The Independent today announced two new launches at Advertising Week Europe: Independent Studio and Bulletin.
Independent Studio is where The Independent’s journalism and content comes to life in talent-led media: original video formats, podcasts, newsletters and more.
Expansion in these areas in recent years has demonstrated how putting truly independent, trusted voices at the forefront creates deep engagement with audiences and creates valuable IP for brand sponsorships. The content will range across verticals from entertainment and lifestyle to sport and current affairs and will live on-site, across major platforms such as YouTube and Spotify, and in email inboxes.
The Independent Studio announcement coincides with the reveal of The Independent’s cutting-edge AI-enabled news service, Bulletin, which is live from today. In a year-long development led by The Independent’s journalists and teams across the business, working with Google’s Gemini AI team, the tools enable trusted news summaries for an era when disinformation is rife, the news agenda is busier than ever, and audiences are more pressed for time.
These two launches underscore The Independent’s tradition of innovation and entrepreneurialism, and its pro-active commitment to tackling distrust in media and disinformation through high-quality, trusted journalism.
INDEPENDENT STUDIO
Independent Studio will produce a huge range of content, from podcasts and talent access to original videos and email newsletters, attracting deep engagement with broad audiences. Front and centre of Independent Studio will be acclaimed journalists, stand-out creators, and top talent: names and faces that our audiences can get to know and trust..
In sport, for example, a new YouTube football channel, ACFC, launched last week by the creator Adam Clery, who spoke on stage at AdWeek, will combine with Miguel Delaney’s long-running football newsletter, and a new podcast.
In travel, Simon Calder and Annabel Grossman’s long-established and highly successful Travel Smart video series is accompanied by their immensely popular email newsletter and Simon’s daily podcast.
Readers, viewers and listeners can expect fresh launches in areas including current affairs, football, music, film, food and more.
Independent Studio’s creative output and deep audience engagement builds on existing success and broadens possibilities for high-visibility partnership packages on high-value intellectual property. Travel Smart is a prime example of this, combining video, newsletter and podcast presence for brands. This formula delivers multiple touch points, unlocking the potential for huge engagement, and will be available in a range of key verticals, with entertainment, travel, food and drink, sport, EVs (electric vehicles) and money (from personal finance to careers, SMEs and business news) leading the charge.
BULLETIN
This week saw the first reporting facilitated by Bulletin, The Independent’s innovative new service powered by proprietary AI editorial tools and verified by trusted journalists.
Journalists at The Independent led the development of the tools and designed all the workflows: a new team of (human) editors will oversee all content and sign off before publication, solving the problem of attribution and fact-checking in many other AI initiatives. Only The Independent’s own verified and fact-checked reporting will be used as source material for the bulletins, ensuring we continue to earn the trust of audiences.
The publisher has been working in partnership with experts at Google Cloud to integrate Gemini, Google’s family of Al models, into Bulletin, alongside The Independent’s data and development teams. The toolkit will be continually developed, adding new features – video, graphics, timelines, explainers and personalisation – as the service evolves.
As well as publishing at bulletin.news, The Independent has partnered with WeAre8, the world’s only sustainable social media app, to deliver exclusive content to the platform’s 1.6 million monthly active users. This supports WeAre8’s mission to be a home for trusted, meaningful conversations and connections in a safe and protected place, where true freedom of speech and authentic journalism can thrive.
WeAre8 is the brainchild of serial tech entrepreneur Zoe Kalar. She and her team have reimagined social media so that it brings people positivity, protection and shared economics. Firstly, the algorithms on WeAre8 have been unlocked so that people are no longer algorithmically controlled to scroll endlessly, but able instead to discover something they love and tap out to related websites to read more. Secondly, the economic framework has been radically changed so people can choose to watch an ad at a time that suits them with the money from the advertisers being shared with them and charities through an in-app wallet. Thirdly, in order to enable healthy discussion and real debate, the trolling and directed abuse has been eliminated through AI models that can detect and block toxic content.
Geordie Greig, Editor-in-Chief at The Independent, remarked about Bulletin: “The Independent always likes to be ahead of the game. As the first fully digital news brand in the UK, we lead again by now helping to pioneer what is a fact of life in 21st century information, the use of AI in journalism.
“We do this with Bulletin, AI with human editorial supervision to allow us to cut to the chase with essential news briefing. We embrace the opportunity to find a way to provide what our readers want: authoritative, quick, brief, engaging journalism as a supplement to what we also provide. It will have focus and act as a brilliant shorthand to our agenda-shaping journalism.”
Christian Broughton, CEO and former editor of The Independent, says about the new launches: “These twin innovations underscore what makes The Independent so special. Powered by tech, driven by people and giving audiences what they so desperately need: trusted, innovative journalism and content. Driving Bulletin is our belief that journalists should be the architects of how publishers take the best from the transformative powers of AI, while safeguarding audiences against any negatives. Our journalists wanted to ensure they are always in control of the process, so they worked through the workflows and tech implementation themselves, to serve our audience’s desire for trusted, essential briefings. That need has become more acute, whether from long working hours, busy family life, or all kinds of other reasons. Whenever readers want to go deeper, they can click through to The Independent’s in-depth news, or Independent Studio’s vast offering of content. We know that Independent Studio will be hugely welcomed by our audience, partners and advertisers.”
