The text below is a slightly edited version of the author’s remarks to the M20 Media Freedom Summit held online in Delhi on September 6, 2023 by the M20 Organising Committee, which comprises 11 editors from India and a former judge of the Supreme Court.Thank you for inviting me to this media discussion for the G20 meetings in New Delhi. I would, especially, like to thank the M20 Indian Organising Committee for pulling this group of media representatives together to raise the profile of press freedom among G20 nations. It’s an important issue. I applaud your effort to drag it onto the agenda. And it’s highly valuable to hear colleagues’ perspectives across the world…I’m currently a board director of Financial Times and formerly the FT’s managing editor. Before that I was the newspaper’s South Asia bureau chief based in New Delhi, which is a regional context I know well but which is clearly evolving. For me, it was sobering to hear N. Ram’s comments earlier about the state of journalism in India among many of the other valuable contributions from colleagues.The FT is headquartered in London where fortunately independent media and media freedoms are well established. This is something we can never take for granted, however. As an international media company, we have correspondents based in 33 countries. We have first-hand experience of how freely or not they and other reporters can operate in these different environments, many of them in G20 countries. In some cases, these reporters encounter considerable restrictions and risks in getting the news out into the public domain. So I want to signal the FT’s strong support for the value of independent journalism and freedom of the press, and for those industry bodies, publications and individuals that uphold these standards that, above all, are essential to democratic societies.There are four issues that I want to highlight briefly. They are cross-border issues. All of them pertain to the digital transformation of news, as we transition from newspaper models. Broadly, I want to point towards solutions between leading publishers rather than simply air concerns, which are now in many cases well-known across our industry.Also read: On Paper, Journalists in South Africa Are Free to Do Their Work. But Attacks Say OtherwiseThe first is misinformation and fake news. This has proliferated in the digital era, where increasingly readers get their news from social media and unrecognised media brands. It can sway public opinion, influence election outcomes and in some cases so blatantly mislead that it can cause serious harm.I’d like to draw to your attention the work of the Trusted News Initiative. This is an international initiative started by the BBC. Publishers like the FT, the Hindu, Reuters and the Washington Post and others join forces to combat fake news in dialogue with some of the big tech platforms, like Google, Microsoft and Facebook. One of its activities is an alert system across newsrooms and their social media teams to alert news editors to a trending piece of fake news, and to persuade the big digital platforms to deprioritise them. Another is to share verified data sets like election results when they are announced and where they are available. The point I want to make is that coalitions can work. So there’s an opportunity to frame this within the G20 agenda.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyOne of the hottest topics here in London, since the launch of ChatGPT, is generative AI applications in journalism. It confronts all of us. Clearly, this technology has many advantages to the publishing model in advertising, marketing, search functions, curation and summarisation. The question we will have to answer is how this influences content journalism itself, and whether the reader can determine what is written by a human and what is written by a machine.At the FT, we have tried to frame a set of editorial and commercial principles about the use of AI. These principles will no doubt evolve. In brief, the Editor, Roula Khalaf has given assurance to readers that FT journalism is made by humans using our standards of attribution, sourcing and fact-checking, and not machine-generated. She did this by an open letter. So three of these principles are: not to allow AI to compromise the integrity of FT journalism, to commit to respecting data privacy and, third, to protect our own intellectual property, brand and business.On the issue of intellectual property protection, raised earlier in this M20 meeting by the Editor of La Repubblica, it’s clear that some technology companies have scraped leading publications around the world for their Large Language Models. We’ve noted with interest the coalition forming in the US to seek redress and compensation for this. Should this coalition expand to publishers beyond the US across G20 countries?A third challenge to highlight is the cyber threat to publishers and publishing systems. In some cases, these threats are state-backed. They have enormous potential to disrupt. One of our primary threats is a bad actor breaking into our publishing system and changing content or jamming the website or blocking it entirely. Another big threat is a ransom-style attack where systems are breached, data accessed and then money demanded not to release the data into the public domain. These incidents rarely enter the public domain as companies do not want to bring to light their troubles. But these protections require large resources and constant vigilance and are a new type of electronic warfare threat.Also read: How Systems of Discrediting, Judicial Harassment and Tech Are Used to Take Down JournalistsAnd finally, I want to highlight the difficulties that many media organisations face with their commercial models in an age of digital disruption. Unable to sustain advertising and subscription models, many smaller titles and regional titles weaken and then close down. This is a big blow to diversity in the media.In this environment, it’s difficult to find the levels of investment among owners required for sustaining quality journalism and independent newsrooms. At the FT, we are open to sharing our own experience of what works for us to sustain and grow our media business as a private enterprise without any government support. And we try, where possible, to join forums like the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford – where we can lend our own perspectives on commercial strategies and successes to help others stay afloat.Again, a G20 grouping could be helpful here.James Lamont is Director, Strategic Partnerships at the Financial Times and a former managing editor of the newspaper.
