Newsrooms In Flux

0:01Hello and welcome to the Media Club. I'm Matt Deegan. In the club today, BBC Three is switched off again as channels BBC Scotland and Radio 4 Extra also go dark. And while BBC News loses another hundred roles, CNN comes knocking with a five-a-month UK subscription. Charlotte Tobitt from Press Gazette takes us through a busy week in news news. Also on the show, what's actually working with AI in the newsroom and what's a waste of budget? fergus bell and tom truonard co-founders of news consultancy fathom bring us a field guide from the scores of newsrooms they've worked inside all that's plus spotify want your super fans money uh two southwark courtrooms put the media in the spotlight and in the audio network media quiz we play a vintage parlor game that's all coming up in this edition of the media club come on in

0:53now joining me are three club members to discuss the week's biggest media stories first welcome back to charlotte uh charlotte tobert uk editor at press gazette um hello matt nice to be back nice to see who are you adding as your plus one this week i would like to add kate chaplin who is director of news video at the sun i interviewed her earlier this week and it was great to hear about um so a lot of the um interviews and stuff we've done about video which obviously a lot of publishers are investing in because you can get good money from youtube um a lot of that's been like non-news formats and kind of so that it can be more easily sponsored um by brands but actually what Kate was talking about this week was your bread and butter news and making the most of the Suns journalists themselves and so it was really nice to to hear how they were kind of investing in and trying to make the classic stuff from the newsroom work on video.

1:52I think a lot of infrastructure haven't they in News UK in that building for video content as well. Yes although they've actually they've built a new studio to do this like literally like quite a whizzy thing without walls like they're right in the middle of the newsroom so they can like just grab a journalist to come over explain this story you know like with the russell brown trial for example they would just get someone over and say what happened in court today um so it's a bit more dynamic than having to go you know 10 floors away into a into a full-on studio and wait for that all to be set up um kind of lets you get news updates and stuff out quite a lot quicker so yeah i hope it works.

2:30Good, a welcome edition. And making their Media Club debut as a double act, Fergus Bell and Tom Truenard, co-founders of Fathom, you help newsrooms around the world do lots of different things, and I guess AI is at the top of that list at the moment. Exactly, yes. Congratulations, your club membership is definitely in the post. I'm not quite sure how we do a split membership, I need to look into that. But you can have your own individual additions to the club as your plus ones. Thank you. Who have you got? uh i've got the broadcast news legend that is christian ammanpour who is leaving cnn after 43 years uh she's my plus one because actually she started at cnn as an assistant on the news desk in 1983 my very first job in a newsroom was an assistant position at cnn so we started in the same place her career has gone in a very different direction to mine but uh yeah that's if I've picked her 43 years at any one place is is pretty impressive isn't it yeah you're institutionalized by that point yes but the stories that she's covered over that time and I think she's she's become synonymous with the international correspondent and kind of what that image is yeah impressive yes very impressive and who have you got for your plus one so I have gone for a news creator called Zoe Bread she just won the TikTok change maker of the year award and she does an amazing job of covering local news particularly focused on kind of strange property developments in Wigan and she does it in a way that is very funny and that really makes you care about the story and I think she has about I think it's like 1.5 million followers on TikTok and maybe 700 ,000 on Instagram which is more than the people who live in Wigan it's huge it's huge And so I think it's a really inspiring vision of what local news can be in 2026.

4:28And her surname isn't her real surname? We don't know. The one thing that we know is that we've never seen her face and it's always covered by a piece of bread. Yes. So I would hypothesize it's not. Yeah. Charlotte, do you think more local journalists would do better if they'd covered their faces whilst doing their reporting? I can safely say that is a question I've never been asked before. nor have I even contemplated before. Maybe, but maybe it's a thing that will only work for one person. Maybe, maybe. Okay, in a moment, BBC Three is being switched off again. More on that after the break. Business is booming.

