Powering Journalistic Efforts through AI

We’ve covered AI a lot of times in our blogs. A consistent theme we have noticed is the use of AI and the collaboration between teams and AI tools. AI has been under a lot of bias because the visual image of it is literally a robot doing whatever you’re supposed to be doing with scientific accuracy. This is far from what we have in our newsrooms today. In our newsrooms this could mean more of a spreadsheet kind of robot. AI can be explained as a set of tasks that can be assigned to a computer system based on its capacity to do these tasks. 

The way we look at AI today is as a work enhancer. Which means that we use computer programs that can perform a single task perfectly. This could mean transcription, text-to-video or even paraphrasing tools. These are smaller tasks that were traditionally done by a group of people. When assigned to an AI - this helps pick up the pace of any content creation. 

Journalism is innately a reporter to desk job. When you think of news stories, you think of field work, real time images and breaking news. Which is to say that one may not always need AI. You may be able to solve a whole lot of things on your own within the team. You may also be able to solve issues with simpler and inexpensive tools. 

As you would strategize your content, it’s important to strategize your AI needs as well. If you have a smaller team and your growth requires you to distribute work in a way that everyone is able to churn better content with just a little push, then AI does sound good. However, where do you need this help? What kind of AI assistance would your team benefit from the most? These are important questions.  

You could use AI to filter comments you receive from the innumerable readers and carry only the relevant ones based on keywords. This helps you keep spam and malicious comments at bay. This is a simple idea. But how do you know if you go about building this AI or if you just use something in the market today. You have legacy publishers like Reuters build their own AI while you have the American Press using AI available in the market. You need control and you need enough budget - you could always find solutions where your personal needs are prioritized and partner with other publishers who would be willing to invest in the same. This could help share the burden of cost while giving you a tool that you can rely on. 

There is such a scale which comes with AI. From using satellite imagery to power your weather reports to tracking the growth of internet speed in the world to analyze trends, AI can help you bring in data you couldn’t have fathomed. Journalism sandwiched with AI helps bring in cross border collaboration that would only benefit people. The scope of research and study is ten-fold. 

There are new AI developments happening everyday. It's important to look into trends and costs. You could use a cheaper tool as a text converter perhaps but you don’t want to hold back when investing in an analytical report generator. You need solutions that are flexible and adaptive to keep up with the fast moving digital publishing world. 

AI can help you generate insights that would improve your journalism. You can understand and mitigate any biases through AI. You can also look into underreported stories and analyze how they performed. You can also use AI in presentation to change the very way we view a news story and absorb information from it. This would bring the revolution in journalism we need today. We can always choose to bring in AI when we have a purpose for it and keep it on the back burner when it isn’t. However to not use AI would be a true loss of innovative journalism.