“Don’t consider yourself passive in this process,” Broughton told participants at our Paris AI Forum. “Publishers still have agency here. We still have creativity here. We still own the journalism right now. And we can shape that as we go forward.”

“You might as well love the thing that you are transforming the world into,” he added. “You might as well get excited about it.”

Broughton acknowledged that is not always a popular view among news publishers, who sometimes find his thinking to be “too hopeful somehow.”

“I don’t see anything wrong about being hopeful for that future because there’s a great danger for publishers that we miss the opportunity. And we miss the chance to shape the next generation of journalism,” he said.

The Independent is not a brand that misses out on opportunities, or lacks the nerve to make large bets.

Ditching print, and doubling down on digital has paid big dividends

Nearly 10 years ago, the publisher completely cut out print, closing the print operations of The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, and selling off The I newspaper. Instead of taking the more traditional transformation route, The Independent chose to focus solely on the digital opportunities in front of them.

“We were a print business back then, but we saw so much opportunity in digital that we decided not to just play defense on print for the next decade, and we actually closed our newspapers,” Broughton said.

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“We worked with the technology,” he said. “We knew we couldn’t stop it. We went with it. And we decided to be active in how we shaped that future for ourselves, and it worked. In the last five years, we’ve doubled revenue, we’ve doubled profit, we’ve doubled the amount we spend on our newsroom.”

WAN-IFRA Members can watch Christian Broughton’s presentation on our Knowledge Hub.

According to The Independent’s most recent annual results, the publisher has now had eight consecutive years of growth and profit, and passed the £50m-mark in annual revenue for the first time.

It is making more money now as a digital business than a decade ago when it had print products. Moreover, The Independent is now among the top news brands in both the UK and the US markets. For them, dropping print entirely has clearly paid off.

Independent’s new ‘Bulletin’ using personalisation, audio to great effect

They are also now celebrating six months since the launch of their latest news product, “Bulletin,” which offers condensed stories for “seriously busy people.”

“It’s the second highest form of engagement for journalism that we have ever created,” Broughton said, noting that The Independent’s Comment pages are the most consistently high engagement, in terms of pages consumed per visit.

“We didn’t realise we were creating that, but this really fills a gap in people’s lives for concise, quality, trust-worthy news,” Broughton said. “The whole thing is based around time saving.”

“Personalisation and audio are its two big points of difference between the app and the website,” he said.

Looking at Bulletin’s overall feature set, Broughton said The Independent is proud of their high level of trust, “so we didn’t want anything that would hallucinate, or cause trouble.”

The Independent is achieving this in two main ways.

• Keeping humans in the loop. “It’s got to be humans using tech, not just tech,” he said.
• Only using The Independent as the source rather than the entire internet. “You really cut down the error rate. The error rate on this is almost nothing, and humans catch them.”

The second edition of our Paris AI Forum drew a capacity crowd.

The Independent has an AI Innovation centre, and Broughton said one of its key areas of focus is to help staff off-load tedious work with the help of AI. “When people have any part of their job that’s just really boring, they can go over and tell the engineers: ‘This is what I want to get rid of.’ And we will try to get rid of it.”

The Independent’s highest engagement referral unit

Bulletin directs readers back to The Independent’s other products as well.

“There’s a card there that says ‘Read the full article,’ that can go to The Independent. It can go to a podcast, it can go to a newsletter. It can link to anything. That is the highest engagement referral unit we’ve ever created for The Independent. It’s not reductive of the journalism. It’s just as truthful, it’s just as reliable as anything else. It fits into our readers lives in a really respectful way, and it’s paying back into the kind of brand bank it draws from,” he said.

In addition, Bulletin has “become a real sandbox for the future,” he said. “The innovations that we used to create this are now being used right across The Independent.”

AI is ‘great for supporting jobs’

Another important point, Broughton noted, is that Bulletin has actually helped create jobs.

They initially created six jobs to run Bulletin, and have recently doubled that to 12. “We’ve got a team in the UK and a team in New York now running this, so we’re creating jobs from it because when you have really  efficient people, it changes the whole financial decision of whether to hire more people. We’re getting far more out of those people. It’s great for supporting jobs.”

“The journalists at The Independent love this because the more efficient we can be, we give back the most precious thing of all, we give back time to the journalists,” he said.