This past week, Axel Springer, the German media conglomerate that owns Politico and Business Insider, signed a “multiyear licensing deal” with OpenAI worth tens of millions of euros. According to the company, the deal “will enrich users’ experience with ChatGPT by adding recent and authoritative content on a wide variety of topics,” in the form of “summaries of selected global news content.” Its stories will also be used to train OpenAI’s models. Now, as small startups, open source projects, and tech giants alike start to close the basic performance gap with OpenAI, and simultaneously start to figure out what their users, customers or potential customers actually find valuable — the subject of training data is back at the center of the conversation around AI.

TVNewsCheck’s annual conference in New York last week charted the forward trajectory of news technology and storytelling. See all the videos of the sessions here.

Constant data allows stations to iterate on the fly on their streaming and FAST channels, executives from CBS News & Stations, Fox Television Stations and Gray Television told a NewsTECHForum audience last week.

New research from Vizrt finds that 64% of Gen Z (64%) consume news on social media, showing the necessity for broadcasters to consider how to harness viewers’ attention on these platforms with live production solutions.

Executives from Scripps News, Gray Television, NBCUniversal Local and ProPublica told a NewsTECHForum panel last week that their cross-group collaborations, as well as with organizations outside their own, have become critical to delivering on their news mission and their viability.

New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include openings for a general manager, creative services director, a news anchor/reporter, nightside news reporter, video technical support coordinator, investigative reporter, integrated digital specialist and local sales manager.

AI is making it easy for anyone to create propaganda outlets, producing content that can be hard to differentiate from real news.

It’s been a long-held suspicion by many people: that smartphones and smart speakers are listening in on their private conversations for various reasons. Now one company — Atlanta-based Cox Media Group — has revealed that yes, your devices are listening to you.

Leading technology executives from the BBC, AP, the Partnership on AI and Adobe said news organizations won’t be able to avoid the profound changes being ushered in by generative AI, and the time to frame up ethical and safe guidelines for its use is today.

TVNewsCheck Editor at Large Harry Jessell and Editor Michael Depp look back over an eventful year in broadcast business news and ahead to the steepest challenges it will confront in 2024. A full transcript of the conversation is included. [Ed. note: Jessell erroneously noted Nexstar stock took a 32% hit, when it actually lost 32 points. Since this episode was recorded, its stock rebounded to 155 yesterday.]

Big U.S. companies including Walt Disney and Comcast increased advertising spending on Instagram after pausing commercials on X last month, according to Sensor Tower, as marketers flee the Elon Musk-owned social media platform over antisemitic content. Disney (DIS.N) and Comcast (CMCSA.O) lifted their U.S. spending on the app owned by Meta (META.O) by 40% and about 6% respectively in the two weeks from Nov. 20, Sensor Tower data showed. Paramount (PARA.O), meanwhile, tripled its spending on Snapchat.

The tech giant’s AI-powered search product is being tested on roughly 10 million users; publishers rely on Google for traffic and see a gathering storm.

Artificial intelligence went mainstream in 2023 — it was a long time coming yet has a long way to go for the technology to match people’s science fiction fantasies of human-like machines. Catalyzing a year of AI fanfare was ChatGPT. The chatbot gave the world a glimpse of recent advances in computer science even if not everyone figured out quite how it works or what to do with it. (Image: Matt Rourke/AP)

Three stations serving the New York City metropolitan area, WPIX (CW), WABC-TV (ABC) and WXTV-DT (Univision), have begun broadcasting in the format.

Tech leaders from CNBC, Fox Television Stations, Gray Television and Sinclair told a NewsTECHForum audience earlier this week that flexibility and speed are driving their implementation of a range of new technology, from LED displays and AR graphics to more expansive remote production and use of the cloud.

Content from at least 30 channels in the network drew nearly 120 million views and 730,000 subscribers since last year.

A series of television stations serving the El Paso market in Texas have begun broadcasting with NextGen TV, a new digital broadcast technology. The launch includes KVIA-TV (ABC), KDBC-TV (CBS), KTSM-TV (NBC), KFOX-TV (FOX) and KTDO (Telemundo).

News-publishing giant Axel Springer has inked a multiyear licensing deal with ChatGPT creator OpenAI, a significant milestone as media companies push for compensation for the use of their content in artificial-intelligence tools. Under the agreement, OpenAI will pay to use content from Axel Springer publications, which include Politico and Business Insider in the U.S. and European properties Bild and Welt, to populate answers in ChatGPT and train its AI tools.

The program will roll out next year, according to executives.