Blog post: Should AI or humans bring you the news?

Free news is not cheap to produce.

I’ve always been a supporter of free news because I believe that everyone has the right to be informed. That’s why, at Romania Insider, we try to cover in our news the most relevant events and developments in Romania and to bring our readers useful information as well as context. We want our readers to know and to understand what is happening in Romania.

But free news is not cheap to produce. While software robots and artificial intelligence AI have started to take over some mundane tasks performed by humans, I don’t think they will be able to produce and curate quality content anytime soon. This requires more than a recipe that algorithms can replicate. It requires experience, background, the ability to distinguish between what’s real and what’s fake, and the capacity to select what is truly relevant. Plus a bit of passion.

Here, at Romania Insider, we are a small team of journalists, but we are passionate about what we do and about our mission: to inform the world about Romania.

Every month, we publish over 400 news articles, analyses, and interviews about Romania, more than any other English-language source on Romania. Over 250,000 people read our articles every month.

We have tried to keep the pace and continue to inform our readers as the pandemic came and changed everything for everyone, because we know that fresh and reliable news is more needed than ever in times like this.

But as a company, things have not been easy. As I said: free news is not cheap to produce. While the crisis hit some of our top clients and advertising sales dropped significantly, our costs remained relatively fixed: we haven’t cut any of our journalists’ salaries, and we continued to pay our suppliers and taxes on time. We believe this is the responsible way to do business.

One year ago, we launched our membership program as the crisis forced us to find alternatives to advertising. We asked our readers for help to finance our team of journalists, and the response has been impressive. Our 500 paying members now help us cover the salaries for two of our four staff journalists.

But we need more help from you as we aim to fully fund our editorial team from reader contributions and memberships. While some sectors of the economy may be seeing recovery this year, the media sector continues to suffer. Companies are not yet ready to resume their advertising spending, and things are moving slowly.