Embracing the meteor: why publishers should see AI as a friend, not an enemy
“Artificial intelligence is a meteor heading our way,” says Ivan Massow, co-founder of Noah Wire Services, a company that’s helping to revolutionise niche and B2B businesses through AI-driven publishing solutions. “It’s an extinction-level event when it comes to business and the entire agricultural revolution of 200 years put into two years. But it can be a friend to businesses if they embrace it.”
Massow has developed technology to help media businesses do just that. Noah scans 4.6m press releases and events from 1.2m sources in 73 languages, alerting publishers instantly to news with citations, tailored to their niche interests.
The content provided by Noah is not AI-generated, but 100% real news, delivered in real time. The company’s technology locates story ideas and data for magazines, newsletters, and market intelligence – often before it surfaces elsewhere. Noah provides a draft that can be used as is, can be tweaked by journalists or used as the base for a more elaborate story.
One of their most recent clients is FIPP, with Noah allowing the global trade association to find the most up-to-date media news stories and deliver it (marked FIPP ai) to its members on its website.
We caught up with Massow to talk about the ways Noah Wire Services is using AI to help level the playing field for B2B and niche publications.
How does Noah collect the data it passes on to publishers?
“We connect via API and RSS feeds to all the press release distribution houses and also monitor everything that goes on in the world in literally every country. We read it all using AI so that we actually understand what it’s about. We’re not learning from that data. We just work out what news is everywhere and what it’s about and try to intelligently understand it rather than using keyword searches or trending algorithms. We are transforming old search technology with the power of AI, to make this incredibly efficient way of searching for news in your vertical.”
What have been some of the challenges you faced?
“It’s incredibly complicated, more so than I ever realised, and sometimes we’ve come across total brick walls. And then we solve it somehow. More often it’s to do with finding a way in which people can get what they want out of our system. The biggest challenge was taking a natural language prompt and finding the stuff you need. So, if you’ve read millions of pieces of news, news releases and press releases and you’re an LGBT magazine and want LGBT friendly restaurants in, say, Barcelona, you would have to run these vast word searches. And it didn’t work, because sometimes you would search using the word ‘restaurant’, but the information out there would have the word ‘eatery’. And, so, we had to find a much more intelligent way of finding that data. And now we do, because otherwise it was just too tricky for people to use our systems.”
How does Noah’s technology help B2B and niche publications in particular?
“We effectively want to become the Reuters of the B2B market. We want to give B2B publications the same sort of power that big posh publications have that pay hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, to Reuters when they want to get their financial data. So, some of our publications are incredibly niche. They do things like packaging news, or engineering. For instance, you have New Civil Engineer magazine who has been squeezed by lower advertising costs and has gone from being paper-based to more or less totally online. They have gone from the heady days of the 90s when they had teams of 50 journalists, down to 3 or 4 journalists. Those journalists are spending their entire time trying to find all the interesting news and they hardly have time to write proper journalism. The other problem is how do you remain relevant with only three or four people writing up news to, say, a bridging engineer, a tunnelling engineer, a marine engineer, a port engineer, an airport engineer. Using our technology, they can speak to all their verticals. Before they couldn’t find any news on port engineering. Now, every day, there’ll be at least one, maybe up to seven. So, one journalist can find the story while the others can go and do the proper writing, like interviewing the port engineer.”
When you first pitch Noah to publishers are they open to the idea, or do you have to convince them?
“New Civil Engineer is owned by Emap and, across their titles, others are becoming less frightened of me. When I first went in, it was like the Grim Reaper was walking into the room – like I was wearing black. So now they’re seeing that their publications are doing better – they’ve got more readers and none of those journalists are writing up the small news. They want to be doing the big either investigative or proper interviews. They want to do something beautiful that they can be proud of. They don’t want to be writing up press releases. This is what they used to give to the juniors.
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One of the big discussions surrounding AI is how humans can use technology to their benefit without it completely taking over. Do you see the approach Noah takes as a template of how journalists and AI can effectively join forces?
“Yes, that is my hope – just to speed up a journalists’ research time and make sure they don’t miss anything. The big complaint we were dealing with to begin with – what journalists and especially editors were telling me – is that they have thousands of emails, WhatsApp messages, LinkedIn messages every day, but when they needed to find a story, they couldn’t find it in their inbox. So that’s what we hope to deal with. We read it all and then we tell them exactly what’s in their verticals. We speed up the boring part. Most journalists use ChatGPT all the time, if not just for research – that’s a given. But to really embrace it, they’re firms not just staff need to look at ways in which they can completely revolutionise their business. I haven’t spoken to any editors and publishers who want to get rid of staff. They want their product to compete better.”
FIPP has recently begun exploring AI sourced content through a partnership with Noah Services. We believe that, when leveraged thoughtfully and transparently, AI can be a powerful tool for content creation and a valuable asset to publishers worldwide. To ensure transparency, articles sourced by Noah Wire for FIPP are labelled with the “FIPP ai” tag. You can see some examples here.
