Now, if you scroll down to the end of almost every article on Newsweek.com, past the headline, article copy, some programmatic ads, and the author's bio, you'll find a short note. “Click here to read how Newsweek uses AI,” the text box says. This link leads to Newsweek's editorial standards page, where several paragraphs outline how generative AI tools are integrated into the publication's editorial process.
The disclosure is just one sign of the 90-year-old brand's ongoing experiment with AI-powered editing.
Newsweek first announced changes to its AI policy in September 2023, as a heated debate over early adoption of AI in journalism began to boil over. Sports Illustrated and Gizmodo were among several publications criticized late last year for sloppily using generative AI tools to write articles. Publications like Wired have responded by largely criticizing tools like ChatGPT in their editorial work and vowing never to publish text written and edited by AI.
Meanwhile, Newsweek magazine is relatively bullish on the technology, as are competitors such as Business Insider. “Newsweek believes that AI tools can help journalists do their jobs faster, smarter and more creatively,” the updated standard page says. “We strongly believe that soon all journalists will be powered by some form of AI in their work, and we want our newsrooms to adopt these technologies as quickly as possible in an ethical manner. That's what I think.
Six months after this new policy was implemented, staff writers and editors are not required to use AI, but are encouraged to experiment with it to improve speed and efficiency. Masu. Newsweek is also rolling out custom-built AI video production tools and is currently recruiting for a new AI-focused live news desk to cover breaking news.
“I think the difference between newsrooms that embrace AI and newsrooms that shy away from AI will become clearer in the coming months and years.” jennifer cunningham, Newsweek's new editor-in-chief told me. Cunningham joined Insider in March after becoming editor-in-chief of Insider's news division. “We've seriously embraced his AI as an opportunity, not some kind of idiot lurking in a newsroom.”
Newsweek magazine has been working to rebuild its editorial credibility following a series of legal problems and allegations of unethical journalism in recent years. In early 2018, Newsweek's offices were raided by the Manhattan district attorney as part of an investigation into former owner Etienne Huzac. (Yuzak later pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges involving then-Newsweek parent company IBT Media, which spun off from IBT Media in late 2018 to form an independent company.) Newsweek has been criticized recently. For platforming far-right figures in their opinion fields and podcasts.
Against this background, Newsweek's CEO Deb Pragad continues to grow its digital publication presence and shift its revenue stream away from mainstream print magazines. So far in 2024, Newsweek.com has more than 130 million total monthly sessions and more than 50 million monthly unique visitors, according to the magazine's advertiser disclosure numbers and media kit. The site has a clear focus on breaking news, aggregations and editorials. In an email from the editorial staff in 2019, the editor-in-chief said: nancy cooper A concise summary of Newsweek's current editorial strategy. “We don't want to reduce the number of articles or slow down the pace of articles. We just want to make every article we produce better.”
To deliver more stories, faster stories, Newsweek's AI policy addendum states that as long as journalists are involved in each step of the process, they will be able to “write, investigate, edit, and otherwise Staff have been given permission to use generative AI in “features.'' The original version of Newsweek's policy stated that using AI for “core journalistic functions” would require touchpoints with “three or more journalists” during production. If you check the Wayback Machine page, you'll see that line says he was removed after March 2nd.
According to the standards page, other tasks reporters use AI for include “note-taking, transcription, video scripting, creating social copy, A/B testing headlines, adding metadata, and images. Restrictions such as “selection of” will be relaxed.
“We really want our reporters to be able to use their time to get the job done, rather than the more process-oriented parts of journalism, the checking-the-box parts, so to speak.” Cunningham said.
Newsweek shared an example of an article published under this new AI policy.A short news article written by a staff writer based in Taiwan Adil Brar Details of Sri Lanka's decision to ban Chinese research vessels from entering its ports, researched with the help of ChatGPT Plus. Cunningham also pointed to legal reporting in Newsweek as a particular beat that sets the stage for generative AI support. He said he encourages reporters to use tools like ChatGPT to summarize “redundant, complex, or lengthy court decisions” to help organize news coverage.
Despite “writing” being among the approved use cases, Cunningham insisted in an interview that none of Newsweek's published articles were written using AI tools. Newsweek spokesman Ben Billingsley said in a subsequent call that text generators are used in some cases as a tool to help draft articles. Billingsley says he uses AI tools to draft his 5% of Newsweek.com articles, and the most accepted use case within the company is for staff who “speak English as a second language.” I said that there is.
In addition to standard professional subscriptions for the chatbots Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT and the image generation tool Dall-E, Newsweek is developing its own internal The company is also building AI tools.
Krish, who previously served as Time Inc.'s chief technology officer and co-founded facial recognition startup Refine AI, said Newsweek currently has no permanent AI product strategy. Instead, he describes the approach as a series of experiments.
