The second area where humans can do a better job than an LLM: real life storytelling
One of the best parts of my last year working at Bauer was getting to know the team which works on real life content. Real life, sometimes called true life or reader stories, focuses on stories derived from ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events – usually not the national news, but their own personal dramas.
There are many magazines whose focus is entirely real life, and you will have seen them on many supermarket shelves with multiple cover lines, often focused on shocking stories. But the key part about them, and the thing which differentiates them from tabloids, is that the stories are those told by the people involved in the drama. It's not third-person reporting: it is focused on first-person experience.
And now a confession: before I worked with that team, and I suspect like many journalists, my view of real life wasn't all that positive. I considered it to be cheap, and pretty low-end.
How wrong I was.
I worked with the team creating the content to implement a new planning system, which needed to capture every part of their story creation process. What I learned was how thorough their process is, and how much human care and attention they had to take when telling what were sometimes traumatic stories, working directly with the subject.
I don't think I have ever worked with a team that had a more thorough legal and fact-checking process, and I came away a bit awed by them. I ended up thinking that if all journalists operated with their level of professionalism and standards, the industry would be in a much better place.
Bringing the human into the story
Where does AI come into this? I talked earlier this week about how injecting more of a human, emotional element into reviews was a way to make them stand out in a field that AI is going to disrupt. Real life is a perfect example of a topic where it's difficult to ever see a large learning model (LLM) being able to create the story.
An LLM can't do an interview, and because of the incredible sensitivity of the stories being told, I wouldn't trust a machine to write even a first draft of it. But there are aspects of the way that real life content is created which, I believe, can give lessons to every kind of journalism.
First, whatever your topic area, telling the human story is always going to be something that humans do better than machines. Build emotion and empathy into telling a personal story, rather than relating just the facts. That doesn’t just mean technique: yes, use emotional arcs, and yes, show don’t tell, but technique alone won’t bring across the way that the subject felt when going through whatever event they are describing.
On a three-to-five-year timescale, I would be looking to shift human journalists into telling more of these kinds of stories, regardless of what your topic area. Remember that humans are empathic storytellers and focus on the emotion of the story. So, think about how you can change your content strategy to be more focused on the human story.
The process is the practice
Don't, though, be tempted to work on these kinds of stories with an ad hoc process. Process is important in journalism – but it is crucial if you want to do real life stories well.
To do this well, make sure you codify and document the process to a high level. Documenting the process is often something that journalists can push back on because it's considered stifling creativity, but that's not true at all. In fact, a documented process allows you to free up time to focus on creative tasks, rather than reinventing the wheel with every story.
And that is where you can start to think about how to use LLMs to streamline your processes and make them move faster. But this is a business process problem, rather than a creative one.
For example, if your pitching process involves creating a summary of a story, an LLM can write the summary – there's no need to waste a human's time to do it. Can you write a specialist GPT to check if a story has been used before? Can you use an LLM to query your content management system for similar stories you may have run in the past?
If you are thinking about how to be a successful publisher in three to five years, you need to be looking at the process. If it's not documented – in detail – then make sure that's done. That can't be a one-off because a process is never a single entity fixed for all time. New technologies and new more efficient practices will come along, and someone needs to be responsible within your organisation for it.
So, ask yourself some questions:
Who, in my company, is directly responsible for documenting and maintaining our editorial and audience development processes?
Where are they documented?
How often are they maintained?
Are they transparent? Does everyone know where they are?
Once you have a fully documented process, you can start to interrogate it for points where AI can be used to speed things up, where using natural language queries to a specialist model can improve the work. That way, you can leave humans to do the work they're best at: emotion, and storytelling.
