Ivo Knahn from the Mainpost: How transparency creates trust

Mr. Knahn, how has AI changed the work in your editorial offices?

Ivo Knahn: Not significantly at all. AI is a new topic that needs to be integrated into our guidelines and standards. Similar to when the Internet or social media came along. Now AI is here as a new tool. But it's not as if our day-to-day work has completely changed as a result of AI.

Guidelines on AI: no one can hide behind the technology

 

In what specific areas do you use AI?

Knahn: Like many other publishers and editorial teams, we have built an editorial assistant so that we can use AI in compliance with data protection regulations. We use the “content assistant” to generate headlines or interview questions, for example. We also work very intensively with user needs: we give the AI a topic and receive topic suggestions from various user perspectives. We have deliberately packed few applications into the tool, namely only those that are really useful in everyday life and are widely used. The “content assistant” is currently used around 70 times a day.

In times when AI-generated content is flooding the web, it is becoming increasingly difficult for users to judge which content they can trust. How do you deal with this uncertainty?

Knahn: First of all, it must be clear to everyone internally that they cannot hide behind the AI. Everything we do must comply with our rules, with or without AI. By that I mean the press code, our own guidelines and, in particular, journalistic due diligence. From the readers' point of view, it's less about the AI itself and more about trust as a whole. If people trust us as journalists, as the Main-Post brand, then they will also trust us to use AI or any other tool responsibly. The fact that we report on how we work with AI can contribute to this trust. For example, I wrote a transparency piece on this at the beginning of 2024. We have published our guidelines on all channels, including in the newspaper and on our website.

What feedback do you receive from your readers on the topic of AI?

Knahn: We get a lot of mail from the editorial team. However, I receive practically no questions on the subject of AI. But there is a lot of interest at events. People are curious and surprised at how deeply we deal with the topic. Not just technically, but also ethically. My impression is that people are grateful that we take the topic so seriously and think about it. I always say: AI is like a knife. You can smear a Nutella sandwich with it or stab someone in the back with it. The technology itself is value-neutral, and the possibilities it offers are incredibly broad. As editors, we are responsible for smearing Nutella sandwiches.

How can “being close to the action” in local journalism be reconciled with the use of AI?

Knahn: I think proximity is the most important value of a regional newspaper. Technology doesn't sound like proximity at first, but it can certainly help us to penetrate the market. As a local media company, we have the difficulty that we are generally unable to scale our journalistic content. That means we can't go to the German-speaking or global market. We are here in Lower Franconia, Mainfranken. That's our market: 800,000 people who live here. AI may be able to help us reach more specific target groups in purely technological terms. One way of adapting and displaying our content in an even more targeted way is versioning. By this I mean that a piece of content – which is usually still text in our case – can be developed into five to ten different formats, for example, which we can automatically play out on our channels. What AI doesn't do for us is to be out there on site and for readers to be able to experience it. So that they feel that there really are people sitting there who live here, who are interested in this region, who know their way around, who have a different perspective and who can answer my questions.

New perspectives for the future: Journalists must learn how to work with AI

 

What does this mean for local journalists? Do they need new skills to do their job well?

Knahn: Many of us became journalists because we enjoy writing. AI can do that very, very well. As a journalist, I now have to learn how to use the new technology. To do this, I have to give up a few things, namely the understanding that I am an author. Maybe at some point I'll just be a researcher, entering what I know into an AI tool in a very structured way and getting all kinds of different versions from it. We haven't gotten that far yet, but I could imagine that the development will go in this direction. A second skill is recognizing what is generated with AI, what is real and what is fake. We are being flooded with information and the sea of disinformation is going to make even bigger waves. Navigating this is a skill that journalists need to learn. We consciously train our employees on the topic of verifying and recognizing fake news and also bring this to schools as part of media studies with the “KLASSE!” school project. We believe that we need to improve this media literacy among professionals on the one hand, but also among readers on the other.