at the moment. There’s been a phase in the past five years where Meta did engage with the news industry, but they’ve literally closed the door and walked away.
“We worked with them on trust and safety, which again is slightly different from news, but they walked away from news. Google is also making signs of back pedalling, and that’s very worrying.
“If you asked me this three or four years ago, I would’ve been more optimistic, because I felt there were more serious interlocutors. Now I don’t feel that.
“So, I do feel that regulation, and laws, and the stick as it were, have to play a role in that, and also in the discussion with the AI companies as well.”
Ricky: What about government, if it’s not too political a question? Where do you think government responsibility lies?
Democracy is at the core of most of our governments. If there's no news, most people and even the tech companies accept there is a risk to democracy.
I just read Microsoft’s 25,000 AI manifesto which goes into detail about how important it is that AI supports facts and democracy as it moves forward. And AFP is also part-funded by the French Government, isn’t it?
Phil: “About a third of our funding comes from the state. Public service media is important. Public money for healthy journalistic enterprise is going to be important.
“We can see there are very few purely commercially independent media companies that are viable in any markets now.
“Funding needs to come from somewhere to irrigate a healthy news ecosystem, so government must play a role in that.
“What is worrying at the moment is the move towards authoritarianism, and the move towards the right, because then everything around journalism is politicised.
“All the politicians across the spectrum who think it’s great to attack the media, undermine the media, question their biases, are doing very lasting damage to the fabric of society.
“And so government has to play a role, and they need to wake up to the damage being done to their societies.
“I take the example of India, which has always had a healthy Press and lively democracy, now you’re seeing pressure on independent media.
“Just doing their job can suddenly trigger a tax investigation, or a corruption investigation, purely aimed at silencing them. That’s extremely worrying.”
Ricky: It’s a tough time. How are we going to find a way to navigate our way to a future where we can continue to do what we do and do it better? And what we do today isn’t any less important now, it’s actually more important than ever.
People's need and hunger for information to make sense of an increasingly fast-paced world is never going to change. Do you think we can get to a place where journalism and tech can co-exist?
Do you think we are going to get there? And if so, why?
Phil: “The irony of this phase of journalism is that there have never been more interesting and more innovative ways to tell stories.
“We had a journalist seriously injured by Israeli tank fire in the south of Lebanon. If that had happened 10 years ago, it would have been written off as the fog of war.
“But what’s amazing in the current tech environment, with live cameras, drones and so on, we now have amazing visual investigators.
“We have journalists working on open-source intelligence who are capable of collecting so much evidence to be able to tell the story of exactly what happened.
“We were able to prove that Israeli tank fire targeted this group of journalists on a hill very clearly.
“There was no outgoing fire around them for 40 minutes, they were all clearly marked as Press.
“It’s an incident that we managed to completely tell on the basis of new story-telling techniques because of the way journalism has evolved.
“So, I take a great deal of optimism from our ability to use technology to tell stories, and that's a positive part also of the AI revolution to come.
“We think about how AI will destroy our industry, and machines will write stories, and it’s legitimate to worry about some of that.
“But the ability to use tech to hold people to account. A lot of those incidents in Gaza and elsewhere will be followed up. There's a lot of evidence out there, and these are things that just didn’t exist in the past, and that gives me optimism.”
Ricky: I'm so pleased to hear you say that partly because I think you need it, because you have a very tough job. When I news edited a major global news brand, it was exhausting, and I spent all my time looking backwards, while hurtling forwards.
I also really respect what you said about recognising the power of AI for journalism. Too much of the narrative, and debate, in our industry is about how we can use AI to do more with less, to save money.
The bigger opportunity is probably in using the technology to expand the way we tell news, into new ways, to remain relevant to our future audiences. Are your staff ready for change, are they ready to innovate?
Phil: “It varies depending on the age group, and the work that they do, and their tech savviness.
“Our message as the leadership is to encourage them to not to be afraid of the future and to understand the value that AI brings.
“One thing we’re stressing all the time is what do we as human beings, as journalists, bring to the AI world?
“The thing that's important is to be there on the ground, to be doing the news gathering process that the machines can’t do. For me, the truth is that we need to be even more out there on the ground.
“The machine can write the story, but if we don’t have the information, if we don't have the data, if we’re not there, then we know nothing.
“In that sense, I see that the future will value even more the base things of what we do, which I think is a positive.”
Ricky: I need to let you get back to your important work, but before I do, I want to say the industry needs leaders like you to remove the stigma of fear, and focus.
I hope you're successful. Phil, thank you for giving me the time.
Since we did this interview, AFP has contacted me to say all its reporters have now been evacuated from the warzone:
“The last one came out last weekend. All are now safe either in Cairo or in Doha, reunited with their families, who we managed to get out several weeks before them.
“The kids are now in school, and all have been provided with health and mental help.”
They are: Mahmud Hams (photographer), Bilal al-Sabbagh (TV), Mohammed Abed (chief photographer); Adel Zaanoun (bureau chief), Mai Yaghi (reporter), Yosef Hassona (TV), Yahya Hassouna (TV), Ahmed Eissa (tech) and Said Khatib (photographer).
Post note: Google just sacked more than 50 workers after they protested over the company’s military ties to the Israeli government.
The Guardian said the firings followed protests at Google offices organised by an alliance of Google and Amazon workers called No Tech for Apartheid.
The group was protesting a $1.2 billion contract called Project Nimbus that they claim makes it “easier for the Israeli government to surveil Palestinians”.
The Guardian continued:
The firings are the largest to occur since Israel’s military campaign in response to the 7 October 2023 terrorist attack by Hamas in which about 1,200 people were killed, and more than 200 hostages were taken.
Since then, more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including more than 14,000 children and 9,670 women.
What’s worth more, dollars or sense? Or can we achieve both? You tell me.