Using robots in a newsroom
How can AI be integrated into newsrooms? What tools should be used? These are the questions Kristoffer Hecquet, head of development projects for Danish technology media, Teknologiens Mediehus, answered at the IQ Media project’s R&D Lab masterclass.
Getting started
🗺️Understanding journalists’ needs. “To be as relevant as possible, we first need to understand the needs of the newsroom and its members,” says Kristoffer Hecquet. By interviewing journalists, Kristoffer Hecquet and his team create a kind of problem mapping. What problems does the newsroom face, and how can they be solved? How can automation helps journalists? Journalists don’t necessarily have a technological culture, and some are not open to it. This can be an obstacle. Relations between journalists and technical teams are often not good.
🔧Working with existing tools.” Some solutions don’t require any development work or coding, so we’ve managed to use tools that are already in use for something else. And tools that journalists are familiar with”, he explains.
💪Potentiate work. “The aim shouldn’t just be to provide tools and technology, but also to say, okay, we’ll make your work more fun and more interesting. Also make it clear that it’s not just for commercial purposes, but that it’s a purely editorial project.”
Three examples of experimentation
First observation: most of these needs are easy to solve with standard tools. Kristoffer Hecquet was thus able to set up three experiments.
The Cobra project
📊How to process data of interest to journalists, and set up automated feeds from lists generated by journalists.
Kristoffer Hecquet and his team used Feedly, an online RSS aggregator, to manage and personalize RSS feed subscriptions.
The Unicorn project
🧪This project involves the collection of scientific information for a newsroom. The information was collected from the universities, so as to get an overview and not miss out on any news.
The Boa project
🗃️How to automate archives? An integration is carried out with the Airtable tool.
On Airtable, news is scheduled (what’s coming, when?), a simple integration has been set up on slack so that the journalist, for example in charge of wastewater, is notified of articles published in the newsroom.
The Anaconda project
📈This project consists of observing external data flows, using infograms, in order, for example, to produce an article on the “top ten jobs sought by companies”.
Other tools
🗓️ Shared calendar. It improves team work by sharing communication, increasing visibility of work and tasks…
📈 Airtable. It lets you create and share databases.
Click here to watch the masterclass video:
| Kristoffer Hecquet is responsible for development projects at Teknologiens Mediehus. He has led innovation projects on AI, open data, automated and community journalism. Kristoffer will talk about robots in the newsroom and how automation and AI tools can be used in the newsroom. LinkedIn: Kristoffer Hecquet |