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5:41Welcome back to the Media Club. On Tuesday, the BBC confirmed they will switch off three broadcast services next year, BBC Three, the BBC Scotland channel and BBC Radio 4 Extra all part of their drive to save£500 million by 2028. Charlotte, BBC Three came back to linear in 2022 with a bit of a fanfare. Four years later, it's off again. Personally, really not surprised and I don't feel like it's made much impact in that time. I know they were using it to try and just reach young people and for example we're creating these short news bulletins in a kind of tiktok-y style in order to do that but those people aren't going to be going to bbc in the bbc three in the first place um so i i do understand why that would be cost that that can easily be got rid of it was no sort of great surprise after they sort of axed all the programs first and then yes the channels following later um also bbc scotland is a channel which hasn't driven audiences wild it's one of those things the bbc should be doing but then it's kind of hard to justify on a cost per viewer basis i agree but again you can still do the content that they should be doing and that is worth doing that was on bbc scotland like choose the best stuff and you know they do have all these places they can still put that out without it being a linear channel and without the pressure of filling the entire schedule worth as well just actually making the stuff that's most important and most worthwhile yeah they're still going to put um some content uh from bbc2 in scotland's like the scottish opt-out will go on to iplayer and it'll still exist as a a channel uh maybe a slight zombie channel on on iplayer 2 tom the bbc says that uh bbc3 shows some of them will still be made um i play for iplayer in youtube i mean it's sort of what they said last time yeah i i don't disagree with charlotte in the sense that clearly the audience isn't there the thing that i worry about is i think this is true of bbc3 and bbc scotland those channels play an important role in the kind of talent development pipeline and are often the first places that journalists and broadcasters at the start of their careers are kind of getting their break.

8:05So that can still happen on iPlayer or on YouTube or wherever these channels end up but I think it's really important that at the same time as closing the linear that there's still clear signaling that these are places that are being invested in in some way because otherwise I think we'll lose those opportunities for the next generation yeah fergus mean the bbc launching a lot of youtube channels loads and loads of youtube channels and obviously there's going to be talent talent on those but it won't have the same necessary audience awareness or um in some ways the talent have got to work for their own audience rather than benefit from the bbc's big historic masts in the past we've seen when people needed to make a pivot to video that they would you know like it's a it's a new story but a written story but we're making it into video or it's radio for tv i think you have to be really careful as you make that change from linear to an online channel on youtube that you're not just trying to replicate one in a different place and that actually you're learning the lesson and saying the audience wasn't there was it because it was linear or was it because the format wasn't right and so i think that's that's one of the key lessons that you have to take and hopefully they'll do that as well that's one of the challenges for their youtube channels i mean will they be youtube native content or will they be stuff that could have been on iplayer yeah i think it's going to be also interesting to see how the commissioning process for that works because uh i've seen a lot of chatter a lot of complaints around uh the people that are being invited to do that and kind of the credentials that you've got and can you be digitally native and get your foot in the door in that process do you have to team up with people so time time will tell uh charlotte some radio news as well so bbc radio 4 extra which is their kind of archive channel um which they they had talked about quite a few years ago that would kind of come to its natural end has now come to its natural end and they've said that some of it will survive on bbc sounds um quite a lot of people listen to 4 extra is this one of these things where yes it saves a bit of money but it annoys a couple of million people i mean it's true that kind of bbc radio 4 and 4 extra probably some of the most kind of stool wall loyal people that would still defend the bbc in many ways and obviously they've also just um announced um the closure or changes to quite a lot of radio 4 programs as well um you and yours and and quite a few others the worry is just overall and including with those services whether the bbc will still be doing the things it really should be doing the stuff that other um publishers channels stations don't do the the real public service stuff and um and i think that's what um we don't necessarily have the clear vision to reassure us on at the moment i was talking to roger bolton this week um who previously presented with lots of bbc shows feedback and uh other things on channel 42 and he was saying he he worries that these cuts the bbc lose the kind of the core people that really support them um and whilst it only seems like small amounts here or there might have a kind of dramatic effect i think he's probably true but it's difficult for us isn't it bbc got to find half a million half a billion pounds of savings like some good stuff has to go as well it does i i mean i'm a big fan of uh for extra i listen to it a lot but i do listen but i use it for inspiration to to kind of refined programs from the bbc and i think actually the experience is about curating with sounds you can curate your own playlist from exactly the same pool of content but i suspect that that hearing like young people hearing dad's army if they're ever exposed to or things like that will inspire them to think about radio and audio in a different way which if we lose that archive we don't get that inspiration filtering through i mean it seems like on bbc3 argument the curatorial side it's not just putting the programs in places it's like how do you point people to them as well um speaking of bbc uh bbc news confirmed the net closure of just over 100 roles this week saving another five and a half million pounds uh but cnn picked this week to launch its first uh proper paywall in the uk live channels on demand and the website paywall for five pounds a month 49 a month um charlotte you spoke to uh amanda rottier at cnn um who's the ahead of growth what's their what's their plan with all this stuff so essentially um and after i spoke to her i looked at the global website traffic and like many um news websites um following the launch of google's ai summaries and obviously um audiences going to all these platforms we've been talking about um chat gbt all of that put together um their traffic uh globally is down 49 % compared to where it was two years ago.

