Anirban Roy - Journalist & Editor
Explore Anirban's World
Of News, Views, Visuals, AI, and Comms
About Anirban
Anirban Roy is a New Delhi, India-based journalist, editor, crisis communications advisor, and media educator with over 25 years of experience at leading Indian and international media houses.
He has been the Founding Editor of The Wall Street Journal's India digital edition, a News Editor at the South Asia Bureau of Dow Jones Newswires & WSJ, India Digital Editor at Reuters, Group Editor of Social Platforms at Network 18, and the Digital Editor of Business Today.
He has led news operations at cross-platform newsrooms—ink to dish to wire and web—launched digital editions and apps, been an independent filmmaker, set up and led bespoke digital video operations, and managed partnerships with publishers and clients across Asia.
He is passionate about AI in newsrooms and media education. He shares his expertise as a consulting editor, mentor, guest professor and trainer at J-schools, universities, fellowship programs and media startups.
He has also won a SOPA award, sharing it with his WSJ colleagues for "editorial excellence in multimedia news presentation."
His recent assignments include mentoring news and digital media startups with a sharp focus on deploying AI in newsrooms, communications consulting specialising in crisis mitigation strategies and first responder training, workshops on identifying fake news and fact-checking and writing on sustainable development and electric vehicles.
AI in Newsrooms
What is often not realised is that artificial intelligence, in its various iterations and early avatars, was deeply embedded into popular tools used by journalists for many years. These tools were so ingrained in our daily processes that their use became almost second nature and eventually got hard coded into our news reporting DNA.
From Google's 'autocomplete' feature on its search to its popular tools like Translate and Analytics, Adobe's web data analytics tool, and Content Management Systems such as Eidosmedia's Méthode—which had Tansa, a text-proofing system that had 'learnt' the style guide of the publisher—early AI models were available in digital-age newsrooms to find and verify information, do research, know more about audience and subscribers demographics, and streamline the workflow of journalists and newsroom leaders.
Today, it's an embarrassment of riches to choose from the many new AI products and technologies available for journalists, newsrooms, and publishers. While these tools may promise to rewire the fine art of journalism, they also raise important questions about trust, ethics and reliability.
AI-led and fed tools are now powering our journalism in more ways than imagined. Daily bread AI tools like chatbots or digital assistants such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot, as well as writing assistants like Grammarly and QuillBot, have become the staple for nearly every journalist in any newsroom.
More advanced use cases like AI-enabled CMS for cross-platform publishing, generating images from words or described emotions via Generative AI, digital media forensics for deepfake detection, and real-time data interpretation and trend analysis during live election results coverage—are proof of how AI is defining new boundaries in newsrooms virtually every day.
By now, most news publishers have made rules and defined SOPs for deploying AI tools in newsrooms. The overarching learning so far is that AI, at best, is a means to maximise the impact of storytelling and journalism through more in-depth research, process automation, intelligent data interpretation, and bulletproof fact-checking, freeing time for journalists to focus more on the story embellishments by moving away from the more repetitive or time-consuming tasks of their daily beat.
AI in journalism is an ever-evolving conversation in newsrooms, rapidly moving away from coffee machine conversations around 'Should I?' to asking 'What more can I do with AI' to make my story travel more and have more impact.
Journalists, product managers, and numbers-obsessed bosses find it increasingly difficult to overlook the possibilities of AI given the challenges the industry is staring at, and there are signs already that AI is on the cusp of redefining the news cycle -- be it for spotting, gathering, production, distribution and monetisation.
I often get asked questions about propriety when deploying AI tools in newsrooms, and we all agree that the human touch can never be replaced at every step as insurance, even while realising that AI is becoming a key ally and a force multiplier in newsrooms globally.
News vs Content
The news and media industry is staring at an unprecedented challenge from the rapid rise of the content creator ecosystem.
Media companies are fighting to stay relevant as speedy, dependable, and trustworthy providers of news and verified information, and they are trying to overcome these obstacles with innovation, technology, and a healthy dose of optimism.
Journalists, social media influencers, and content creators are now in a race to dominate the information dissemination ecosystem and gather more reach, engagement, perception, and revenues.
Every day is a high-stakes game of continuous innovation, faster production, and swift cross-platform distribution to feed the appetite for content and not necessarily branded news.
The rapid rise of the influencer ecosystem and the content creator economy, combined with the muscular reach of social platforms, has become a gale-force headwind for journalism as we know it.
According to Deloitte Research, the creator economy in 2023 was estimated at $250 billion and is expected to double in the next 5 years. Another report compiled by Coherent Market Insight says that as of 2024, the global creator economy is worth $156.37 billion and likely to hit $528.39 billion by 2030.
The rapid shift in how people find and consume news is a significant challenge for newsrooms. Audience mind share, distribution reach, engagement metrics, and the revenue pie will shrink significantly for the pure-play players unless new storytelling formats, tools, and audience engagement methods are employed quickly.
Meanwhile, more and more influencers and content creators are now realising that the ethics of a newsroom and the rigours of journalism often make the difference, as information can now be quickly fact-checked and labelled as misinformation or disinformation, leading to a loss of reputation or a brand casualty.
Journalists and newsrooms are not immune to the vagaries of change or the shifting sands of time. After all, be it a journalist or an influencer, we are all currently slaves of the algorithm and living proof of Marshall McLuhan’s theory—the medium is the message!
