Every year, the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) carries out a detailed survey of their members. There’s a lot of ways to dig into this data, but I’d like to highlight this post by Emily Roseman who concentrates on how AI is being used in these newsrooms.
This is an interesting, real-world snapshot of how journalists (nearly all WordPress-based) are using AI. Here are some of the most common uses along with examples from the article:
- Fundraising: Grist, a large climate publisher, runs top-performing fundraising emails through ChatGPT with commands such as “Make this email more donor-centric” or “Is this a compelling email to increase reader donations?” Then a staff member rewrote the ChatGPT draft by adding relevant and recent content from Grist.
- Story translation: New Bedford Light, a Massachusetts news startup, uses an AI-based story reader and translator from Trinity Audio. This allows readers to click an icon on the story and have the the story read in their native language. New Bedford Light translates up to 200 stories per month into English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Vietnamese and Arabic. Trinity has a WordPress plugin.
- Analysis of large document repositories: The Marshall Project, a criminal justice publisher, uses ChatGPT to summarize lengthy policy documents
- Audience engagement: Documented, a watchdog journalism publisher, has built their own AI application to summarize and aggregate articles for their newsletter.
- Transcription: Resolve Philly uses AI to help take board meeting minutes.
- Summarizing stories for re-publishing: We’ve talked before about the importance of republishing partners. On the Ground is a local elections republication service from INN. They use AI from Overtone to collect and organize members’ news reports and then email them to partners. Editors can select stories to republish and get all the story assets by email.
In our work with WordPress publishers we’ve been careful not to push AI too hard. It’s easy to find use-cases that reduce the quality of publishers’ work, without helping them improve. And while all these publishers use WordPress, not all of these tools are WordPress-specific.
Our biggest move in implementing AI has been to allow publishers to use services such as OpenAI and IBM Watson to make it easier to categorize WordPress posts. But it’s very helpful to pay attention to where publishers are looking to use AI to improve. The six areas in this list from INN are a great place to start.
