Missouri Press Association, Columbia, MO
|
Volume 50, No. 3
|
March 2025
From headlines to crime reports: AI’s growing role in newsrooms By Mike & Alex Buffington Mainstreet Newspapers Jefferson, Georgia Editor’s note: ChatGPT wrote the headline for this story and generated the two illustrations on page 4. A few weeks ago, we asked the ISWNE Hotline for editors to tell how they’re using AI in the newsroom. A lot of people responded, some aggressively using AI while others remain reluctant to pursue its newsroom use. Of course, some AI tools have been around a long time, including spellcheck software and early grammar-checking software. For the past year or so, we’ve been experimenting with more advanced AI and its potential to help manage the flow of news on a consistent basis. We’ve found some things it’s very good at, but it does have some flaws. Like a lot of small-town newspapers, we face financial and staffing limitations. Even if we could afford more staff, finding and keeping people is increasingly difficult. Plus, we publish five weekly papers and while each has its own editor, we do share resources and help support each other.
IN THIS
ISSUE
So, our experiments with AI have been to find ways to be more efficient with the weekly workload, especially routine duties. In that, AI is proving to be a great tool, and we believe it has a lot of potential for the future at most weekly newsrooms. Here are some of the ways we’ve been using and experimenting with AI, starting with some simple examples working up toward our more complex and problematic experiments:
Transcribing/Otter Like many of those who commented on the ISWNE Hotline, we too use Otter and other transcription software (iPhones now have that ability) to get quotes and to recall other comments from public meetings. We record all meetings we attend, as do all our editors and reporters. The problem is sound quality; it is often poor and the transcription becomes muddled. Still, as more local governments set up their own recording devices for audio and video, the quality may improve, especially if we can link our recording into those systems. (More about using audio transcriptions later.)
Simple editing We get a lot of emails with data in a variety of formats and conditions. We’ve found
Register now for ISWNE conference, page 8
Mike & Alex Buffington
that AI is excellent for processing this information and is much faster than doing it manually. (Note, we’re currently using ChatGPT with the upgraded paid version because it is more robust. There may be CONTINUED ON PAGE 3
Member Profile: Megan Wylie, page 12