13:08And, you know, that's not uncommon. That's not just saying CNN's done a bad job there. That is unsurprising when you look across the board, although it's maybe on the worse end. So obviously they've been thinking about that and thinking what should we do. And like many others, including the likes of The Sun and The Mail, the answer is, or they think the answer is, not just having all website content free anymore so they've already had um uh the paywall in the us which also it should be said you know might have contributed to traffic going down um to be fair obviously but um that's now come this week to the uk and canada for the first time what's a bit different is that in the us they had the website paywall first and then they added this all access with the live streaming and the on-demand video content as well whereas in the uk that's all come at the same time they didn't even have the website paywall um first so um so it's quite a big change if you're a cn fan you kind of you get it all yeah i i kind of said you know is there enough appetite outside the u.s obviously they are um first and foremost a u.s broadcaster but um amanda sort of said yeah they um you know i think with our kind of international stuff you know you've already mentioned Christiane Amanpour with the sort of people like her and they're she's saying there's plenty of upside outside the US for that kind of credible trusted on the ground journalism.

14:38Tom if you think about CNN and kind of BBC as well they sort of own this position of kind of a facts based channel I'm sure there are some that disagree with that. Is there a danger with the paywalls that we're we're taking those common facts out of the out of the world? potentially yes but i think um we're you know very i think very fortunate here to have the bbc um i i think it will be a massive uphill struggle for cnn to sell a premium package in the uk i'm not sure that they have the kind of brand recognition here and i was looking at some of the reuters institute uh research um i think that they which is you know has its caveats it's self-reported it say i say i watch um it was something like two two percent of brits say they watch cnn uh on tv and they weren't even in the rankings online so it's a big uphill struggle in a very competitive market where we have the bbc sky um the other uh publishers who are also pivoting to video so i think um you know we're fortunate to have uh good access to reliable fact-based media in the uk um that's not true everywhere uh it's interesting looking at kind of other subscriptions and charlotte mentioned some of them i mean fergus you've got kind of sky news have got a podcast package for 99 um also got a defense package for 14.99 that's going for sort of the premium end do you think some of these broadcasters and news providers actually by picking a vertical that they're known for have got like super expertise and have got a better option i think they're borrowing from other industries there and i think that's that's really encouraging because I think news industry does need to look at where that is successful elsewhere and that kind of personalized briefing or niche briefing is one of them.

16:27I do think timing is everything, though, and I don't think it can't be an accident that CNN is launching this right before the midterms, which is actually probably if you ask people in the UK what they turn to CNN for, it's the elections. We just heard someone recently talk from the Athletic talk about how they built up a subscription base and they had got a lot of people in for the World Cup, but those people stayed beyond the World Cup and kept going. And so maybe that's the strategy, but that's very different to the Sky strategy. Yeah, I'm trying to hook them in with something different. Charlotte, Rachel Jupp, the new BBC News boss, she told staff too many audiences, particularly younger ones, aren't finding BBC News.

17:14do you think they've got the ability to find them with other products and drag them into the into the big british castle i mean they've got to um i mean all the publishers are kind of you know obviously the bbc's may be the most existential um because of its funding model in that sense but you know all the publishers are trying to figure out how to reach young people but then also if if they find them on youtube or tiktok where or wherever will they ever actually come back to their platforms directly and build that direct relationship which is what they especially really need nowadays without google kind of the the old value exchange that we had with google and facebook certainly i was talking to some people recently and said people just don't click through from those platforms so that is the real challenge i mean i think the bbc at least needs to be very visible on there because i mean if not then it's just it's it might be doing great things but if those people never see them they won't even have that kind of stepping stone even if it's i think kind of what you've got to accept is that it might be a long-term play unfortunately with the current crisis kind of crisis the bbc is in that's um quite difficult to hear but um like the financial times for example um we had some data that among the national newspapers in the uk they had the biggest proportion of young audiences and so we asked why and um part of what their ceo john slade says was that um they they accepted that the investment they put into reaching those young people wasn't going to be on the revenue sheet in the next year or so you know they accepted it's a long-term play and with these young audiences that's that's all you can do you've just you've they've got to know you now and you hope that that relationship and that value will build later and fergus is this sort of like a reach versus attribution question like if you're a big public broadcaster you need to sort of prove they've realized that those clips on youtube or instagram are theirs but is that kind of short-termist in itself is it actually reach is more important My worry is that it's too vague.

