ANALYSIS: AI How AI-driven journalism can enhance fast, accurate, and engaging news

Technology in the newsroom is continually evolving. From mobile phone journalism, social media reporting to artificial intelligence (AI) news discovery, the current newsroom is not only leveraging the latest technologies to improve productivity, but also to produce fast, accurate, and engaging news.

Bloomberg’s Cyborg, for instance, has aided the news agency by analysing and creating draft content based on the latest financial reports of companies, diminishing errors in financial news reporting, and allowing journalists to focus on more important tasks such as analytical writing. This is an example of how AI can efficiently support the newsroom production for data-driven news and trend analysis. Hence, the use of AI is gaining steep momentum in the technology, media & entertainment, and telecommunications industry (TMT), due to its ability to support fast and accurate content discovery, creation and archiving. This is evidently so, as up to 72% of TMT firms surveyed still strongly agree that AI is very important to their ability to stay

There can be competitive over the next five years — 12% higher than any other industry — according to insights from Deloitte’s State of AI in the Enterprise, 5th Edition Survey (2022).

While the findings may come as a surprise, the survey attributes the high AI adoption rate to the industry’s razorsharp focus on operational efficiency and customer acquisition as well as retention.

The survey also uncovered that TMT stands out slightly in its AI adoption with use cases such as video content analysis, audio and video mining, and automation of production operations.

Further accelerated by external factors like the migration to cloud and streaming, AI is seeing more adoption in the TMT sector.

The growth factors, as forecast by Deloitte’s survey, are in continuing to monetise such digital-first enablers and TMT companies will still derive the most value from use cases related to back-end operations that tend to enable standard business practices such as business-asusual (BAU) workflows. That said, how should TMT organisations adapt and tap on AI and other similar solutions and technologies to create fast, accurate, and engaging content?

Optimising AI in the newsroom

A common use of AI in the newsroom is to transcribe interviews and adapt them into various content formats. Compared to 2021, AI transcription company Limecraft processed 448% more materials in 2022. Otter.ai, an AI-enabled transcription application, records speech in real-time and transforms it into written dialogue. It can even recognise different speakers and can learn special terminology that specific industries might use. The long hours of transcribing can now be reduced to minutes. With AI being an optimal tool for replacing time-consuming tasks, journalists can focus on stories that require multi-faceted analysis and ethical judgments. Apart from relieving tedious tasks, AI can also create content to meet market demands. Mittmedia, a Swedish news publisher, uncovered that real-estate articles are of great interest to their readers, but it is impossible for their workforce to cover every property sale in the country. Thus, they developed the Homeowners Bot, which can produce quick descriptions of recently sold properties, resulting in 1,000 more subscribers, while increasing productivity at the workplace.

AI can have a positive impact in the newsroom, Mei Lee Quah, Director, ICT Research, Frost & Sullivan, told APB+. She explained, “There can be faster, more accurate and detailed news updates within minutes. There will also be broader views with less bias in global news and more insights as journalists will have more time to focus on data analysis and formation or seeking of opinions on updates and facts obtained.”

With the flood of misinformation seeping through every social media channel, accurate news reporting has become increasingly important, but it is challenging to manually monitor every channel 24/7. To overcome this challenge, Chequedo, an Argentinabased and Google-funded company, developed an AI tool that allows the selection and monitoring of media on a 24-hour basis. The AI tool is also equipped with an automated factchecker that can filter those sentences by the claimer and the subject.

In another instance, Logically, a UK start-up, combined AI and human intelligence to verify the veracity of news. By comparing with more than 100,000 sources, the AI is able to analyse and label the credibility of the content from low to high. During India’s last election, Logically’s AI found more than 50,000 articles to be fake. The AI, then, proceeds to block out the content to stop the spread of fake news. Indeed, AI is efficient in amplifying the works of journalism, and this can also be seen in the accelerated investment in AI by TMT organisations. According to the Deloitte’s survey in 2022, 42% of TMT’s AI investments is in personalisation of user