Rob Tornoe | for E&P Magazine
In 2023, Gannett was hilariously forced to pause a service promising to harness artificial intelligence to write high school sports stories when corny phrases like “close encounters of the athletic kind” began appearing in coverage across the country.
There was and still is a lot of hype around AI, which I and others continue to point out has no real intelligence. I prefer the term “stochastic parrots,” coined by University of Washington computational linguist Emily Bender. It hits the nail on the head about AI-powered tools mimicking words and images without really understanding them.
Regardless, the early fears of AI replacing journalists and upending the very business of news seem to have subsided a bit. Retha Hill, the director of innovation at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism, recently described it as a textbook example of the Gartner Hype Cycle, which illustrates the five stages a new technology goes through over a period of time.
In terms of AI, we’ve already passed through the Trough of Disillusionment, where overhyped promises about a technology are replaced with issues that cause interest to fade. Regarding journalism, we appear somewhere between the Slope of Enlightenment, where early adopters discover a technology’s actual benefits, and the Plateau of Productivity, where the technology is adopted more widely.
Across the news-gathering world, journalists are finding all sorts of ways to use AI-powered tools to benefit their daily workflows. From helping reporters craft emails to aiding investigative journalists in large data analysis projects, these tools are increasingly finding their way into newsrooms.
So, how can you jump in and use these tools in your daily routine?
Let’s start with the premise that none of us want some robot writing our stories for us, especially with their propensity to make facts up — hallucinations, as they’re known within the industry. Even using AI-powered tools on the margins requires a human hand to oversee and guide the process to ensure facts are accurate, and all newsrooms should put together an AI policy to ensure everyone is on the same page about maintaining the standards around your journalism.
With that out of the way, AI can contribute to your daily workflow, both as a timesaver and to push your journalism forward. In fact, you’re probably already using AI tools and might not even know it.
Otter is a recording and transcription service that uses AI to transcribe words in real-time, which is incredibly helpful in breaking news situations involving news conferences.
Grammarly, which has long been a popular tool for journalists, uses generative AI to make rewrite suggestions (though be mindful of possible plagiarism issues). So does Hemingway, which has incorporated AI to help improve the warm sack of passive mush you’ve cobbled together into bolder, more direct copy.
Here are a couple of examples of AI-powered tools and how reporters have used them to bolster their journalism:
ChatGPT
Most journalists have probably heard of ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot developed and deployed by OpenAI. ChatGPT is a large language model, trained by a vast trove of text data from the web that it uses to predict the next word in a sequence.
Do we want it to write your next story? No, but it can help with mundane tasks, such as creating a readable headline optimized for search engines.
I have been using it to develop alternate headline ideas for a/b testing at work, and I’m beginning to love the results. But it’s all about the prompt — which I stole from Danya Henninger, the editorial director at Technical.ly. When I use it on stories I write for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the prompt looks something like this:
You are an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, a newspaper that covers news in and around Philadelphia.
You’re going to suggest SEO headlines for the following article. The goal is for the article to show up in search results when people interested in the topic search the web. You want the headlines to be user-friendly, but they must be shorter than 65 characters, and the first three words count the most toward search engine optimization. Use sentence case for the titles.
Come up with 10 options for the following article, and please estimate which would return the most SEO results.
ChatGPT will shoot back 10 headlines, tell you why it thinks each one works, and which would be best positioned to maximize search results. You can also take the headlines you like and feed them right back into the program to refine the results.
Other uses for ChatGPT include asking it to create TL;DR bullet points of an article you’ve written. (I do this occasionally to make sure the focus of my story is clear). Another is to ask it to develop a list of questions for an upcoming interview subject. Henninger told the Lenfest Institute Technical.ly uses ChatGPT to comb through workforce data to find interesting patterns that might end up becoming stories.
One important caveat is by using ChatGPT, you’re also training it with your journalism, which might run afoul of your newsroom’s policies. If so, other chatbots are similar to ChatGPT, including Claude and Google’s Gemini, which signed a deal with The Associated Press to deliver up-to-date news.
Pinpoint
Pinpoint is a free AI tool created by Google that allows journalists to upload and analyze large volumes of documents and search for patterns. The program accepts a surprisingly broad array of file formats, including audio files (which it converts into PDF transcripts), images and hand-written documents.
The Boston Globe used Pinpoint to analyze public records from all 50 states on vehicle crashes and trucking mishaps after seven motorcyclists were killed in a crash in New Hampshire in 2019. After analyzing the data, the Globe discovered an unsettling trend: unsafe drivers across the country were allowed to remain on the roads because they committed driving offenses in different states. Essentially, states were failing to keep dangerous drivers off the road, with fatal consequences.
The Globe’s investigation led to the three-part Blind Spot series, which earned the newspaper the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.
“A couple of helpful aspects of Pinpoint are its ability to recognize text in images and organizational capabilities, like the opportunity to quickly see, and search documents for, the most mentioned names or places and connections between people,” Brendan McCarthy, the editor of Spotlight, wrote in a case study for Google. “So often in journalism — especially when you are dealing with mass troves of data — you are looking for outliers. Pinpoint let us figure out what was NOT there as much as what was there.”
Other AI-powered tools to try
I often turn to Hunter and Lusha, Chrome plugins that help you find accurate contact information using an organization’s website and profiles on LinkedIn. Adobe Express has a handy free tool that easily removes the background from an image — no lasso tool required. Perplexity is an AI-powered search tool that summarizes news topics based on a prompt and provides links to its source materials. If you’re looking for more ideas, subscribe to the Wonder Tools newsletter, written by Jeremy Caplan, the director of teaching and learning at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
Rob Tornoe is a cartoonist and columnist for Editor and Publisher, where he writes about trends in digital media. He is also a digital editor and writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Reach him at [email protected].