“If I tell you what's going to happen tomorrow or a week from now, the technology may have evolved,” Krish said. “It's moving so fast. We're trying to keep up.”
One of those experiments has already been carried out. Over the past few months, Newsweek's engineering team has launched a custom tool that creates short-form video summaries of existing news articles. The internal tool first creates a video script summarizing the news article, then finds and retrieves related stock images and video clips, which he stitches together into one cohesive video. According to Krish, this unique technology is built using a combination of open source tools and his GPT-4 Turbo, a professional-tier, large-scale multimodal model that OpenAI released in December 2023. It's something.
Although much of the process is automated, the tool still requires a human video editor to review the transcript, manually select additional images, and fine-tune the final edit.
The clips are often about 30 to 90 seconds long and appear at the top of many news articles on the site. As an example, a Newsweek spokesperson on April 9th shared a video of this recent article summarizing the findings of a study on globalization by the University of Chicago. Summary text is overlaid on stock videos of crowds from different regions of the world.
Krish describes the tool as a way to repackage the reports already on your site to get more out of your stories. “We have a small multimedia team. We can't handle the high volume of requests from all this content that requires video, so this tool will help us scale that,” he said. Ta.
Building a breaking news desk using AI
Newsweek's job board currently has a number of job openings in the editorial, audience and sales fields. Some job postings are for reporters and editors. intention As part of a new live news desk that prioritizes speed and efficiency, it is mandatory to integrate AI into the workflow.
““This team leverages the opportunities presented by advances in artificial intelligence and other tools to produce high-quality journalism,” the Reporter (Live News) job description reads.
The new Live News team reporters will cover “.Create multiple stories a day, spanning several beats and topics. ” This could include US politics, crime, celebrities, reality TV, international current events, etc., and uses AI tools, according to the list. In the interview, Cunningham emphasized that implementing AI on the Live News team will help with “quick-turn reporting,” whether it's investigative or editorial.
Live News writer and editor job openings will be based in Newsweek's New York and London offices, with “working knowledge” of large-scale language models (LLM) and image generators being one of the hiring criteria is clearly indicated. Live News desk chief editors are also expected to have a “comprehensive understanding of media law” in addition to more general editorial and administrative responsibilities.
In any workplace, the wave of AI adoption comes with the fear of job loss. But Cunningham insisted that Newsweek's existing role will not be affected by these AI efforts.
“Listen, I completely understand the feelings of reporters who are probably feeling anxious, especially because of the generally unrelated headwinds that are affecting newsrooms across the country and have nothing to do with AI. “I feel sorry for them. Over the past six months, many stores have closed and there have been layoffs,” she said. Cunningham noted that unlike many news publications, Newsweek is expanding. She said: “We are hiring at a time when many other news organizations are closing or freezing hiring.”
If you have a problem with your AI tool
In addition to keeping up to date with media law, Live News editors are expected to ensure that every article published from their desk is “accurate and fair”. It's not an easy task. Many AI chatbots and text generators, including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google's Gemini, have been widely criticized for having factual errors.
Cunningham says the solution to these shortcomings is transparency. “We want to make sure that the readers we serve have a clear understanding of the use of this technology in the content they're viewing or reading. That's really important. It's ethically important too. I think so,” she said.
However, readers won't be able to tell whether errors in Newsweek articles were caused by chatbots or other AI tools. For now, Newsweek only plans to include a general disclaimer of his AI editorial policy on article pages. The publication does not mark whether individual stories were created using assistive AI tools, and corrections do not disclose whether AI tools contributed to the error.
Newsweek's Corrections page lists all articles on our website that require correction of factual errors or other significant updates. All fixes are grouped by month. In September, when Newsweek first changed its generative AI policy, there were a total of 21 site-wide fixes. Since then, the total number of fixes has increased by a few each month. For example, in March Newsweek published 54 corrections of his across the site. Our current policy does not allow readers to know whether AI tools contributed to the errors in these articles.
When asked how Newsweek has handled corrections made by AI-assisted articles, Cunningham maintained that no errors have been introduced into Newsweek articles published by the generative AI tool.
“We will continue to be transparent and take responsibility for any errors that occur, whether it be human error or AI error, but fortunately we have not had to deal with any “It hasn’t been a problem,” she said. “I think it’s clear to our readers that we are leveraging AI and that we are open and honest about our use of AI.”
For now, Newsweek describes the company's AI strategy as flexible. “We are in the early stages of this,” Krish said, sharing that his engineering team is working towards the release of other of his AI-assisted editing projects. “We don’t know what the future holds, but at least we’re building the skillset internally.”