19:24I don't think that when we talk about reaching young audiences where they are, we're able to actually define what success would look like. And we can reach one audience, one young audience now or one sector of that, but there's going to be another young audience behind it. So it's got to be much more about the kind of approach to new young audiences in the future as well. So my worry is that no one is actually defining what that success looks like. I always find it interesting. It doesn't get talked about much more, but Snapchat still has massive reach with teenagers, particularly around mapping and tracking friends and those things.

20:00There's never any discussion about that as a place to reach audiences. Is it sort of old people that run the media just to think about TikTok and the things that are in the headlines? The trouble with Snapchat is that they used to have quite good relationships with publishers and they'd enable publishers to monetize their content on there. And it seems that they have recently changed all of that. So the LGBTQ plus brand Pink News, for example, they basically made a load of cuts specifically because quite a lot of their revenue was built on Snapchat. And the Snapchat changes it's made this year.

20:41That's what Pink News said. essentially have um taken that away so um it kind of to to these publishers and everyone sadly if the money if there isn't a link to to make any investment they're worth it then again it would just be that vague future hope that those young people will come to them them and they kind of do need a direct um result from it unfortunately we were um listening to somebody from um gold.com today which is a brand I'd not heard of but whose content I have experienced as a as a football fan and he was talking a little bit about this they've got they've got many brands that reach different kind of segments of different audiences with different products that are focused on quizzes and trivia or ratings but what was very interesting I thought was he was talking about the monetization side of his business i think he said 100 million dollars a year revenue um only 15 of that is kind of programmatic or coming from the platforms and a huge chunk of that is direct sales so i think we can't rely necessarily on the monetization kind of natively coming through youtube or snapchat that's very unreliable and they're changing the terms of engagement on that all the time, the thing that we can control if we have the numbers to back it up is the kind of direct sales to advertising brand partners that we can make.

22:15Okay, when we return, more newsroom chat as we move to AI. See you in a sec.

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23:35You can manage orders, sync inventory, track returns all automatically. Everything your operation needs, all in one place. Right now, qualified shippers get a real dedicated person to get you set up and switched over for free. So when peak season hits, you're ready to go. Switch today at ShipStation.com. Code audio. Welcome back. Here's a few other stories we've been talking about in the club this week. Spotify has launched memberships, letting creators charge their biggest fans for exclusive content and letting them keep 90 % of the takings too. The bar to entry is low. 100 listeners, 100 hours consumed and just three episodes of content.

24:11Is this going to cause some issues for Patreon, whose growth has been fueled by podcast creators? Watch this space. Southgate Crown Court jurors in Tommy Robinson's harassment trial heard a voicemail left for Daily Mail editor Ted Verity, in which Robinson said he would make the papers journalists and their families famous. Robinson, a real name, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, denies the charges and the case continues. Also in the same building, Russell Brand's trial heard from a former MTV employee who said she didn't report to allegations against him in 2004 because the media industry protects its own.

24:45Brand faces seven charges, including three counts of rape relating to six women. He's pled not guilty to all of them. links to all of our stories available on our sub stack just head to themediaclub.com that's themediaclub.com right charlotte fergus and tom are still with me uh fergus and tom let's talk fathom um uh what is it fathom is a consultancy we work with news organizations all around the world uh the bulk of our work over the last few years has been supporting uh newsrooms big and small national broadcasters publishers uh to implement ai as a way of uh making their business sustainable and uh doing better journalism uh it's one of those things on the consultancy side you get to be really nosy you get to find out about other people's businesses that's the best bit of being a consultant uh what are you uh finding out at the moment from uh newsrooms that maybe surprised you?

