The world of journalism is constantly evolving, demanding agility and efficiency from newsrooms to keep pace with the ever-growing volume of information and the dynamic news cycle.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful tool, offering the potential to streamline workflows, augment journalistic capabilities, and ultimately, enhance news quality and reach.
This article explores how AI can be leveraged in various aspects of the newsroom, emphasising its role as a valuable collaborator, not a replacement, for journalists.
Generative AI: An Ally, Not a Replacement
A crucial aspect of utilising AI in the newsroom lies in recognising its limitations and fostering a collaborative partnership between humans and machines. In particular, Generative AI should be viewed as a tool to empower journalists, not replace their expertise and judgment. Journalists remain indispensable for fact-checking, source verification, ethical considerations, and ultimately, injecting human insight and narrative into the stories they tell. When we talk about AI in the newsroom, I like to follow the breakdown given by the latest LSE report on journalism and AI. We can therefore divide the different tools into news gathering, production, distribution and news monetisation.
News Gathering: Leveraging AI for Efficiency
AI can significantly enhance the news gathering flow showing, for example, real-time results about trends on search engines or social media. Here are some key use cases:
- Analytics: AI tools can analyse vast amounts of data from social media, news feeds, and public records, identifying emerging trends, potential breaking news, and public sentiment around specific topics. This empowers journalists to prioritise their efforts and focus on stories with greater societal impact.
- Trend Discovery: AI algorithms can analyse results on major search engines (Google Trends is a good free example) and identify keywords, topics, and themes that are gaining traction online.
News Production: Streamlining Workflows with AI
Perhaps the ‘production’ tools are the ones that have become more widespread as a result of the Generative AI boom. They are certainly the easiest to implement, but often the results are still mediocre (for instance, to this day, it is impossible to ask an LLM to write an article worthy of being called one). Some of the most common use cases are:
- Summarisation: AI can automatically generate concise summaries of lengthy reports, press releases, or research papers, saving journalists time and providing readers with a quick overview of key points.
- Translation: AI-powered translation tools can help translate news content into multiple languages, reaching wider audiences and promoting international understanding.
- Transcription: AI technology can transcribe audio and video recordings, allowing journalists to efficiently capture and analyse interviews and press conferences.
- Paraphrasing: AI can rephrase sentences or paragraphs while preserving meaning, assisting journalists in crafting clear and concise narratives.
- Grammar Check: It has now become a commodity for many, but a few years ago, it was unimaginable to think of writing an article with an automatic grammar check to help us. This functionality has greatly speeded up the daily work of the journalist and writer.
News Distribution: Reaching Wider Audiences with AI
Today, writing an article is only the beginning of its journey; knowing how to distribute it is crucial to reaching a wider audience and especially the right one in different media. For example, AI tools are very powerful for SEO. They can analyse content and suggest relevant keywords and meta descriptions, improving search engine visibility and driving organic traffic to news articles. After several tests, however, I believe there is a lot of work to be done to refine the results here as well.
Another way to use AI is to share content on different social networks. AI can analyse audience engagement on social media platforms and suggest optimal posting times and content formats for each channel, maximising reach and engagement. AI can also help to rewrite articles according to the target audience. A very interesting project is modular journalism, which consists of rearranging paragraphs of text according to what that particular reader is looking for at that moment.
Another popular feature to improve the distribution of an article is to turn it into audio thanks to text-to-speech technology. This technology, too, has made huge strides, moving from all-too-robotic voices to neural voices very similar to real ones. Finally, newsrooms with more money are dubbing actors’ or journalists’ voices to have their own proprietary stamp. This is also very helpful in making the article accessible to those with visual impairments.
News Monetisation: Exploring Dynamic Paywalls with AI
AI could potentially revolutionise news monetisation by offering dynamic paywalls, which personalise subscription pricing based on factors like reader location, consumption history and article content. See the famous (and successful) New York Times experience.
In conclusion, we can affirm that AI is not a magic bullet, but it presents a valuable opportunity for newsrooms to enhance efficiency, explore new forms of content creation and reach wider audiences.
By embracing AI as a collaborative tool, journalists can focus on their core strengths – critical thinking, storytelling and ethical reporting – while leveraging AI to streamline workflows and amplify their impact in the ever-evolving landscape of the news industry.
About us
MyType is a new brand of Atex dedicated entirely to digital media. The first product presented by MyType is an innovative AI-driven CMS. Within the CMS, a series of features are integrated to assist editorial staff throughout the different stages of news production.
To find out more, arrange a call with Giorgio Scuteri, sales manager of MyType: gscuteri@atex.com. For collaborations and partnerships: press@mytype.news
