Hartman: I can tell you what we’re doing today and what our roadmap is in 2025. So long before I looked at a pie chart that looked at the changes over time in a reporter’s day and how a reporter spends their time, particularly a television reporter, and what you see happen over time is an increasingly smaller amount of time spent on source building and actual reporting.
So that really became kind of like a roadmap. Like, okay, what problems can we solve? The biggest one, as we talked to as I was preparing for this role, and as I hired Keith, was that we talked to reporters and digital teams across the company and said what are the most soul crushing parts of your job? And what bubbled up to the top is doing the same story over and over again.
The amount of pressure on a single journalist and a single manager and all the platforms have just absolutely changed.
So that was our first target in terms of solving problems for our newsrooms. And so we are leveraging generative AI to take our originally reported television broadcasts scripts and formatting them for web audiences. There are also tools that are in the testing phase right now to take packages produced for television and version them for social media platforms.
All of this we’re committed to human in the loop. Nothing gets published without a human set of eyes. The ability to have platform specific, social post copy that frankly, we find is more effective in some cases, than what people can do when they’re dashing it out at the end of what is already a long day. It has really been, I think, a boon to our newsrooms. There’s also the reality of newsrooms across the country is that we can’t be everywhere.
They haven’t launched this product in the market, yet. But they’ve developed a tool that allows you to monitor local government proceedings and take the transcript and generate potential news items for journalists to dig into further.
You can set up alerts. If say you’re following potholes, right? You can set up alerts and any time a local government proceeding is posted to YouTube or Vimeo. Any journalist who set up watch lists can get alerts to say, “Hey, they talked about, you know, potholes,” and they get a summary and then make their own decision. Was this newsworthy enough to pursue? But being there in the first place to watch it when it may not yield anything is something that we no longer have to spend the time doing.
TVSPY: So, I’m familiar with the versioning portion of AI and other websites you can use. What platforms are you using and what models?
Because I know that sometimes there’s a bias in the model. I found that when I did an experimental script in my tech job and I asked the Microsoft AI to write a script about one of our products, and it used, because of its knowledge base, it used the Microsoft version of the product to fill out the script, which was wrong for our company.
That’s kind of a two part question: what models are you using and is there a human part making sure that it’s actually doing what you want it to do?
Hartman: Yes. Well, so what I will say, one of the things that we are telling, particularly the senior leadership team, is that in this phase of development and advancements in the technology, we can’t do business in the same way with AI.