Tomorrow’s Publisher, a site about the future of news, is 'powered by' an AI startup

The New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI is going to trial, the BBC is accusing Apple News of improper citations, and the Daily Mail just passed 250,000 digital subscribers.

No, these are not stories on Nieman Lab, but rather some of the most recent headlines on Tomorrow’s Publisher.

The digital news site is home to a host of AI-assisted, and human-edited, news stories about the latest in news innovation. A handful of human-bylined opinion pieces about the media industry and the rise of AI are interspersed throughout.

Launched in January, Tomorrow’s Publisher is first and foremost a marketing tool for HBM Advisory, a media consulting business whose past clients include The Wall Street Journal and MIT Technology Review.

Alan Hunter, the editor of Tomorrow’s Publisher and co-founder of HBM Advisory, told me that since he swapped his consulting blog for Tomorrow’s Publisher, he’s been taking more meetings with potential clients than ever. (Hunter was previously head of digital at The Times and The Sunday Times.) But the news site is also a showcase for one generative AI tool in particular, NoahWire.

“Our news is supplied by NoahWire, using real-time algorithms and then rigorously verified against ten independent sources,” reads Tomorrow’s Publisher’s author page. To date, there are 11 bylined articles from human contributors on the site, while 535 other articles are bylined “News Room.” The majority of those are “powered by Noah Wire Services.”

Each morning NoahWire generates a feed of potential trending news stories, pulling from a mix of press releases, blog posts, public records, and other news sites. Hunter says he has a feed for each vertical on the site, including topics like news avoidance, monetization, and subscriptions. NoahWire allows him to select one of these stories and output a research summary or a first draft of an article using its fine-tuned large language models (LLM). Hunter clarified that sometimes he only uses the feeds for idea generation, and that when he does output a full AI-generated draft, it is reshaped, edited, and fact-checked by him before publication.

“Information is sometimes dressed up as journalism but really is the transcription of facts. It is reporting on press releases, ministerial press conferences, corporate events, sports results, and so on,” Hunter wrote in an opinion piece on Tomorrow’s Publisher. “This kind of content, I believe, will be entirely produced by bots, maybe with very limited human oversight, in the next couple of years.”

Tomorrow’s Publisher aims to demonstrate what exactly this new era of automation might look like for potential clients. An ad at the bottom of the site reads, “Want a bespoke publication like the one you’re reading?” with a link to HMB Advisory’s contact page. The copy is laid over an AI-generated illustration of a man reading a newspaper titled “My B2B Magazine.”

Within days of its launch in January, Tomorrow’s Publisher had already received criticism, with some questioning whether it was ethical for NoahWire to repurpose other news publishers’ original reporting for its own content, or to do so without direct compensation or licensing.

“Some sources are named but not linked, and the ‘Source: Noah Wire Services’ at the bottom makes it look like that’s the original source, not whichever site(s) the info originally came from,” wrote Esther Kezia Thorpe, a media analyst and co-host of Media Voices podcasts, in the comments of Hunter’s LinkedIn post announcing the launch. Others also pointed out that there was no obvious AI disclosure on the articles pages or site homepage.

“This new publication, pretty as it is, is frankly concerning to anyone pushing for a smidgeon of accountability, transparency and ethical use of AI in publishing. Why is it so opaque?” asked Marcela Kunova, editor of Journalism.co.uk, beneath the same post.

Ivan Massow, co-founder of NoahWire and of Tomorrow’s Publisher, published an essay on the site responding to the criticism. “Those who claim that we are undermining original reporting are being naive or tendentious. And indeed blind to how the industry has always operated,” wrote Massow, explaining that the service relies on public APIs and RSS feeds, and doesn’t jump news publisher paywalls. “How do they think today’s leading websites fill their space with thousands of articles a day? Is it all the result of original reporting? Of course not. Nobody even pretends that it is.”

NoahWire isn’t ignoring exclusion protocols, Massow told me. “We don’t worry about the fact that there are some sites that don’t want us to look at their stuff, because the news will be on quite a few others simultaneously, and maybe even the site that they got their news from,” he said. Unlike a service like Dow Jones’ Factiva which has AI licensing deals with over 4,000 publishers, Massov says, “we’re just not including sources that you need to pay for.”

“Embracing the meteor”

NoahWire is Massow’s first foray into publishing and journalism, though he has long been a public figure in the U.K., including past lives in financial services, campaigning for gay rights and against a ban on foxhunting with dogs, and an unsuccessful bid for mayor of London in 2016. Since founding NoahWire, he has become a vocal proponent for widespread AI adoption by news publishers — or, as he called it in a recent interview, “embracing the meteor.”