25:43I've actually been quite impressed by how willing a lot of newsrooms have been to experiment with this technology. I think a few years ago when we started Fathom, we tried to speak to newsrooms about AI and it was kind of a no-go zone. Now I think people are open to testing different things as a really justified caution about a lot of use cases and a lot of thought around that but people are willing to try stuff and that's quite exciting uh as you look at your backgrounds fergus you're ap's first social media editor and i guess in that first wave tom building verification tools at meeden um what was it from those places that sort of led you to the ai world do you think the stuff that i was doing with social media and to some extent tom was doing with social media uh at a different organization we were we saw an opportunity for the news industry to adopt a new technology and some some places where that could go i was told in my newsroom position that this social media thing was not going to be a thing that no journalists were going to be using it um but i i saw something there and and time it wasn't me who who solved that but but um that happened and i think we've seen the similar thing with ai this is an opportunity for the news industry they don't need to be scared of it and i think the thing that surprised me is once you explain to a newsroom that there's a lot of ai work that they can do that doesn't actually touch reporting but frees them up to do reporting to do good journalism that's a that's a way that you can get them to think about that opportunity it's interesting when i talk to friends and colleagues who are in uh news organizations it's really variable i mean some are very much you're not allowed to touch it our rule is basically don't use any of them others are really really exploring big big systems but building building their own systems what what's the fear that people have got uh or that the bosses have got sometimes to go into this space i think the fear is a lack of control uh i think what i'd say is where people are being told they can't use ai they're still using ai in what we call a kind of shadow way and i think that that that is then true loss of control and that's that's risky and is something that owners and executives should really take care of because that opens up kind of data risk i think sometimes they can be nervous because they don't understand the technology and when there's a lot of terminology going around like frontier models and tokens and how you can prototype and if they've if they're removed from the kind of doing part of the business it can be something that they don't necessarily want to admit that they don't understand and that can slow down progress i think there's also the the danger and the or the the way that the industry has done things before is to dip their toe in but this technology is moving so fast that you really just have to grab it by the horns and understand your position and and chart your path through it and that's the way to get through it it's not about being really really cautious and slow be create your own barriers and your own parameters and be cautious within that but you've got to throw yourself into it i think sometimes people when you think of ari and journalism they assume it's going to write the news yeah um when in reality it's probably more likely to be tools and systems that people use to to build it um who's who's doing definitely maybe who they are but what are interesting things that people are doing that others should be inspired by Yeah, there's a growing body of case studies and actually one of the encouraging things I see is that people are sort of willing to share.

29:33so we worked with the Daily Mail on one of the Oneifra programs last year and they built a very cohesive suite of tools that was doing a whole range of things from kind of speeding up image selection to helping make first cuts for social video to things that journalists really hate doing like tagging metadata in content management systems and archives and they'd done it in a very kind of cohesive way that was trying to make the tools very kind of accessible to to the to the people who are having to do the work in a way that they could feel that their time was being saved and better uses we've also seen examples of using ai to pass a lot of data or to take feeds from local authorities police forces in order to identify stories and then in further a field where in places like India where you have many, many languages and you're responsible for producing content in many languages, you can produce one piece of journalism and get that automatically translated with the video to go along with it for a huge audience that speaks a different language.

30:46So, yeah. Are any news organizations kind of developing their own LLMs, like using their own material to create their own stuff? There have been some attempts at that. It can be quite expensive, although I think it's getting cheaper and some of the open weights models are allowing for a kind of a fine tuning. But it's quite unclear on a technical level whether that offers better performance than just using the bigger models. But there's been definitely a lot of work in terms of applying house style and making sure that, you know, your content is meeting your style guides. that's one of the first things that people reach for because it feels uh quite safe and is very clearly useful um so lots of newsrooms that we've worked with have done that do you want your cms charlotte to tell you you're not writing it in the house style um i mean obviously i'm already writing in the house style you are the house style uh we're also seeing kind of you talk about the the foundation models so these people like open ai and anthropic and google who are kind of building that core technology um who have perhaps built them on hoovering up the content from a lot of uh journalists uh some people are signing up uh to as kind of ai news partners thinking about reach and cnn signing up with with google's ai operation a usa today suing open ai um how do you work with clients about are they friend or foe are they both what's what should people do that's a question i i think it's um a bit of both and i think um i would expect to see the new york times open ai case be settled and that is uh you know an amount of money that will go from one to the other it's not a deal it's the settlement but it's kind of performing some of the same role you know we've worked uh on programs where open ai have funded the program and newsrooms in india who are suing OpenAI are part of the program.

