The Washington Post is hardly alone in experimenting with AI news products. Yahoo announced earlier this week that it was rolling out almost the exact same product as the Post. Business Insider announced it was rolling out a tool for generating news stories overseen by human editors; the publication has published fewer than a dozen AI-written stories, one of which included a minor correction. Semafor has experimented with internal AI projects aimed at improving newsroom productivity.
Some outlets’ AI products have received backlash from news consumers, while others seem to have gone over without much protest. In an interview with Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast, New Yorker editor David Remnick said the magazine’s readers have largely embraced the magazine’s AI-read audio longreads, which they can turn around much quicker than a host-read narrated article.
It remains to be seen whether a large number of people will begin to consume AI podcasts at a scale that can be profitable for media companies; at this point, it seems like the products are strange and buggy. (Eerily, the Post’s AI podcasts also include fake podcast tics, such as ums, uhs, and prolonged pauses, simulating the speech patterns of podcasters.)
But the rocky rollout represents a larger problem for the Post. The paper’s push into new products, including an opinion news aggregator launched this week, is trying to solve an audience problem with new widgets for which there’s little clear demand.
Since owner Jeff Bezos’ decision not to allow the paper to endorse Kamala Harris in the 2024 election triggered a massive backlash to the Post among its own subscribers, the paper has been attempting to reposition itself, making its opinion page more centrist and shedding some of its vehemently anti-Trump voices.
The ideological shift has driven its old subscribers, many of whom signed up for its antagonistic stance towards President Donald Trump in his first administration, into the arms of competitors like The Atlantic, The Bulwark, and The Guardian, who have poached the paper’s journalists and writers and seen a surge in subscribers that at times has coincided directly with negative news cycles about the Post.