Why FT Strategies Has Partnered With An AI Wire Service

FT Strategies, the media consulting arm of the Financial Times, is partnering with NoahWire, an AI-powered newswire and content management system, which will recommend the service to some of its partner newsrooms.

Why? FT Strategies says it opens up the possibility for publishers to quickly build out new verticals or enhance their capacities for personalization by increasing the sheer volume of content they produce. They’ve been referring to it as “NewsCAAS”: news content as a service.

“We can see really good application for many of our clients,” Lisa MacLeod, a director at FT Strategies, told AMO. “It solves a lot of their problems: not least recency, frequency and volume of content for revenue growth and product innovation.”  

NoahWire, currently being used by around 400 customers, uses a tangle of AI tools to comb the internet and populate feeds of stories that are both relevant to each user’s specific needs and would otherwise go undiscovered. It also allows users to quickly spin up articles using generative AI.

NoahWire leans heavily for discovery on niche press releases and publisher content—which has prompted allegations, as with many other AI tools, that it is little more than a high-tech plagiarism machine. But FT Strategies sees the tool as an opportunity to help publishers find new revenue streams. MacLeod said:

We will introduce a new model—fractional journalism—where experienced editors and journalists work flexibly across multiple titles and create output for audience demand… The venture will operate alongside clients’ editorial teams to generate new sources of revenue, offering a future where technology reliably supports quality journalism, new revenue streams and accelerates product innovation.

FT Strategies advises media companies on how they can improve their businesses, focusing on factors like subscriber acquisition and retention, revenue diversification and innovation. The organization charges for its services, but also draws a significant portion of its revenue from a partnership with the Google News Initiative. Although FT Strategies grew out of and still works with the Financial Times, the business paper itself is not part of the agreement with NoahWire.

NoahWire has already been the subject of some publisher backlash: Tomorrow’s Publisher, a publication about the future of news owned by HBM Advisory, a media consulting business, was accused by Press Gazette of using their content without permission. (The NoahWire-enabled outlet said that where it had referred to other publishers, that had been because its human editor was inserting references, as any good newsroom would.)

Editor’s Note: After publication, Alan Hunter from HBM Advisory reached out to offer clarity on the point in the above paragraph regarding established publishers using their content without credit or permission. The “referred to established publishers” was actually only Press Gazette and any mention of them in the story was credited by a human editor and that any animosity between Press Gazette and Tomorrow’s Publisher no longer exists.

NoahWire’s creator, British entrepreneur Ivan Massow, says that what the tool does is no different from the behavior of the numerous digital publishers who rewrite rivals’ work. And he notes that partner newsrooms can add links and credit from the bibliography directly into the copy.

Whichever argument you sympathize with, the fact is NoahWire is here and—with FT Strategies set to start recommending it to some of its partner newsrooms—publishers are going to have to learn to live with it.

Personalization

The pair who created Tomorrow’s Publisher, media consultants Alan Hunter and Michael Brunt, are also involved in the FT Strategies deal. They will “take the lead on editorial and journalistic standards” for clients who opt to use NoahWire, MacLeod said.

The partnership does not mean that NoahWire will be provided as standard to all FT Strategies clients—the organization will begin recommending the service where it sees a fit.

MacLeod told AMO the partnership would offer FT Strategies’ clients “a combination of FT Strategies content strategy expertise with specialist AI-generated feeds and top-level editorial oversight to increase revenue opportunities.” The consultancy, she said, “will leverage its content strategy methodology to identify promising underserved niches that can be addressed by Noah’s news discovery tools.”

A key part of the value FT Strategies sees in NoahWire comes from the possibilities it offers for personalization. At present, publishers often personalize content by asking a user their interests and then presenting them with whatever relevant content they produce—but this can produce very thin verticals. At time of writing on the BBC News app, for example, any users with “LGBT” and “journalism” selected as interests will see four stories from the last day on the former topic, but four in the past two months on the latter.

Massow argues that publishers need to adopt tech like his soon because there are organizations out there with a lot of money and far fewer editorial scruples who see value in running their own cheap AI-enabled trade publications. 

“The reason why publishers need to hurry up is this: this does enable other people to create Cycling Weekly very, very easily… there are people who do have the readers—like associations, or big businesses—who are interested in lead gen,” Massow said. 

AMO Tried It Out

When you set up a NoahWire account it asks you what sort of stories you’re interested in and the maximum number you’d like each day. After a half-hour delay to populate the feed, the service gives the user daily updates on their desired beat. 

I asked for: “Business news affecting the sushi industry. If it might be of interest to sushi restaurateurs, I want to hear about it.” 

