Staff at French newspaper Journal du Dimanche (JDD), which had embarked on the longest strike in French media in decades over the appointment of a far-right-friendly chief editor by the outlet’s new owner, decided to end the strike.

The editor, Geoffroy Lejeune, formally took his post on Tuesday. The journalists have acknowledged they wouldn’t win the standoff with the new owner Vivendi, controlled by conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré. Still, the fight will result in dozens of journalists leaving the newspaper, which currently employs around 100 reports.

“As part of the end of the strike, [JDD owner] Lagardère’s management had agreed not to force any journalists to work under Lejeune while negotiating their departure”, Financial Times reports.

As we noted last week, the situation around JDD has sparked a broader debate about media independence in France, including a bill proposed by a cross-party group of legislators that would “guarantee journalists’ independence from media shareholders”.

News Corp Australia has made use of generative AI in hyperlocal news an important part of its business strategy, executive chairman Michael Miller said at the recent WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress in Taipei.

As WAN-IFRA notes in its writeup of the presentation, News Corp Australia has seen its best financial year in a decade, having reached 1 million digital paid subscribers and a monthly audience of over 18 million. The company’s investment in in-depth hyperlocal coverage drives part of the growth.

While the use of AI to generate simple stories like weather and traffic reports isn’t groundbreaking at this point, the scale of News Corp’s reliance on generative AI is interesting. Miller said that a team of four staff are overseeing the creation of 3,000 articles a week on dozens of locations in Australia.

Guardian Australia notes that a typical such story doesn’t feature a disclosures that it was AI-generated. The company’s spokesperson told in a comment to Guardian Australia that “it would be more accurate to describe the ‘3,000 articles’ as providing service information” on information like daily fuel prices and funeral notices.

Bonus — Three more stories you might want to check out:

Source of the cover photo: https://unsplash.com/

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