How newsrooms are utilising AI across the globe

Last week, I underscored the value of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a critical success factor for the reader-revenue strategy. Today, I discuss how AI is being used in newsrooms across the globe.

There are three main ways in which AI is being used in newsrooms today: news gathering, content generation and content distribution. In the news gathering process, AI is being used to identify trends and potential breaking news stories to allow journalists enough time to research on the topic before the news breaks.

AI has also been used to identify ‘pre-trending’ topics – topical issues that are on the brink of blowing up. This anticipatory capacity has allowed some newsrooms to get ahead of the curve and prepare adequately for the breaking news.

If you are familiar with ‘Paradise Papers’ and ‘Panama Papers’, the collaborative investigative journalism project that uncovered the details of offshore investments of the world’s elite, then you have witnessed how AI can be a useful tool for news gathering.

In these two cases, AI was used to analyse data from multiple sources, producing one of the most impactful journalistic enterprises in the recent past. Similarly, we have local examples of AI being used to create a ‘Covid-19 tracker’ that allowed one local newsroom to trace Covid-19 numbers from the Johns Hopkins Hospital website and relaying the data to the local newsroom’s website in real time.

Robot journalism

Another familiar appropriation of AI is automated content generation, also known as “Robot Journalism’. This means using bots to write stories based on structured data. Popular categories of such stories include stock market reports, weather forecasts, business news (corporate earnings reports) and sports news.

The beauty of this use case is twofold; first it improves efficiency because bots have a much faster turnaround time, and secondly, it relieves journalists of the mundane tasks of writing the same stories every quarter (in the case of corporate earning) to allow them enough time to focus on investigative, in-depth reporting.

Make no mistake, bots are not replacing journalists in the strict sense. Instead, they are carrying out tasks that might be considered mechanical, leaving journalists to bring in the analysis, nuance and historical accounts. What one might consider a ‘local example’ could be Bloomberg’s South Africa use of AI to report financial data and update their stock market reports. The Associated Press is also using AI to report corporate earnings.

Lastly, AI is prominently being used in content distribution. Through AI, online editors are able to know the best time to publish a story and news organisations are able to effect personalised content curation for their audiences. Using data on previous audience engagement habits, AI predicts content consumption behaviors to optimise the time audiences spend on their websites.

In a conversation on this matter with a colleague, the issue of “Tech allergies” came up. This refers to the cynicism with which journalists treat the appropriation of AI and other technologies in the media.

You already know what I’ll be tackling next week!

The writer is the Director, Innovation Centre, at Aga Khan University; [email protected]