32:45So I think everybody knows that on some level they have to work together. The desire to get deals, I think, is one that is going to be very frustrating for newsrooms. I think we see the number of deals kind of coming down. And I think deals for training of the models are largely kind of done. So we need to kind of work out what the value flow is in in this new world and i think actually just going back to your earlier question about what are owners afraid of it's how where our audience is going to be uh in a world where potentially these these big models are disintermediating the relationship that we have with audiences um should journalists be using the tools to kind of become coders should they be building their own tools to to do their work that is that is something that we come across a lot and yes is the answer but with some thought process behind it so anyone can build something now just because you can build it definitely doesn't mean that you should build it and so a lot of the a lot of the shiny things we see come out of newsrooms are someone's had an idea in the corner of the newsroom and they're like yeah i'm going to build it and then it's there putting a strategy behind it and and getting that buy-in from the most senior stakeholders in the organization to say yes build that if you can build this because this is in line with our strategy that would be wonderful i think internal tools for uh to let you kind of pass data around stories that you're that you're working on is is very valuable i think reader facing stuff audience facing stuff is a little bit harder because we don't want to go down that route of not meeting our audience where it is just because we can do something that's easy that creates a whole problem that we're going to see down the road again if someone's a newsroom leader and they're and they're watching the show what what are the the first things you'd tell them to to think about i would encourage uh uh to have some sort of plan for letting people test safely um i don't think that this approach of nobody use ai for anything is realistic um so i think that would be my starting point um the second would be there's going to be something in your newsroom that the people have to do that they really don't like doing um and that could be a really good uh interesting place to start thinking about um is there an ai based solution for this that can actually save people time and frustration um and make our lives a bit easier um that's a really good starting point i would say get your hands dirty get your if you are an executive get your hands on an ai tool a model like chat gpt or gemini or claude and just start using it yourself to see how it works and see how it is and i think we know all the risks we know a lot of the risks and we know that there are safeguarding policies that we need to put in place for for our own use of it but it would be great if people also thought about the opportunity that it could bring and there if we think about that now we have the opportunity to kind of shape the way that that's done responsibly and capitalise on those opportunities and so that's what i would that would say be kind of look what is the opportunity as well as the risk charlotte it's kind of interesting from a journalist perspective isn't it there are a lot of opportunities there also some worry sometimes about what your big evil bosses might uh might might use it for what do you hear from your uh journalist readers and subscribers yeah i mean a lot of that rung to i think a lot of people are using it for all the kind of shortcut productivity um if there are tools being introduced that can help you with tagging hyperlinks all of those things that are not the things that people get into journalism to do but can take up quite a lot of your day um people are absolutely on board with that um we've heard quite a lot recently from a few there's a few publishers that um have built tools to reuse their own stories in obviously in a safe way um whether that's archive stuff or whether that's like to use on other sites in their own networks plus um to help them re uh rewrite essentially press release type stuff that is maybe for local sites in particular um it's the sort of stuff that people want to know and need to know but it's not really worth the trained journalist spending a lot of time on so they can do that and then it will free up the journalist to um actually maybe leave the office or to yeah spend more time investigating something that's the dream yeah and it does sound like some of that is happening um um and i really hope that is the way it goes i mean it's been you know so uh we track kind of redundancies going on in in the journalism industry in the uk and us and past few months it's kind of really picked up again um and i just really hope that not too many of those are you know end up being directly linked to ai being introduced to the newsroom okay just enough time for the audio network media quiz three media stories connected by one theme and then shoehorned into the format of an existing media property this week it's called did they just say that it's a parlor game in the grand tradition of any number of light entertainment formats i'm going to read you a quote uh from this week's media news uh you just tell me who said it and why did charlotte write the news uh They're not Charlotte's story.

38:14And once again, Alex Audio Network has taken that dusty brief from producer Matt and provided a tinkle of the ivories to punctuate today's proceedings. It's a best of three. So buzz in with your names if you know the story. So Charlotte, you will say. Charlotte. And Fergus and Tom, you're playing as a team. So you can say both your names simultaneously. Okay. That doesn't sound fair. You've done this plenty of times. It's fine. It's fine. Okay. Let's play. did they just say that okay number one who said this week we may be down but we're not out yet a clue there might be trouble in their coal mine tom ergus oh i think tom just just one there um it was your clue that give it away i think this must be the news that the canary is closing uh it seems they've been debanked and there are some allegations that i won't get into because i don't know what they are um so i'll leave that story to charlotte to explain but i will claim the point yes the canary which closed indefinitely on monday after 11 years they blamed being debanked by lloyds in june their metro in september and what it called malicious lies from former staff on social media yes which yeah we probably shouldn't go into but yeah there has been kind of this this account set up and what i'm looking forward to is in that kind of goodbye statement, they said we're still going to put out, you know, what's actually happened.

