• There is a debate on whether AI has come to replace people in their workspaces
• Experts say it is meant to support and enhance journalists' work, not replace them
Image: PIXABAY
As technology advances on a daily basis, artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the world as we know it.
From healthcare to farming, the adoption of AI technology has been rapidly growing in various industries.
One such industry that is witnessing the impact of AI is the media.
AI is becoming increasingly important in the media industry, from content creation to distribution and even in audience engagement.
Here, we will explore the adoption of AI in media houses and how to develop a newsroom bot.
Al is being used by media houses to automate various tasks.
This includes content creation, distribution, fact-checking and workflow automation, audience engagement and data analysis.
Newsrooms are turning to AI to generate news articles and other content, including financial reports and sports recaps.
It is also being used to create and optimise headlines for articles, identify trending topics and sentiments, and even recommend related articles to readers.
It can even provide insights into potential sources and interviewees. With AI-powered content recommendation engines, media houses can recommend articles to readers based on their preferences and reading history.
This helps to increase engagement and loyalty among readers.
There is a high chance you have read an online article that has been written by an AI.
AI is also used to analyse user data to create targeted advertising campaigns that help media houses monetise their content.
It also helps journalists find patterns in data that they may have otherwise missed, analyse large amounts of data and identify patterns and trends that can inform reporting.
There is, however, an ongoing debate on whether AI has come to replace people in their workspaces.
Experts say AI is not here to replace human journalists. Rather, it is a tool that supports and enhances work.
This is by freeing up journalists so they can focus on more important tasks.
Here are examples of media houses that have used AI or Newsroom Chatbots, and how they've used it.
Several media houses around the world have already adopted AI and developed newsroom chatbots to automate tasks like telling stories and improve their overall efficiency.
1. Reuters News Agency
Reuters News Agency developed a chatbot named Lynx Insights to assist its journalists in finding news stories and data quickly.
The chatbot is trained to scan financial reports and identify the most important information that needs to be included in news stories.
Its main aim is to analyse data with more speed and efficiency than a human being can.
Through an Internet of Business blog post, Reuters insists that instead of seeking to replace journalists, it is "placing a bet that the future of automation in the newsroom is less around using machines to write stories than in using machines to mine data, find insights and present them to the journalist".
2. The Washington Post
The Washington Post developed a newsroom chatbot named Heliograf, which is used to create automated news stories.
Heliograf can write news stories on a range of topics, including politics, sports and business, and it even won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 2016 US election.
Back in 2017, Washington Post also launched ModBot, a software application that utilises AI to moderate comments.
This proprietary tech uses machine learning to automatically filter comments that require human moderating, flag stories that require real-time monitoring and approve or delete comments based on The Post's discussion policy.
3. Associated Press
AP has been using AI technology for several years to automate tasks such as data collection and analysis.
It has also developed a chatbot named AP Newsbot.
The chatbot is integrated with the AP newsroom system and helps journalists to find and report breaking news stories.
4. BBC
BBC has also adopted AI technology in various ways, such as using machine learning algorithms to personalise content for its viewers and recommending news articles to its readers based on their interests.
The organisation also developed a newsroom chatbot named Juicer, which is used to automate the process of curating news stories and publishing them on social media platforms.
IMPLICATIONS OF TREND
The media industry is witnessing a rapid transformation as AI technology is adopted by media houses around the world.
AI has improved efficiency and automation, from content creation to distribution and even audience engagement.
Developing a newsroom bot is an excellent way for media houses to leverage the benefits of AI and improve their newsroom's overall efficiency.
With the right platform and training, a newsroom bot can assist journalists in various tasks, leading to an improvement in the quality of content produced by the newsroom.
Developing a newsroom chatbot is a great way for media houses to leverage the benefits of AI.
A newsroom bot is a conversational assistant that can help journalists in various tasks, such as content creation, research and analysis.
Below are some of the steps to develop a newsroom bot:
Step 1: Define the objectives of the bot
What tasks do you want it to perform? Do you want the bot to help in content creation, research or analysis? What is the intent?
Step 2: Choose the right platform
There are several platforms available that allow you to develop conversational agents, such as Chatfuel, Dialogflow and ManyChat.
Step 3: Train the bot
You need to provide the bot with enough data so it can understand the context of the questions and provide the right answers.
You can use machine-learning algorithms to train the bot.
Step 4: Test the bot
This ensures it can handle the questions and tasks you want it to perform.
You can test the bot using a sample dataset of questions and tasks.
Step 5: Deploy the bot
You can integrate the bot with your newsroom software and make it available to your journalists.
They can then interact with the bot to get assistance in various tasks.
AI is revolutionising the media industry by automating various tasks and providing valuable insights into user behaviour.
Developing a newsroom bot is a great way for media houses to leverage the benefits of AI and improve the efficiency of their newsrooms.
With the right platform and training, a newsroom bot can assist journalists in various tasks and improve the quality of the content produced by the newsroom.