“Ivan brings an outsider’s view to the news ecosystem, and that is very powerful,” said Hunter of his partner in Tomorrow’s Publisher. “His point of view is not ‘how can I fit my service into the status quo?’ Instead, it is ‘how can we do this more effectively?’”

Massow said the inspiration for NoahWire came from tools already being used in some newsrooms that rely on keyword and statistical analysis to identify trending topics. Some of those also provide links to other stories for journalists to reference while writing their own versions, he said. NoahWire uses foundation models to improve this real-time search and automate parts of the research and drafting process. Its search features, Massow argues, makes it more than a “GPT wrapper.”

NoahWire only came out of beta in February, but it has a small stable of business-to-business (B2B) publishers and digital news outlets as customers. Massow says he’s taken on more traditional news publishers as clients as well, including a U.K. tabloid —  “one of the red tops,” though he declined to name which one. The tabloid is currently using Noah for a feed on social security scams, to prime coverage that appeals to its elderly readers.

Rather than using NoahWire’s semi-automation to cut down on newsroom staff, Massow claims his clients are using these tools to cut down on the time journalists spend aggregating other news, in order to open up their days for more substantive reporting.

One of NoahWire’s first customers was Reset Media, a publisher that operates several climate and energy-focused digital news sites, including Climate Solutions News and EVLife.

“We treat Noah as a source of insight and content ideas, like a very focused and tailored search engine,” said Dominic Shales, the company’s founder and CEO. Reset has a small editorial team, including freelancers, though the majority of the sites’ stories are produced by Shales himself.

Reset has subscribed to Noah for about eight months, paying a monthly fee that offers a set number of tokens to use for its various feeds. “There are different levels of subscription according to how many story ideas you need,” said Shales. NoahWire’s site lists its rate for larger commercial publishers at roughly $1,300 per month.

Shales shared several stories he bylined that were produced using Noah, including an explainer on solid-state batteries, as well as coverage of an “energy-efficient” cruise ship and Tesla’s launch in Saudi Arabia. In each case, Shales identified a story in one of their feeds, then prompted Noah to produce a “full draft” that was the basis for the final article. He then looked at the original sources linked to check that the draft was accurate and that quotes were attributed properly. When needed, he added in additional context, comment, or photos.

Noah doesn’t always pull from press releases, though. In a recent Reset Media article about Bill Gates’ views on AI and the future of work, Gates argues that “professions like teaching, journalism, and programming [will be] susceptible to major transformations sooner than manual jobs.” Those comments are pulled directly from an interview with Gates by The Indian Express.

“I’ve always found that the originating media outlet is credited by Noah and they also provide links and sources for verification. If we deem the story relevant and interesting for our audience, we would also credit the outlet clearly in the final article,” said Shales. In this case, The Indian Express is cited in the first sentence of Reset Media’s story, though there is no link back to the original interview.

An aggregation double standard?

Some publishers are concerned that NoahWire isn’t properly crediting or compensating them. Soon after the launch of Tomorrow’s Publisher, Massow received a cease-and-desist letter from Press Gazette, a U.K.-based publication also covering the future of the media industry.

“I shared four links with [Massow] on stories which originated on Press Gazette,” Dominic Ponsford, the editor-in-chief of Press Gazette, said in a statement. Ponsford assumed Press Gazette’s site had been scraped and its original reporting rewritten using AI to produce the stories.

“We weren’t scraping anything,” said Massow, who explained that the Press Gazette site had been blocked from indexing. “We always respect those protocols.”

Rather, Hunter said, in this case he read the stories himself on Press Gazette and chose to manually write them up, crediting the publication in the article copy. Still, he offered to take down the aggregations and they no longer appear on the site.

“I took them down solely because our aim is to serve the news industry, not to risk making enemies within it for no good reason,” he said.

Ponsford said he withdrew his cease-and-desist request and considered the situation “settled amicably.” Still, he shared reservations about Tomorrow’s Publisher’s use of NoahWire at large. “My view is it is okay to use AI to rewrite press releases but wrong to use it to repurpose original journalism. But you need to be transparent with the reader about what is going on,” he said.

Massow holds up the incident as a double standard, in which AI-based aggregation is treated differently than human aggregation. “People are holding AI to a level of accountability they wouldn’t dream of applying to a human,” he said. “Even though we didn’t supply Tomorrow’s Publisher with those articles, the mere idea that they might have come from us caused real upset.”

In recent months, I’ve covered a roiling debate about the downstream effects of automated news aggregation, including how it can displace human newsletter writers and siphon off advertising from local outlets. In its own way, Tomorrow’s Publisher is pressing on a similar nerve.

“I don’t see why people have such a problem with newsrooms using AI to follow up stories published elsewhere. Human journalists do this thousands of times a day and it passes without comment,” said Hunter. “Using AI to speed this process should leave journalists free to pursue the added-value original journalism that will be essential to their survival.”