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AI image of police in dresses fools publishers | UFOs help fuel NewsNation on Youtube
Plus what Google's agentic and AI Mode changes mean for publishers and Reuters moves into investigative documentaries
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Welcome to the Press Gazette Future of Media US newsletter on Friday, 29 May.
👗 The New York Post, Daily Mail and several UK national publishers all reported as fact a story that Thai police had dressed up in drag to go undercover for a suspected drug dealer’s arrest.
The problem is that this wasn’t true. It was a normal undercover operation, with no police officers wearing dresses.
The story was based on a Facebook post from the Thai police station involved, which shared an image of the officers in dresses. It turned out that this image had been manipulated using AI.
Let this be a reminder: even stories that appear to be dropped into our collective laps might nowadays have the misleading hand of AI involved in them.
We need to check everything or it will just get embarrassing and have a serious cumulative impact on trust in the media (which, as we know, is already low).
At the time of writing, there’s been a mix of outlets taking the story down altogether and others now reporting that it had been a hoax (with varying levels of admission as to their own culpability).
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👾 That Thai police story feels like it’s from an earlier, Google-driven era of publishing that you’d think we would have moved out of now.
For many years, online publishing decisions were driven by quantity and speed to get Google and Facebook clicks and not get left behind competitors. A quick story sourced from a police Facebook page like this would have been a no-brainer.
But now the value exchange is completely different. Google is not sending traffic in the way it once was.
One SEO expert said this means Google’s traditional search page will “handle the initial click, only to aggressively lock users into a zero-click loop the second they ask a clarifying question”.
The other news is that Google is planning to make it so AI agents can effectively do your searching for you.
Other SEO experts told us these changes are unlikely to be as impactful as the arrival of AI Overviews but that equally it’s “one more nail in the coffin”.
At least AI Mode isn’t yet the default search experience, which would be an even bigger blow for publishers.
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📺 Cable broadcaster NewsNation is rapidly expanding its output on Youtube.
The channel has gone beyond replicating its TV output to creating a number of YouTube native shows.
The proof is in the numbers: in Press Gazette’s recent ranking of the biggest English-language news publishers on YouTube, NewsNation had more views in its channel history, despite only being live since 2020, than several of the biggest news organisations who have been on the platform since 2006.
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