Content quality control has to be media's not-so-secret weapon

As Barry Adams analyses the cause and effect of mass AI-generated content, it seems to me there is only one clear path to success for publishers.

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 16:03, 06 March 2025

There’s a neat feature in Glide CMS which lets harassed writers and sub-editors know they’ve gone awry on a headline and lets them know it needs work. (Hold, on this isn't a sales pitch...)

Said feature means you can set business rules for things like SEO, or simply reduce the likelihood a bolshy designer will go looking with malice aforethought for whomever broke their 3-deck headline rule for the umpteenth time.

What makes me think of this? 

I was reading Barry Adams’ latest piece on the Content Quality Bell Curve, and pictured a world in which a CMS had a content quality enforcement feature, burning with alerts and refusal-to-save until a required level of information was entered, in the manner of some SEO fulfilment tools. Who'd need editors, huh?

Before the AI KoolAId convinced many that humans are old hat, such an idea was utterly inconceivable, but the train of thought is an intriguing one if only to put into relief the current situation with content production.

As Adams notes in his excellent piece, we are approaching a stage where a substantial part of the internet, even the majority, is starting to be occupied by low quality and AI-generated trash.

Again, as Barry points out, there's always been a good deal of drivel out there, but the volume is increasing at levels only made possible by automation.

The obvious commercial conclusion for those not wishing to participate in such a race to the bottom is to strive for quality in their content. 

It's in the details

Shifting from the macro to the micro during this rumination on what quality means in this era, I happened to read a story on my local newspaper's site concerning a defence manufacturing company in our area.

Essentially, it was about the prospects for the business improving as the UK decides it needs to make a few more swords, as well as plowshares, in the current uncertain situation.

To my editorial consternation, there was a not a single mention of what the company actually made for its military customers. It could be planet-devastating death rays, or it could be camouflaged sporks - I still want to know.

One can argue such an omission is a small thing, but it really isn't. Such omissions make the news editor in me twitch quite violently. If you treat those consuming your content as fools, then you are making a fool of yourself.

You don't have to club the reader's attention span into submission with details, yet it remains a core task of reporters to take the complex and render it into terms the lay person can understand.

So when "quality" is spoken of, quality in content is in the details, and if it’s not in the details it won't be present in the whole.

The "Who, When, What, Why and How" of basic news reporting is not some awful stricture that is designed to punish inexperienced reporters; it is the base essence of quality in reporting. Get that right, all else falls into place.

Even amid all the immense distracting babble over what tech can and can't do for our industry, and what it has and hasn't done, some basic editorial requirements remain constant in actual content production.

Such moderate standards of quality such as this are enforceable only within a production chain with humans in it. There is no automated solution, and if there were, it would likely only result in some universal and bland definition of quality, if the results we see from AI-created content are anything to go by.

So then, we come to a chicken and egg situation. Am I a paid subscriber to my local newspaper? No, I am just a registered user. Every time I consume content from there, I ask myself, “Should I be paying for this?”.

The industry insider in me says "yes" of course, but the journalistic quality filter puts a roadblock on that. The price-to-information ratio isn't high enough. Yet unless an organisation has the funds to improve its situation by hiring, then it remains locked in a battle with the awful, ever-growing mass of low quality content.

As Mr Adams puts it, "being a mediocre, forgettable publication is a death sentence."