How did this Swedish newspaper turn AI into an ally?

How can AI be developed within a newsroom, and what are the best practices? Martin Schori, Deputy Editor in Chief at Aftonbladet, Swedish daily newspaper, looks back on his experience.

Does AI threaten the viability of newsrooms? Certainly not, says Martin Schori, who has decided to position his media company in favor of the sensible use of AI tools. His key question: “Here’s a new technology, and how can we use it? In the interests of our newsroom, but also of our audience?” Here’s how he went about it.

📜 A favorable internal policy

As a preamble, the deputy editor-in-chief points out: “it’s important to know that Schibsted (the media company in Norway and Sweden to which Aftonbladet belongs) has a very positive view of technology and AI and how we can implement them in journalism.” Also, shortly after the arrival of ChatGPT, the newsroom already has a charter that encourages journalists to embrace AI, while also thinking critically.  “We launched an AI policy that we published online and posted internally, but also externally so that our readers could see how we view this new technology and make that clear because we immediately started getting a lot of questions.” With 4.2 million unique visitors a day, Aftonbladet is a must-read newspaper in Sweden, which has a population of 10 million. Transparency is a must, both within the teams and with their audience.

📰The success of abstracts at the beginning of articles.

The newspaper soon developed an AI tool to summarize the articles produced by Aftonbladet. Called “snub” (quick version), these summaries tell the story in three points.  They are produced using the openAI API integrated into the CMS. Once a journalist has written an article, he or she simply clicks on activate AI summary; the journalist reads it, if needed modifies it, then publishes it. Success is guaranteed:

“The CTR (click-through rate) is 43% and among 19- to 36-years-old, the CTR is even higher at 53%. “

The data also show that those who read the summary read the article to a greater extent than those who didn’t. Readers are encouraged to continue reading.

🧑🏽‍🤝‍🧑A dedicated AI team within the newspaper

In October, Aftonbladet set up AI Hub, a team of 9 people with a varied profile: journalists, developers…Seven of them work full-time. Their job is to experiment, test and implement various AI tools, both to create their own and to see what exists that could be useful. The aim is also educational: to make AI everyone’s business.

🔧Editorial tools

For Aftonbladet, AI has become an editorial tool.

The AI buffet

It is a toolbox with AI tools, to get people started using the technology. One tool provides five follow-up suggestions for an article when a link is pasted. Other tools in the toolbox focus on bots, SEO, headlines, and more. The overarching goal of Schibsted, the company mentioned, is to encourage people to explore the positive aspects of technology and understand how to use it effectively.

Five-points generator

“Five Points” was used to summarize major news stories, such as conflicts like the war in Gaza. Despite lacking coding experience or strong technical skills, the author managed to build a Five Points format in just 20 minutes. This format enables the compilation of information about ongoing events, like the current gang war in Sweden, adhering to Style Guidelines. The resulting summaries are considered suitable for publication.

Feedback on your text

A member of the AI hub, lacking coding experience, successfully developed a bot reader. This tool offers text feedback, proofreading, and suggestions for improvement. Users can upload their articles, and the bot provides feedback on the content, suggesting changes in reasoning or offering insights on the writing style. This innovation facilitates an automated and accessible way for individuals to enhance the quality of their written work. This tool is probably the most successful one.

Fact box

In order to appeal to a younger audience, we also needed tools such as calendars and questions and answers. The latter model was used to decipher inflation. Among the seven questions: what is inflation, how does it work and how does it affect me?

Click here to watch the masterclass video:

Weekly newsletter

AI Hub has a newsletter in English and on LinkedIn. It’s called Aftonbladet AI Hub buzz Every week, we share what we’ve done and feedback. Perhaps the most important thing is the way we talk about AI, because many of our journalists were skeptical and even a little scared that it was going to replace us.

🖋️Examples of productions

Investigating the Sweden Democrats.

We wanted to investigate a Swedish political party that has launched a propaganda channel on YouTube. It’s called Sweden Democrats, and it’s been very successful. So we wanted to investigate what they were talking about, what people were talking about, and the sources. What are they telling their audience? And that’s what we did? It was four or five thousand video clips on YouTube that we simply fed into GPT and transcribed, then asked the AI to categorize everything so we could reveal who the politicians they were attacking were. How do they talk about immigration? This was the first test, which turned out to be quite conclusive.

Talking to King Gustav Vasa

“We woke up our first king in 1523. Sweden celebrated its 500th anniversary last summer, and we wanted to do something fun and engaging. So we trained the model on Gustav Vasa, how he spoke and his opinions on specific topics, and let our readers chat with Gustav. On another note, I’d like to ask you what your views are on democracy. We received several thousand questions. So it was a success.“

Commenting on the public’s Christmas trees

It’s a fun activity we organized through our most famous journalists. They reviewed the Christmas trees of our audience.  The public sent in a photo and the journalists commented on it. We cloned their voices and had a sort of script written by the GPT chat. One of the journalists involved would say positive things, while the other would say negative things about their Christmas trees. The aim was to show our audience how fast this technology is progressing.

Martin Schori is the deputy editor in chief at Aftonbladet. He has shared with the IQ Media Project how his newsroom uses generative AI to summarize articles and for which results. LinkedIn : Martin SchoriAftonbladet’s AI Hub Buzz