By Guest Blog
At the Financial Times we champion the coverage of innovation both in the newsroom and as a business. This past year, we saw our reporters not only examine the capabilities of generative AI journalistically, but experiment with its efficiencies themselves. We sought to understand the extent to which generative AI and AI assisted technology could be used to help journalists with text and image analysis, transcribing and data mining.
There’s no denying that AI has the potential to be a powerful tool, with its ability to revolutionise our way of working yet to truly be unlocked. However, as our editor, Roula Khalaf made clear in a letter to our readers, FT journalism in this new AI age will continue to be written and reported with trust and transparency by the humans who continue to be the best in their fields.
We always place our readers' interests first, with principles of trust, transparency and privacy guiding us as our north star. In 2002 we were the first publisher to launch a subscription model that encouraged our users to subscribe for access to our content online. This decision created the mixed advertising and subscription revenue model that helps fund the quality journalism for which we are known. With this foundation, we have been able to build a unique ecosystem that benefits both advertisers and our 1.3 million subscribers.
By retaining declared first party data from our subscribers to build comprehensive and reliable user profiles, we have been able to confidently combat the removal of third party cookies that many advertisers feared would make it harder for them to connect with audiences. We have invested in creating innovative solutions such as our frequency optimization tool, which directly serves relevant and timely advertisements to audiences. The tool works to empower advertisers with the capability to measure and fine-tune ad exposure across the entire FT ecosystem. Similarly, we’ve also launched our bespoke first-party context classification model, which uses keyword matching across the FT’s editorial content. This first-party context classification model is moderated by our editorial team, to ensure content is tagged correctly, ensuring contextual advertising is accurately served.
Interested in learning more about the FT’s capabilities? Book a meeting with a member of our team at MWC to find out more.