AI And The Local News

AI has done some things to journalism. In fact, that’s really an understatement. Ask someone who’s been in the field for more than five years, and they’ll probably keep you there in the conversation for the better part of an hour, explaining what happened when these technologies were turned loose on an industry that deals, primarily, with the flow of information.

To be fair, AI is coming for everything. In some years, it will be making sweaters, delivering milk, and all of those other things that humans do, but in some essential ways, it came for journalism first.

Now, those who are concerned are looking at how to re-invigorate a moribund local news system, and evaluating how AI has helped or hindered this pursuit.

Mountain View, CA: The Next Endeavor

At the Next Endeavor event Sept. 14-15, in Mountain View, California, which Imagination in Action and partners put on (disclaimer: I help to run these events) we had a panel talking about local news.

If there’s somebody just right to lead a conversation like this, it’s Nina Gregory, and I also like how she framed it starting out:

“There is so much news about AI. But today we’re not going to talk about that. We’re going to talk about how AI is uh entering the newsroom, the process of gathering, reporting, writing, and distributing the news.”

With that, she turned to the panelists, Ken Doctor, Gabriel Sama, and Queena Kim, for more.

“We really view (AI) as a force multiplier, and we’re starting to use it in everyday activities,” said Doctor, who is the CEO of a pub called Lookout Santa Cruz. “And there are really three different ways that we’re using it now.”

One of those three ways, he noted, is in product creation.

A human, he said, reads everything before it goes out.

“A process that would have taken probably 40 hours of work in a given week, at least, if not 80, takes us 15 minutes each morning,” he said. Other uses he cited include spanish translation and geocoding.

Moving with the Times

The Modern Classroom

She explained: