Morning Briefing: Press Gazette’s Future, Deep-Dive Journalism, and the AI Battle
Good morning from the Press Gazette team on this rather busy Thursday, 10 September. It’s one of those days where newsrooms are blurring with a mix of anxiety, excitement, and a lot of caffeine, especially with the Future of Media Awards looming tonight. Yes, the awards where we celebrate the best in UK and global media innovation are happening, and winners will be revealed on our website at about 9:30 pm. It’s a fitting moment to talk about where journalism is heading, because right now the industry is in this weird fork in the road—one path leads to endless AI-generated slop, the other to a stubborn but necessary embrace of human-made quality. And it’s precisely that battle we’re addressing this morning. We’re delighted to announce a new tool, one we’ve been quietly working on, called Made by Humans. It doesn’t win awards with a marketing line; it’s a working piece of tech to help you, the editor, keep the fakes out and the real in. This plugin, built with Flip-Pay, sits inside your content management system, sending a warning when text or pictures look like they’ve been massaged by an AI model. It can run a check on all your copy, and if it passes the test, you can slap a reassuring “Human Made” badge on it, telling your readers you haven’t just fed a prompt into ChatGPT and called it a day. We’ve been using these detection technologies in our investigative work to expose those fake experts, you know, those phantom academics and analysts with AI-generated headshots and no real existence? So far, not a single one has complained, which, in a weird way, gives us confidence the tool works. Of course, this isn’t a silver bullet; it doesn’t replace the editorial judgment of an experienced human. But it supports that judgment, gives it an extra pair of eyes that constantly scans for the telltale signs of manipulation.
Meanwhile, the “war is hell, but great for business” line is never comfortable, yet we have to be realistic. That’s exactly why Sky News has thrown its hat into a niche market—defence—for its first exclusive paid-for app. At £14.99 per month, that’s effectively five times the price of their podcast bundle, which for a consumer trying to stay informed is quite a leap of faith. The thinking is that a deep, vertical, reliable source of defence news can command that premium. Sky’s executive editor Jonathan Levy explained it’s all part of the Sky 2030 strategy, a plan that’s all about going “narrow yet deep” to build a sustainable, crown-jewel service that loyal readers will pay for, even if the overall audience shrinks. It’s a smart move if you can afford it, but it does feel a bit like the industry is splitting into two clusters: the ones who throw everything at scale and ad revenue, and the ones who pivot to highly engaged, niche audiences with money. The defence app is a example of that pivot. Yet we should also look at the broader, more sobering picture. Of the top-50 traffic rankings for US news websites, 41 publications are down year on year in August. Newsweek, Daily Mail, and Business Insider were among the most dramatic fallers. If media is scaling toward a cliff, those numbers are the parking brake. They help explain why so many newsrooms are abandoning ad-funded, scale-dependent models, trying instead to build small but loyal cohorts of readers who are willing to pay for content they actually love—content that they can trust, content with a face and a name behind it, not just a bit that scrapes the wire and spits out a 500-word piece. It’s a tough spot but also a clarifying signal in an decade that has been adrift.
Other media efficiency harnesses are also race of the small. Responsive, experimentative. Washington Post has finally said it expects to break even this year after years of loss, and permanently installed Jeff D’Onofrio as CEO and publisher—a rare spot of stable. Channel 4, meanwhile, has just announced it’s cutting 340 jobs, which is—what, a 28% reduction by the end of the year—a cruel but never boring Industry. Because now we’re seeing the brutal, economic reality of television, not just text. The Irish News collected that its digital subscriptions increased 32% year-on-year in the first half of 2026, and have 19,962 combined print circulation and paid digital subscriptions. Yes, it’s small potatoes in giant terms, but it’s an vital, heartbeat reminder that regional and local communities will always be a core part of media sustainability. And it continues: Beehiiv has added a trio of real seasoned journalists to its Media Collective—Peter Greenberg from CBS, Dana Harris-Bridson from Indiewire, and tech/politics reporter David Covucci—pushing that collective further. The collective is unique: it lets journalists run on a platform with no platform fees, offers them insurance and pre-publication review if needed. The Met Police meanwhile, are trying to “seek obtaining relevant footage relating to the broadcast” of a Channel 4 undercover investigation, which apparently shows senior Reform UK figures discussing breaking the law on party donations. That’s a serious viral, and it tells us the power of the human story remains in investigations. London newsroom is still under criticism over freelance rates and unpaid internships, food and drink brand is bucking the trend with search traffic and digital growth, and everyone praises someone else for supporting younger reporters and fostering a strong team culture—probably because that’s the only way we survive the AI era. And there’s even a nice note about Reuters using digitisation and AI tools to enhance access to ITN footage, a clever merging of the new with the old.
Now we get to the final, big story: we have behind-the-scenes wisdom from a veteran who has watched every wave of digital disruption since the mid-1990s, Brian Alvey, co-owner of WordPress VIP, and he tells it like it is. When he says, “AI this wave is up there with fire, steam engines, electricity and refrigeration,” it’s not just vague; it’s a bloodline. In his words, AI is fundamentally different from the web, different from social, maybe more profound than the auto motion. He’s entering a carefully set world: publishers must embrace AI to automate those boring workflows—tax, contentesting, the routine enough stuff—that causes bottleneck speed, but then they absolutely must avoid the disease of “AI slop” and human slop that floods the space with bland, generic generated content. They also have to pull up the satisfaction the direct and owned relationships that you have with your audience—your website, your email lists, not the social media platforms where you are only a tenant. In other words, don’t let the algorithm crowd out the human connection. Because the only defense against the onslaught of robots is ironically and foundationally human: the trust of a reader, the curated identity of a newsroom, the author’s name on a byline.
That’s the nub of it. All the stories we’re seeing today, the launches, the deep-dives, the fire-fighting, they’re all variations on the same theme: be real, be specific, and be useful to a human within a world where infinite is content generated. We’re not saying everything is rosy—the line between invention and slop still gets blurry, and an app with a loyalty card is not a magic bullet. But there’s a richness in these challenges. The Washington Post may balance its ledger, but the bigger victory will be in the boards and in the readers who notice the difference between a piece which was written with a human rhythm and a one that was fed into a machine learning model. That’s why the Made by Human tool is a small step—you get a badge, you show your skeleton, but it’s a badge of accountability, a small mark. It’s about saying, “We care, and we want you to know we didn’t take the shortcut.” At the end of the day, as the old media barons would have said, content is king, but the human silent partner behind it is the true emperor. Tonight, as the Future of Media Awards are handed out, we won’t just be celebrating the big winners; we’ll be celebrating the entire future—with all its uneven edges, its fears, and its huge, repeated, but ultimately human moments. Stay tuned to Press Gazette for the results, and in the meantime, keep the AI-detection algorithms off your back, and keep writing like a human. After all, it’s the only edge we’ve got left.