ChatGPT’s media compressor

Print is not dead in Paris. I was having dinner at a restaurant on the Left Bank when a man entered to offer patrons copies of Le Monde for sale. That’s the kind of energy publishers need to win in the Information Space. Push is better than pull. On that note, I’ve been using ChatGPT’s new daily digest product, Pulse, which offers a glimpse of the implications of AI-mediated media. Plus: A conversation with Piano CEO Trevor Kaufman about why audience development has gotten in the way of sustainable business strategies.

The essential challenge for publishers is similar to most businesses: find a way to control their relationship with the customer. The structure of the Information Space, with powerful tech platforms sitting upstream in control of the interface layer, makes this even more difficult. 

That means going back to basics, argues Trevor Kaufman, CEO of Piano, and giving people reasons to come directly to publishers. Too often published have chosen audience development tactic — fish where the fish are, etc — over sound business strategies, Trevor told me on the Rebooting Show ahead of this week’s Piano Academy in Paris.

“Fundamentally, creating a loyal audience that shows up at your front door; that’s the business of publishing,” Trevor told me. “We get too distracted with a pivot to video, or apps, or Facebook, or AI, instead of asking what it means to be a subscriber or a member of this brand.” 

Other issues we discussed:

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, never one for understatement, described ChatGPT’s new daily digest feature as “the first step toward a more useful ChatGPT.” On PvA on Friday, I was skeptical, mostly because I have struggled with squaring the hyperventilated talk of AI maximalists with my own lived experiences of the limits of the actual products when I use them.

Pulse has impressed me in the first few days of using it. The product is far from perfect, but it shows the direction of OpenAI wanting to position itself as the everything assistant, or maybe the everything chief of staff who has a crisp briefing for the boss ready first thing each morning. 

Pulse will be followed by other similar daily habit products that will use AI for information retrieval and summarization to obviate the need to seek out information. Needless to say, such a media construct will be a sea change of widely adopted, which is a good bet considering ChatGPT has scaled to 200 million users in under three years.

The push era. The era of building businesses off so-called drive-by audiences is ending. Search and social were defined by traffic, much of it fleeting. That’s changing, as seen by new follow buttons popping up on publisher sites as they scramble to be marked as a preferred news source to signal Google not to cut off the critical Discover traffic firehouse. ChatGPT dispenses with preferred brand sources as a default in favor of the system as not just editor but compressor. 

This is a very different than efforts like Google News, Facebook News Feed. Apple News and others that combined algorithms with a newsstand. 

Brands are marginalized. Pulse is designed to be a compact digest of information of many types that is organized based on prior behavior and expressed interests. It asks people to add topics they want to see and what they’re curious about. The card format is organized around topics, not brands. The information topic is king, while the sources contributing to that understanding are relegated to small footnotes. 

For instance, I was pushed an information card on Cloudflare’s new rules for AI crawlers. Rather than rely on editorial coverage, a majority of the information was generated from Cloudflare documents with innovations summarized from industry news publishers.

The unknown: Will people trust the outputs without much transparency about what is chosen to surface and why?

News becomes a feature. Feeds took news from a separate category and mixed it in with all kinds of different information and entertainment. In the feed, News battled it out with anyone and everyone in the attention game. Pulse offers a viewpoint that shifts News to being a feature, not a product. 

Pulse isn’t a news product. OpenAI has positioned it as an agentic feature of ChatGPT that will use its memory to personalize updates, whether that’s news information or upcoming meetings. (Pulse will have connections to calendars and email.) 

The unknown: Do people really want bare bones news summaries rather than narratives that feed emotions?

Publishers become raw information suppliers. Pulse is not trying to win on pizazz. It’s just-the-facts dry tone and Axios-like bullet points summarize topics without any need for anecdotal ledes. This is an approach that will put to a test the oft-cited complaint that news is not just facts anymore. It compresses news as raw material. Think of the AI as the refiner, enriching the raw material with access to infinite sources and with the kind of one-to-one personalization impossible for a content publisher. News goes back to being an ambient feature of people’s days rather than an engagement-based identity product.

The unknown: Is this a replacement product or a peripheral product?

Personalization is the commanding heights. Control of the interface layer has stupendously enriched and advantaged tech companies. That combined with the vast amounts of information ChatGPT can not just access but glean from your conversations gives it all-powerful personalization capabilities. 

The role of editor is fully taken over by a machine that has deep insights into your interests and personality. For instance, I’ve instructed Pulse to add a section with its implications for my own business, based on how much it knows about it through our interactions. 

The unknown: Can these kinds of machines go beyond summarization and personalization to creatively connect the dots and deliver serendipity?

Thanks for reading. Send me a reply by hitting reply with how you see ChatGPT Pulse changing consumption patterns.

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