39:46And I'm still on tenterhooks for that. We will see. Okay, here's quotation number two. Whose newsreader said this? The BBC has announced it's closing BBC Three. Not just yet, though. Charlotte? Yes. Is it BBC Three's newsreader? Yes, BBC Three's nightly news bulletin for the TikTok generation has been axed, launched in 2022 even before Boost News had a TikTok account I think this is Ben Henley Washford the host there it is kind of sad that the something that they're trying to do for a different audience has kind of disappeared as well will it will it exist in any other form do you think I suppose my question about that is they were doing something in a TikTok style that was the idea of it but on a tv channel so it's a bit like what you guys were saying earlier it's landscape as well and um and i mean when we did a story when when this launched in 2022 and kind of the two reasons given were one to bring young people back to the bbc and two to meet ofcom's requirement for bbc3 to have um this this news bulletin so um perhaps trying to shoehorn it in in this certain way didn't quite work um but i mean if they were doing it in this tiktok style it might still work on tiktok i'm not quite sure what the plan is yes well we will see okay one more to go as i was saying before i was so rudely interrupted which creator said those words this week.

41:24Charlotte. Yes. Was this this YouTuber that got like their account got hacked and then they were very angry at YouTube and Google as to how they'd handled it as well. Yeah, YouTuber Gabe Newell he's back on the platform after his channel was hacked calling the company pathetic, useless and toothless. After hours long responses on chat YouTubers since now, so it will temporarily pause uploads on channels as it's The specs have been hijacked, usually for up to 24 hours. It's really hard to get hold of social media organisations when something goes wrong, whether you're a big broadcaster or an individual YouTuber.

42:03Is this just because they've got too many people trying to upload stuff? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of always been this way. We used to have some relationships with the money. It's basically, you have to know a person who can help you. And if you don't know a person, then you can... And people's livelihoods are tied to this. So I think this YouTuber, they have been locked out of the account that pays them their wage. And so worried about paying their rent because they couldn't get hold of anyone. Yeah. I mean, being trapped in endless probably AI chats to try and get it back. One thing when I read this, there's also the danger that people will say, will basically cause hijackings to stop uploads.

42:46I mean, pretty much anything that these social platforms introduce kind of gets stopped, doesn't it? Or gets kind of interrupted by consumers trying to break them. Yeah, especially if it becomes known that it's very difficult to recover these accounts. I mean, we've seen this same approach taken against activists in different countries around the world where they get mass blocked and then they have no means to get their channels back. It's quite scary. please don't touch our youtube channel right that makes a charlotte a winner see there's nothing to worry about nothing to worry about against two competitors you go on to challenge four competitors in the internet my thanks to charlotte fergus and tom and thanks again to alex audio network for supplying today's music remember audio network can do that for you as well just head to audionetwork.com before we go charlotte where can people keep up to date with you and the Press Gazette?

43:41Pressgazette.co.uk and in a special plug for next week the British Journalism Award shortlist will be live. So definitely check that out. It's got, it'll have like all the links to all, like so much amazing journalism from the past year. So if you've missed all the big stories from 2025 to 2026, that's the place to get it. And also just Charlotte Tobert on LinkedIn. Have you had to do all the links manually or have you used AI to help you with those links? Manually. Good, good. As you know, they definitely go to the right place. And Fergus and Tom, how can we keep up with your work? You can find us at fathom.co, but we also talk a lot about AI and journalism on a podcast that we host together called The Signal Podcast.

44:21That's at The Signal Pod on YouTube. Great. And you can get that wherever you're listening or watching this. And thank you for listening and watching. My name's Matt Deegan. The producer was Matt Hill. It was a Rethink Audio production with video support from Podcast Discovery. I'll see you next week.

45:07We'll be right back. one place. Upgrade your shipping operations to stress-proof your biggest sales days and capture every bit of potential revenue. Go to ShipStation.com and use code AUDIO and get 30 days free.