Q: How are publishers using AI to create smart editorial workflows?
A: Publishers are now using a range of back-office tools powered by AI to enhance productivity in the newsroom especially around the content creation and optimisation workflows — so, from article idea to published article. Examples include recommended headlines, auto-generated summaries, image and video recommendations, checking the content against a publisher’s editorial style guide, translating content into multiple languages and automatically tagging and linking to related articles — all of which used to be manual and laborious tasks.
Q: How are publishers using AI for planning purposes?
A: There are now a number of AI tools to plan content creation around events whether events with known timings (eg. elections, sports matches, music events), or breaking news events that have similar characteristics to previous events. The tools can look at how events were covered previously and suggest the number and types of articles to create to have the best chance of getting the most traffic and therefore revenue.
The tools that have data from Google Search Console, Google Analytics and other search data have the best predictions on how to cover and plan for events. There are also options to optimise staff rotas and being able to assign tasks to the best person — again learning from previous experience and feeding into the AI predictive models.
Q: How are publishers using AI for content creation?
A: Publishers have been experimenting with generative AI for a while now and we’re now entering a phase where there is more confidence about the process and how to ensure quality is maintained that meets the publisher’s style guides and quality controls.
The important learning is to have a ‘human-in-the-loop-workflow’ where content is reviewed by humans before publishing. This has led to a change of some people’s roles in the newsroom to become more about reviewing and refining, but it’s important to stress that it’s not a replacement for quality journalism. The best cases are where the content is based on data, for example financial reports, weather, traffic updates and even court cases.
Q: How are publishers using AI for video creation and editing?
A: Publishers are starting to use tools to take long form video or unedited video and provide short form or summary videos that are suitable for news articles.
It’s now possible to extract key moments from videos by event type. For example, from a football match you could create a highlights video of the whole match, highlights of goals, highlights of best corners etc.
Also, there are many tools to have virtual presenters even using real journalists’ profiles and their voices.
The smart editing tools that use AI and learn from human feedback are having a real impact — again I stress the need for human-in-the-loop for review to maintain quality and provide useful data back into the model to provide continuous improvements.
Q: How are publishers using AI for data-driven insights?
A: I believe the best AI processes and outputs come from data-driven workflows. It’s possible to see how an event was covered in the past eg. a publisher maybe has covered Glastonbury with weather reports, live blogs, artist reviews and the analytics data collected around engagement and content journeys can be used to predict how to cover the next Glastonbury Festival.
Also, AI is being used to expose insights about what to write about, and what to write less about, making the newsroom more efficient and able to serve the audience with the content they want.
Q: How do you see AI evolving over the 6-12 months and how will this impact the newsroom?
A: More focus on the quality of the data going into the models and also the checks on data produced whether insights or generative content. It’ll be possible to get to a place where hallucinations are an edge case and not the norm, and confidence will build in newsrooms that AI is there to support and enable and not to take jobs — there’s going to be a steep learning and training curve, but that is already in motion in a lot of publishers’ newsrooms.
Q: What’s in the pipeline from Bright Sites?
A: We’re working hard on our product launch next month of our predictive and planning tool for newsrooms which is powered by AI — essentially answering the questions: what to write and when, and when to update content?
It’s our first standalone product and has a lower barrier to entry than a CMS migration so we’re excited to be working with more publishers over the next year. We also have an aggressive roadmap for AI tools within Flow, our CMS and publishing platform and are excited by the speed at which we can innovate — we’ve doubled the number of people working on AI at Bright Sites in the last year and see a similar growth plan for next year.
About us
Bright Sites is a leading tech company producing innovative content creation tools and planning and audience products for publishers including our flagship product, Flow, an AI-enabled publishing platform. Flow is a versatile, high-performance CMS with liveblogging, ecommerce, translation and AI and automation workflows enabling publishers to take advantage of the latest advances in AI.
Email: brian.alford@brightsites.co.uk
Tel: 07719 019091
Website: www.brightsites.co.uk
