Digital transformation is about revenue diversification: James Hewes, FIPP

James Hewes is glad to be back in India. The President of FIPP, the global trade association for the magazine media industry, was in Delhi for the Indian Magazine Congress, which took place after a gap of four years. One of the keynote speakers at the event who addressed perspectives on the industry from around the world, Hewes spoke to exchange4media about the importance of magazine associations, global trends, and the looming presence of Artificial Intelligence.

Saying that it was great to come back after such a long time, Hewes elaborated, “There's always a worry when an event finishes, gets postponed or pauses for whatever reason that it won't come back. With our global perspective, it's so important that there are events like this around the world. And it's also important that the local industry supports their publishing associations.”

Hewes remarked that there's a danger that sometimes such events are just viewed as a cost, and people don't really understand the value of the community that they bring and the work that they do. “So, events like this are good because it provides everybody with a good reminder of the benefit of having a good strong association.”

Indeed, it’s become all the more crucial to preserve and promote these associations in a media landscape that has become diluted by the presence of influencers and AI tools like ChatGPT.

“I read a really good book called The AI Delusion (by Gary Smith), and it was an AI scientist explaining about AI and how it works. It's not a brain and it's not magic, it doesn't have the capacity of thinking, and it never will; it's not self-aware. AI's just a computer program. Just a very good, very well programmed computer program, with a bit of code and algorithms that's taking information and analyzing it very, very quickly and very, very cleverly, and spitting out what it finds in a new form,” asserts Hewes.

He says we must not fall into the delusion of thinking that it replaces a human. “It replaces the boring things that humans shouldn't be doing. I don't mean to be rude about it, as in terms of everybody was an intern once. I mean AI can do more repetitive stuff, like writing short copy for marketing would be a good example, and other things that nobody enjoys. Chat GPG Pro probably does that just as well as a human and it would save a human a boring job so they can do something more interesting.”

And that of course brings us to the human element itself.

“I think people pay for journalism because they're paying for trust, and they're paying for quality. That combination is what sets aside good human journalism from machine journalism or content that has been created by people who are not professionals,” says Hewes.

“It's the same issue that I have with influencers and the reason we don't talk about influencers very much in our talks and in our work, is because these people are not journalists. I use the analogy of plumbing. I wouldn't come to a plumber’s house and pretend to be a plumber just because I've watched a video on YouTube about how to fix the drains, right?”

But, as Hewes points out, an influencer seems to think that journalism is something that anybody can do well. “There's a reason journalism schools exist and there's a reason why a lot of time and money is spent getting journalism degrees because it's a job, it's a craft. Will we have AI pick up elements of that craft and replicate it? Yes. Is it going to find widespread usage by serious publishers? I hope not. I don't think so. In fact you can ask ChatGPT itself, it's actually quite honest about itself. It will tell you it's not self-aware, and will tell you it's not there to have opinions. It's not there to predict the future. It's there to synthesize what's already been. So our job is to make that leap into things that it can't do.”

That being said, Hewes also notes that there's no journalism without paid journalists. “So you've got to figure out a way to make journalism pay, otherwise, it's just not going to exist. For publishers, that really means only one of three things. You either get an advertiser to pay for it (but there's a limit on that, as we know), or you get the consumer to pay for it directly in the form of a paywall or a subscription or you get the consumer to pay for it indirectly in the form of getting them to carry out a transaction as a result of your content and you take a share of it. There isn't really any other way to make money from this stuff. The rest are all variations on that theme.”

Hewes concludes that digital transformation is not about swapping dependence on print advertising for dependence on digital advertising or a paywall or whatever. “Digital transformation is about revenue diversification, having four or five ways to make money so that you're insulated from the century of crises that we live in where you don't know what the next shock is going to be, which is going to destroy one of those revenue streams. You've got to insulate yourself against that risk.”