News agency bosses at Reuters and PA explain differing ‘red line’ on use of AI

Reuters and PA Media have different “red lines” curbing the extent to which they will use AI for customer-facing content, according to the news agencies’ top editors.

PA Media editor-in-chief Jack Lefley said the UK-based news agency has an “unambiguous” take on AI: “We use it to support our journalists and enrich their journalism, but never to replace them.”

He cited tasks like transcription, archive retrieval and trawling huge datasets to “get important information into the public domain, in the public interest, faster. But we would never use it to generate content.”

PA Media rolled out the use of AI in 2018 to help with data-driven stories with the RADAR project, which saw human journalists write templated data stories which were then localised.

Lefley said PA focuses on having “reporters, photographers, and videographers out on jobs, in courtrooms, in Parliament, in institutions, and sending that very reliable first take to our customers who are publishers and broadcasters… so our line is that we won’t use AI to generate that content that is on the newswire. It’s just a red line.”

Reuters editor-in-chief Alessandra Galloni responded: “The two things are not incompatible. Because the whole point is that you can free up the journalist and then have the eyes in the courtroom to see the twitching of the person who’s on the stand or to witness something in a conflict zone, right?

“I mean, nobody’s suggesting that a photographer in Ukraine is using AI to do anything. We do not generate any visuals, video, or pictures from AI.”

The editors were speaking on a panel at the Society of Editors Future of News Conference in London on Tuesday, 17 March.

Panel host and BBC presenter Ros Atkins asked PA’s Lefley: “So you wouldn’t get a series of press releases on a certain subject and let the AI skim it and create a summary?” He responded: “No.” But Galloni added: “We do.”

Galloni noted that her parent company Thomson Reuters is spending $200m a year on building AI tools.

She said: “You have to see where we sit in the ecosystem. A lot of what we do is we give news to financial audiences and a lot of that news is press releases on results or on central bank communiques or anything that companies release.

“We have long been using automation to help us provide headlines from these press releases. And now, for a couple of years, we’ve been using a new AI tool that we call Fact Chaining, which helps us extract news from those press releases and make headlines out of it and now make some of the first urgents, we call them, out of that news.”

‘Urgents’ at Reuters are up to three paragraphs that contain the story’s initial news line stating, for example, that profit was up or down.

Galloni added: “But we do not send it out until a human is looking at that and making sure that it’s correct.”

Galloni said the Reuters AI receives all the corporate results but “has real trouble prioritising… these AI tools, they’re good at the routine, very good, but they don’t have news judgment. And that’s why you have to have the humans in the loop.”

She continued: “But aside from this one example, generally what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to use the AI tools to help us propagate important information, in particular to the markets, to our financial terminal, in order to allow our journalists to go out and do that which journalists only can do, which is take sources out to lunch and get scoops. So that’s sort of the goal.”

Galloni also spoke about AI-written bullet points or “super summaries” that are published at the top of stories, mainly for the core financial audience.

She said they initially worried people would no longer feel the need to read the actual story but she said this was not the case “so it’s enhancing our product”.

Galloni also spoke about the expansion by Reuters into consumer-facing subscriptions. Reuters launched a metered paywall on its website and app in October 2024, costing £40 per year.

Asked by Atkins if Reuters is competing with its own B2B clients by growing its own consumer offering, Galloni said the agency still provides “raw material” so other news organisations can produce their own articles, podcasts and broadcast packages.

“And then for our platforms or for our website, we package it and analyse it and put our own spin on it,” she said.

“Thus far, this has not been a problem. The two things are not incompatible.”

Natalie Fahy, editor of several Reach websites including Nottinghamshire Live, told the panel about the publisher’s move into digital subscriptions.

Premium paywalls have been launched on eight Reach websites since November including the Manchester Evening News and the Express and they now have a combined 25,000 paying subscribers.

Fahy said Leicestershire Live, one of the websites under her leadership, has “hundreds” of subscribers after it launched a paywall for premium content at the end of January.

She said this shows “people actually want to pay for hyperlocal content”.

Fahy said although Reach wants to “stop relying on third-party platforms” it does “need the scale to attract subscribers as well”.

What are top editors worrying about in 2026?

Alessandra Galloni, Reuters: Journalist safety

Physical safety for journalists in conflict zones including Ukraine, Iran, UAE, Gaza, Sudan and Congo.

Plus: “Safety in the US in a way that we haven’t witnessed before with this new administration. And part of it is digital safety. There’s physical safety also, covering protests, but also attacks, you know, doxing online.”

Jack Lefley, PA Media: Attacks on journalists and ‘degraded information environment’

Journalists or anyone with a camera being targeted a events like protests.

“More broadly, I would say that the biggest threat to the industry is the degraded information environment. Where audiences lose the ability to distinguish between verified journalism and synthetic noise.”

Laura Wilshaw, ITV News: Doing it all

“We need to try and do it all without double the resources to do it all. So we want to keep up with the industry, keep up with changing viewer habits whilst maintaining trust.

“Changing the workforce, upskilling the workforce to be able to provide content on multi-platforms in a way that reaches lots of different audiences whilst maintaining our linear audience too.”

Natalie Fahy, Nottinghamshire Live: Media literacy

“I think it’s a big problem. People don’t understand what we do. People are more likely to trust the likes of Lee Anderson or Facebook rather than us, for example.

“I think that starts at primary school, really. I think we need to start as editors maybe feeding into the national curriculum, really educating people from childhood so they grow up understanding what we do and why we do it.”

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