The article, reimagined

Editor’s note: we are republishing a note that previously appeared in The Fix Media’s weekly newsletter. Subscribe to get everything you need to know about the European media market every Monday, along with monthly special reports.

The static web article is overdue for reinvention. That’s why Time’s AI experiment with its Person of the Year announcement stands out – far more than the actual Person of the Year choice.

The magazine’s AI features include letting readers query the story, generating summaries of different length, translating the text into several languages, and listening to the audio version.

“These features are powered by Scale AI and other strategic partnerships, such as OpenAI, announced as a partner earlier this year, which provides the chat and translation functionality, while ElevenLabs powers the conversational voice components”, Time’s COO writes in his note.

The company says that it’s “just the beginning” and promises “future advancements [that are] already in development”. 

Do readers actually want to chat with a journalistic article? Maybe not. But the ability to listen to a piece instead of reading is genuinely useful. (The next step would be to conveniently switch back and forth between reading and listening – something Time’s experiment doesn’t offer).

A quick summary is also valuable for consumers (although it might leave some authors unhappy by flattening richly-reported features into ChatGPT-style uniformity). The instant translation feature adds real value too. 

Time’s true innovation lies in the product, not technology – taking the features AI tools already offer and packaging them in a neat user experience. Despite its constraints, there’s a lot other publishers can learn from this experiment.

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