Workflows to building trust: What AI is doing in newsrooms across the world

Digital news workflows, transcription, saving reader's time, building trust (yes!) and reaching new audiences are among the many things that AI is now being used for in newsrooms across the world

“The New York Times examined whether Israel had bombed civilians in Gaza. Its team trained an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that could identify the craters left behind by the 2,000-pound bombs. Then, the team used the tool to review satellite imagery and confirm that hundreds of those bombs were dropped particularly in areas that had been marked as safe for civilians.” 

“The Wall Street Journal used AI to map how billionaire Elon Musk’s rhetoric has shifted over time to become increasingly political, particularly after his acquisition of Twitter. The journal used AI to analyse more than 41,000 tweets by Musk, going back as far as 2019. It converted a dataset of his posts into vectors, which helped group tweets with similar keywords in clusters.” 

Those are just two examples of AI being used in hard reporting. 

Digital news workflows, transcription, customer service, saving reader’s time, building trust (yes!) and reaching new audiences are among the many things that AI is now being used for in newsrooms across the world. 

That is what an outstanding report from the International News Media Association (INMA), a global community of over 100 news media companies in 90-odd countries, maps in a report released late in October.

 

‘Inside the Shift Towards AI-Driven News Operations’ is researched and put together by Sonali Verma, who heads the generative AI initiative for INMA. 

 

The report, priced at $895, is available free of cost to members like this reporter. It looks at AI across four dimensions — automating processes, as an aid to reporting, as a way of serving audiences better and on what it could do to help monetise audiences.

 

The last part deals with the question of why it is difficult to measure the return on investment (RoI) on AI deployment.

 

It quotes a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study that showed 95 per cent of companies that have invested in GenAI are getting zero return much to the dismay of investors. Some of the best examples in the INMA report are in the process and reaching new audiences by making news easier to consume.

 

“The team at Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany gives its audience the option of reading the article in ‘easy’ language through a slider on articles. In that version of the article, there is no jargon, no abbreviations, and no assumptions that readers already have the context they need to understand the story,” says the report.

 

Amedia in Norway created an AI Sandbox, a secure, in-house platform designed for journalists. It features pre-programmed prompts like ‘improve my text,’ search engine optimisation (SEO) summaries, Facebook blurbs, and headline suggestions.

 

Journalists can also upload PDFs or spreadsheets and even paste URLs for quick content generation. The interface is simple by design and every element is built to save time.

 

The report denies that AI is killing jobs in the news business.

 

“It is taking some tasks off our plates, but you still need human judgement and sensitivity in the news business. It may change some skills we hire in the news business.”