"We scream." That is what Ole Reissmann, Director of AI at Der Spiegel, said when I asked how he thinks about AI and the governance questions it raises. "We (now) break it up and give all the bits and pieces away to an AI system we don't control, that might have biases we don't know about, that assembles it back together, and then attaches our name and our brand to it,” he said. “How does that look? We scream."

Der Spiegel is not alone in facing these challenges. Many other publications are struggling to implement governance structures to navigate the challenges posed by the rise of AI.

For this article I spoke to 20 newsroom leaders, experts and academics from 13 countries around the world. Whilst their concerns varied, a theme emerged amongst the leaders further along in their AI journeys. The more they experimented with AI, the more they realised the hardest governance questions provoked much bigger existential questions.

Martin Schori, former Director of Editorial AI at Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet and now co-founder of Hint, wanted to know how journalism can remain relevant when a large language model can summarise almost any piece into three bullet points. Luke Bradley-Jones, the newly appointed CEO of The Economist Group, told me that understanding what journalism looks like in a post-search world is what keeps him awake at night.

These are questions that are not just about the technology or business models but are about power and accountability. They force news organisations to ask what journalism is for in an age of AI.  Who is actually controlling the systems shaping what audiences consume? Who carries responsibility when something goes wrong? And how do news organisations uphold trust when relying on tools they neither fully own nor entirely understand?

Many news organisations are still at an early stage of grappling with these questions. According to a recent study by FT Strategies and WAN-IFRA based on responses from 448 newsrooms, 57% have no AI representation in their organisations, while 64% still produce news for a single legacy channel. The most common measure of AI success was also efficiency, with 42% reporting time saved.

Read the full article about AI governance in journalism by Ramaa Sharma at Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.