Today in News Tech

Evaluating the use of A.I. for newsrooms


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This episode of Today in News Tech is made possible with Audio Articles by Our-Hometown.com. Today, we’re highlighting a piece by  Maggie Doheny at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute which interviewed Marc Lavallee from the New York Times about the ways the publication has adopted Artificial Intelligence.

In the interview, “When and how should we use A.I. in news?” Lavallee discusses how the Times has been implementing A.I. and the ways it can be utilized by smaller news outlets. They also go into the difficulties in implementing A.I. and how The Times determined when it’s worthwhile to adopt new technologies.

“When A.I. solves a tangible need in a way that is visible to a journalist. Then the fact that it’s A.I. or machine learning, is almost incidental.”

– said Marc Lavallee

Here are a few of our big takeaways:

  • The Times is primarily using A.I. for language processing, doing things like transcribing interviews and improving archive searches.
  • The best way for newsrooms to find A.I. that fits their needs is to see where its use overlaps with other industries. Audio to text transcription is widely utilized and fairly easy for newsrooms to implement.
  • The technology still isn’t perfect, but implementing it slowly to aid in tedious tasks can prepare publications for using it when it’s more stable.

In the interview, Lavallee points out that A.I. is still a ways off from being perfect, but the more it’s used the better it will become. In fact, this article has been converted into an audio file using artificial intelligence through Our Hometown’s Audio Article Podcasts. Our Hometown created this feature to help newsrooms of any size access a new medium to share their stories.

Thanks for watching Today in News Tech, the podcast where we discuss innovations happening in digital journalism. Remember to like and subscribe to keep up with everything happening in online media.

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