Zoe Kalar, Founder and CEO, WeAre8, believes the partnership opens up a world of possibilities: “WeAre8 and The Independent are transforming social news with the launch of Bulletin. In a world where the stories that matter are getting lost to algorithms, journalists are being trolled, people are scared to ask questions, and misinformation thrives – we are radically reinventing and reimagining news on social media. WeAre8 eliminates the negatives of social media. Through WeAre8’s healthy algorithms that enable people to see everyone they follow, an AI engine that eliminates abuse, links out from every post back to the publisher websites, and shared economics, we transform the news experience as we know it. Through Bulletin and WeAre8, people will see the daily snapshot of what is happening, but they are no longer passive bystanders. They can discuss the news on our Flows platform without the fear of being attacked. And, because our citizens are rewarded financially when they opt to watch ads on the WeAre8 platform, they can also choose to forward their earnings to key charities and non-profits supporting communities who are going through tragic and challenging times featured in the news. Together we enter a new world where news is truly social and our voices matter, where people can discuss the tough things without fear, elevate journalism, unlock economic flow back to people in need and empower people’s voices to fast-track much needed change in the world.”
Quotes from The Independent’s Advertising Week Europe session
Christian Broughton, CEO of The Independent said:
“The Independent was created to break bias, and has always been disruptive, and you only get growth when you innovate.”
“Bulletin is the result of a journalist-led process to work out the best uses of AI in journalism. Our belief is that AI is going to be used in newsrooms, so let’s use it well. Through technology, we can do something that’s been an ambition for a long, long time – more than a decade – to bring quality, trusted briefings to audiences who have less time than ever to keep up with a news agenda that has never been busier. Bulletin creates a whole new product out of our trusted Independent journalism.”
“It’s fundamentally different from asking an open-ended question to an AI tool, where we’ve all seen errors introduced. Instead, we take one single trusted source – and Independent report – that is turned into bitesize content, and approved by our human editors.”
Regarding Independent Studio, he added:
“People trust people, and platforms work well for people: one-to-one deep engagement with audiences through video, podcasts, newsletters and more. At The Independent, we give audiences the freedom to think what they think, make the choices they want to make. And we can give that freedom to creators too.”
Chloe Hubbard, UK Editor of The Independent said:
“All content is factually verified and we only publish stories on the Bulletin platform that we know our audiences want.”
“Already, in one day alone, our Bulletin team achieved one million article views, and that was before the official launch.”
“The tool is about balance. It’s a useful and also retrospective tool for our team, to see how we can better build on the original story.”
“We hired a team of seven people to work with the tools. And we only see that increasing and increasing as Bulletin grows. So essentially, it’s an employment creator—it’s creating jobs.”
Adam Clery, Creative Director, ACFC – The Independent, commented:
“When I spoke to The Independent for the first time about joining them, it was really clear that the direction of travel was about being trusted and about being authentic, and ultimately about having somewhere people can go looking to enjoy football content. First and foremost, you’ve got to make an entertainment product. But at the core of that is something that they know is right and informative.”
Zoe Kalar, Founder and CEO, WeAre8 said:
“With WeAre8 and Bulletin people are no longer passive bystanders to distressing world events, unable to discern fake from real. Instead we can be active participants in trusted news of the day, discuss and debate it in a safe space without the fear of attack or trolling, click out to read the longer form news and make an impact by signing petitions or donating our earnings from ads we’ve earned in our 8wallet to support a cause we see in a news story.”
“WeAre8 is like if Instagram and Tik Tok had a lovechild with a conscience.Do we need another social media platform like the old ones? Absolutely not. We had to spend 4 and a half years training our AI to learn the positive aspects of humanity as well as to be able to determine different language nuances so that truly toxic stuff doesn’t get through. The legacy platforms’ AI has learnt to prioritise the negative human traits – greed, power, hate etc. WeAre8’s AI is human knowledge through a really powerful, positive, healthy lens.
And to solve the systematic problems of social media we also had to unlock the algorithms as the algorithms control what people see, how they feel and we’ve become addicted to this race of “how many followers do we have?” And it’s become this judgement and insecurity framework. We’re just playing the casino the whole time because irrespective of how many followers you have, the back end controls how many people see it.”
“We’ve reimagined the ad delivery model in a way that works x 54 times better. We’ve taken the ad out of the feed so people have the choice of if, how and when they watch ads and we then share the ad revs with them in their central WeAre8 wallet. You can then use this to pay off your bills or subscriptions or redistribute to charities and non profits you care about. We’ve discovered that 97% of people are really happy to watch ads if they feel valued and can watch on their terms.”
