CEO of News Media Holding spoke at SPIEF

Maxim Iksanov, CEO of News Media Holding, spoke at the session "New Media, Advertising and Communications: how new technologies are changing business" from Kommersant Publishing House in the framework of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. The discussion focused on the transformation of media consumption and the changing role of journalists and content creators in the digital age.

According to Iksanov, the differences between traditional journalism and blogging are becoming less noticeable today. Both journalists and digital content authors work towards the same goal — attracting and retaining the audience's attention.

"We are gradually moving towards one point. Bloggers borrow the tools of classical media, while journalists actively use the formats that have appeared in the digital environment. As a result, everyone is doing the same thing — trying to interest the audience and win their attention," Iksanov said.

He stressed that modern media projects are increasingly using blogging formats to work with new audiences. As an example, Iksanov cited the work of VK Video studio at the SPIEF, where forum participants, in addition to industry issues, discussed simpler topics that were understandable to a wide audience. This reflects the general trend towards more open and accessible communication between experts, business and society.

A separate role is assigned to artificial intelligence in the media industry. The head of the holding noted that modern technologies significantly expand the capabilities of editorial offices and content creators, but they are not able to replace human creativity.

"Artificial intelligence provides almost limitless opportunities for the realization of ideas. But only a person determines the direction, formulates the task and comes up with how to use these tools to create a unique product," Iksanov emphasized.

According to the media manager, the advantage of a professional journalist in the new media reality remains a broad outlook, high-quality education and the ability to work in several formats at once. A modern specialist should feel equally confident in the frame, work with neural networks, create creative concepts and find exclusive stories.

"The winner today is the one who knows how to do everything: work in the frame, come up with an AI agent, come up with a cool product, figure out how to creatively approach the hero, interest him in something and pull out an exclusive. All this together creates the image of a modern, advanced journalist," said the CEO of News Media Holding.

During the session, Grigory Levchenko, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Kommersant Publishing House, drew the attention of the audience to the fact that the Russian media market needs content licensing and protection of the publishing mark.

According to the speaker, "the value of a professional journalist is growing and he needs to protect the visible mark of human authorship. The use of content for teaching large language models of artificial intelligence should be monetized through licensing of copyrighted materials."

Nevertheless, Russian AI developers are not ready for this step yet, while foreign companies are already turning to Russian media for partnership in LLM training.

The expert added that the level of standards, regulatory and applied solutions in the Russian digital industry is very high against a global background, and he is convinced that the necessary solutions for the development of the media industry in the age of AI will be formed based on the consensus of regulators, publishers and other market participants.

The session participants also discussed the impact of big data and artificial intelligence on advertising communications, the development of new media platforms, and the transformation of business and audience interaction models in the digital economy. The session was moderated by Marina Kim, First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technology and Communications of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. The participants of the session were Alexander Krainov, Director of Artificial Intelligence Technology Development at Yandex, Ruslan Novikov, CEO of Argumenty I Fakty JSC, Dmitry Pashutin, Director of Strategy at National Media Group JSC, Ryan Perkins, Senior Analyst at Global Economic Indicator, and Zen, Managing Director.Platform" Alexander Tolokolnikov, publisher, Managing Director of Ostdeutsche Medienholding Holger Friedrich.