I got a genuinely interesting stream of information: the FDA had just approved the first-ever lab-grown sushi for use in restaurants. A week earlier, restaurant SushiDog received £1.3 million ($1.8 million) from an investment firm to expand its number of restaurants. There was even a trend story claiming London’s sushi scene was shifting from quick meals “towards authentic, mindful dining.”

These stories and many more were presented as headlines alongside bullet point summaries. If I was interested in one, I could ask the tool to fetch a generatively-written draft based on the source web pages.

Massow says NoahWire indexes press and government releases, markets and exchanges to fetch its information, but most of the sources I saw in my sushi feed were publishers.

The lab-grown sushi story aggregated sources including B2B titles Food Processing, Food & Beverage Business and Salmon Business, as well as Smithsonian magazine, all named in a bibliography rather than in the text itself. The SushiDog investment story was mostly written using the investment firm’s own press releases, but the NoahWire CMS named the UK’s Northern Echo newspaper as the originating publication.

The story about trends in London sushi, meanwhile, appeared to have been based wholly on an unbylined (and uncredited) article on London Daily News, which quoted no experts, chefs or London residents and linked three times to a specific sushi restaurant’s website. In the bibliography, the story was supported by some tangentially related articles from publishers like the FT and Forbes on the general popularity of sushi and, separately, slow dining in London. 

NoahWire assesses the quality of each story it provides the user: in this case it gave its work a source reliability score of 4 out of 10 and a plausibility score of 7 out of 10.

NoahWire is instructed to only pull from un-paywalled publications, and is supposed to attribute any quotes it incorporates from them to their source publications. Massow said that it respects the scraping preferences expressed in publishers’ robots.txt pages.

I didn’t see any direct quotes during my sushi reporting, but most publishers cited didn’t appear to be blocking any bots—with the exception of The Northern Echo, which had a series of exclusions listed in its robots.txt page. Massow said that this was because the Echo, part of Gannett’s UK subsidiary Newsquest, is not specifically blocking NoahBot, which NoahWire uses to scour the internet. (The service details how to opt-out of indexing on its website.)

The FT appeared in a story bibliography because NoahWire has licensing agreements in place that mean it can scrape some premium publishers, Massow said.

“That’s exactly why we can’t break the rules,” he said. “Our clients are the policemen… as you can imagine, I can’t fuck the FT over.”

But he acknowledged that the system does sometimes break its rules.

“This is something that will improve,” he said. “It’s a million times better than it was.”

Real Life Example

British publisher Emap, which produces B2B titles like Nursing Times, Construction News and Retail Jeweller, uses NoahWire. One of its brands, New Civil Engineer, has been the sandbox for using the service in a B2B context, and Massow claimed the title is now able to publish far more content on certain niches because of NoahWire’s discoverability feature.

“Bridge engineering, marine engineering, airport engineering… I find 20, 30 articles a day—they were lucky to find one a month before I came along. They just didn’t get the press releases, because it’s obscure stuff.”

Neither New Civil Engineer’s editors nor the chief executive of Emap’s parent company Metropolis responded to requests for interviews about their use of NoahWire. Massow said that New Civil Engineer is selling sponsorship against some of the new topical newsletters it has created using the AI wire. It is unclear whether Emap uses AI to write stories, something Massow says is entirely up to the publisher. The website does not appear to disclose its use of AI to readers.

Editor’s Note: We clarified that Massow claims the title can publish more content because of NoahWire’s discoverability feature and that it is unclear whether Emap uses AI to write any stories.

Reset Media, the young publisher behind decarbonisation-focused titles like EVLife and Climate Solutions News, is using NoahWire, and founder Dominic Shales, said it tends to hallucinate far less than ChatGPT. 

“I still check on quotes,” Shales said. Most of the stories he publishes using NoahWire are based on news stories, and he said he hadn’t yet seen it pulling from paywalled publishers.

“If it does come up with something that is, for example, an interview that another publication has run… in my experience, it credits the source of that. And then, if I were going to run it, I would also credit the source and link back to the original interview.”

“What I generally use it for is stuff that’s generally widely accessible, for example a car launch or something like that, where there’s company information, but then there’s lots of different media outlets also covering it—and the coverage is broadly similar, to be honest.”

Currently, Massow is building a news site for a group of animal pharmaceutical consultants. “Money is no object to them. And they will get proper writers. But now they know they have the content with me—they can know they can fill their pages,” he said. 

In fact, he claims, publishers may not even need journalists in the traditional sense any more. “A different kind of person can get into journalism now—they don’t have to be wordsmiths anymore,” Massow said. “You can switch to having an expert in engineering rather than a writer who’s really good with words.”

These AI-assisted experts make for better personalities around which communities and events can be built versus people whose main qualification is being good at writing. At least, that’s what Massow thinks. 

“I think, I feel, I’m on the right thing,” he said. “But I can’t convince the people who really need it the most.”