What is the AI & Local News Challenge? Over the first half of 2023, six dynamic teams built AI applications for local news to support quality information for local news audiences and sustainable news outlets.
Demo Day: At our virtual Demo Day, each team will present their work and receive feedback from a panel of local news innovation experts.
Join Us! Explore the the opportunities and challenges of working with artificial intelligence and automation for journalism. Learn about applications relating to story production, discussion engagement, translation and factchecking.
Our Teams The teams represent a dynamic mix of tech and journalistic backgrounds, ranging from news organizations to startups to university research and development.
- Bangla AI (MD Ashraful Goni, Md. Ashraful Haque, Nabil Mosharraf Hossain) is developing an AI-based web platform that can help Bengali ethnic media journalists access important information in Bengali rather than English.
- Factchequeado (Marcos Barroso, Sebastían Lanaro, Joaquín Saralegui, Diego Vasconcelo, Laura Zommer) will continue developing its Chequeabot platform, which uses AI to speed up the process of fact-checking in Spanish, to support Factchequeado's work in the U.S. to improve Latino communities' access to high-quality news.
- Graham Media Group (Dustin Block, Marcus Brown, Araz Hashemi, Kristen Tebo) is building conversation prompts that leverage natural language processing and ChatGPT to direct and improve community comments on news articles.
- Newsroom AI (Annanay Agarwal, Pallavi Bansal, Stratos Botis, Kalyan Gautham, Gregory Schweickert), whose members are from Cornell University, is continuing to build a copiloting platform that accelerates news article generation in journalists' own style, making journalists more productive and efficient while maintaining the quality and accuracy of their work.
- NOBL Media (Jacob Bailly, Dr. Elizabeth Earle, Nameer Hirschkind, Cedar Milazzo, Bill Skeet) will expand its ad tech product with a new segment that allows programmatic advertisers to reach publishers' content in service of smaller audiences that can be targeted by geography or demography.
- WNYC/New York Public Radio (Josh Gitlin, Sam Guzik, Tember Hopkins, Kim LaRocca) is investigating ways to use speech-to-text models, natural language processing and generative AI for real-time captioning and transcription of WNYC broadcasts.
The AI & Local News Initiative The AI & Local News initiative–supported by Knight Foundation–helps local news organizations harness the power of artificial intelligence to drive success through projects with the Associated Press, Brown Institute’s Local News Lab, NYU Tandon's NYC Media Lab, and Partnership on AI.