In her latest column, Charlotte Mceleny takes a look at the publishing ecosystem, and how an industry used to turbulence is approaching the latest disruptive tech…

The publishing ecosystem is a perfect microcosm for the often-conflicting feelings of fear and opportunity that come with AI adoption. But publishers are also no strangers to tech and economic disruption, and this experience is playing out in Australia as they take to AI with innovation, while safeguarding on quality and ethics.

Take News Corp, for example, which has inked global deals with the likes of Meta and OpenAI to use content from the Wall Street Journal, The Times, and The Australian to train its models. Closer to home in Australia, the attitude there is more mixed, with executive chair Michael Miller last year saying publishers need to create a "united front" against social and tech firms, yet the company itself has been building out its own NewsGPT tool.

Scott Purcell, co-founder of Man of Many, Australia's largest independent men's lifestyle publisher, is bullish on AI but believes that publishers should stand firm on journalism being produced by humans.

"The narrative around AI and journalism has been dominated by fear, and I get it. But I think the real risk isn't AI itself. It's publishers who refuse to adapt while the ground shifts beneath them. At Man of Many, we've always taken the position that AI is augmentation, not replacement. We're a "100% Human Initiative" member. Every article we publish is written by a human journalist. That hasn't changed, and it won't."

He adds, "Where AI transforms things is on the operational side. The boring stuff. SEO audits, competitor benchmarking, metadata tagging, social scheduling, and reporting. We've been quietly building what we call our AI operating system over the past 12 months, and the productivity gains have been significant. My view is that the publishers who treat AI as a content factory will get punished by audiences and algorithms alike. Those who use it to free up their teams to produce better journalism will win."

Areas for innovation

Outside of content creation, one area where publishers are starting to experiment with AI is as a democratiser for sales teams, particularly in unlocking revenue from long-tail clients that may not have been an option or scalable for them previously.

Simon Larcey, founder of Viztrade, has been experimenting with agentic AI that acts as a media sales agent, hunting for advertisers and communicating with them while they sleep.

"We are building a media sales agent to help all our self-serve clients find and source more advertising clients, increasing demand flow and billing more revenue," he adds.

"I think AI puts all publishers on a much more level playing field. I think the agility of smaller publishers will enable them to adopt AI faster, helping them in their fight against media conglomerates. With AI, you can pretty much do anything - you just need an idea and know how to ask the right questions. I think smaller publishers will benefit from the efficiencies it can offer and this will speed up processes and reduce the resources required," he explains.

Likewise, Made Of Many’s AI operating system, Otto, also employs a custom-built multi-agent approach. It uses AI as a connective layer within its tech stack, employing over 50 AI agents to operate across departments and including 12 specific automated workflows. Examples of what this actually means for output range from daily performance briefings to newsletter scheduling to competitive intelligence alerts.

From a data perspective, the AI runs across a knowledge base of 5500 "chunks of company data" and connects to 15+ data sources through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) or CLI's, which lets the AI read and act on live data rather than working from a static snapshot, according to Purcell.

"None of this writes our articles. What it does is give a lean team of 11 people the operational firepower of a team three times our size. Our editors spend less time pulling reports and more time creating content. Our sales team is automatically briefed on campaign performance. I get a daily executive summary across every department before I've finished my coffee," he explains. 

Upsizing the potential for a smaller-sized team is precisely the upside for Purcell, who agrees that it starts to level the playing field for smaller, independent publishers.

"The big licensing deals between AI companies and legacy publishers have overwhelmingly favoured the large incumbents. Smaller, independent publishers like us don't have the leverage to negotiate multimillion-dollar deals with OpenAI or Google.

But the technology itself is actually an equaliser. For the first time, a team of 11 can genuinely compete with newsrooms of 50 or 100 because the gap was never talent; it was infrastructure. We couldn't afford dedicated data analysts, a full-time SEO team, and a reporting department. Now we don't need to, because AI handles the operational layer while our humans focus on what they're best at: creating trusted, expert-verified content in categories we genuinely know," he adds.

In contrast to a legacy publisher, he says Man of Many has been able to do this in months and this agility has become a competitive advantage, as it is unburdened by red tape. This speed has also created another potential revenue stream for publishers by spinning out these solutions as a SaaS model. Both Viztrade and Man of Many are making this technology available to other businesses and, although it is early days in these talks, are seeing shared challenges in meeting the industry's fast-paced demands.

As Purcell explains, "Every independent publisher I talk to is dealing with the same equation: shrinking teams, growing demands, and a technology shift they can't afford to ignore. If we can help solve that, there's a real business there."