This post will no doubt have limited appeal, but a few readers might find it interesting. I’ve been thinking about how to produce summaries and news stories based on the podcast that Ellen Clegg and I host, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” The best way would be to pay a student to write it up. But is it also a task that could be turned over to AI?
Purely as an experiment, I took our most recent podcast — an interview with Scott Brodbeck, founder and CEO of Local News Now, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. — and turned it over to the robots.
I started by downloading the audio and feeding it into Otter, a web-based transcription service that uses AI to guess at what the speaker might actually be saying. Once I had a transcript, I took a part of it — our conversation with Brodbeck, eliminating the introduction and other features — and fed it into ChatGPT twice, once asking it to produce a 600-word summary and then again to produce a 600-word news story. Important caveat: I did very little to clean up the transcript and did not edit what ChatGPT spit out.
The results were pretty good. I’m guessing it would have been better if I had been using a paid version of ChatGPT, but that would require, you know, money. I’d say that what AI produced would be publishable if some human-powered editing were employed to fix it up. Anyway, here are the results.
The transcript
Q: Scott, so many of the projects that we have looked at are nonprofit, and that trend seems to be accelerating. In fact, we love nonprofit news, but we also worry that there are limits to how much community journalism can be supported by philanthropy. So your project is for profit. How have you made that work? Dan, do you think for profit? Digital only, local news can thrive in other parts of the country as well. Continue reading “Playing with AI: Can Otter and ChatGPT produce a good-enough account of a podcast interview?”
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Scott Brodbeck, founder and CEO of Local News Now.
Many of the news entrepreneurs on our podcast lead nonprofits. Local News Now is a for-profit. Scott owns and operates local news websites in three big Northern Virginia suburbs: Arlington, Alexandria and Fairfax County. He also provides technical and back-office support to three other news outlets.
I’ve got a Quick Take about a corporate newspaper owner that is making a big bet on growth at a major metropolitan newspaper. In Georgia, Cox Enterprises is making a $150 million bet that it can transform The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. If Cox is successful, it might serve as a model for other corporate newspaper owners.
Ellen has a Quick Take about a piece in the New Yorker by a writer named Nathan Heller. At first glance, it doesn’t seem to relate to local news. In fact, the title is pretty wonky: “The Republican Victory and the Ambience of Information.” But Heller has some smart observations about how information travels in a viral age.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Photo (cc) 2024 by Gage Skidmore.
One of my Sunday night rituals is to read the Semafor media newsletter overseen by Ben Smith — something I also used to do when he was writing his media column for The New York Times.
Smith is a talented guy, and we’ve exchanged a few friendly messages over the years. So I was taken aback at his claim this past Sunday that New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi’s sexual affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while she was covering the presidential campaign was no big deal. Here’s part of what he said:
[N]ow that we are in the full fury of American media prurience and self-righteousness, I am going to risk my neck on a slightly contrarian view.
Reporters have all sorts of compromising relationships with sources. The most compromising of all, and the most common, is a reporter’s fealty to someone who gives them information. That’s the real coin of this realm. Sex barely rates.
You won’t hear many American journalists reckon with this. (Some British journalists, naturally, have been texting us to ask what the fuss is about. If you’re not sleeping with someone in a position of power, how are you even a journalist?) The advice writer Heather Havrilesky texted me Saturday that “the world would be much more exciting with more Nuzzis around, but alas the world is inhabited by anonymously emailing moralists instead!”
I realize that Smith isn’t the only observer who’s said this is much ado about very little. But the fact remains, as I noted earlier this week, that Nuzzi wrote an unusually harsh feature about President Biden’s cognitive abilities at a time when Kennedy was one of his rivals as well as a squishy profile of Donald Trump when Kennedy was trying to suck up to him.
So I was glad to see NPR media reporter David Folkenflik speak up for ethical journalism. In an interview with Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket, Folkenflik said what needed to be said about Nuzzi and, while he was at it, about Smith as well:
Ben’s a very smart guy, a serial news entrepreneur, and an interesting and fun thinker about journalism. And I’ve got a lot of regard for him. But this is pretty bananas as a claim. I think that if people are having an intimate relationship, whatever form that may take, with somebody who they’re writing about or whose world they’re writing about, but they fail to disclose — the supposed British sensibility of, “oh, well, we’re all in bed with each other” — is bonkers and bullshit. And it’s not how journalism should be conducted in the States, and it’s not actually how journalism should be conducted in the U.K. either. And I’ve spent a fair amount of time in my career looking at that very question as well.
Now, I should add that Smith later tweeted that he was joking, at least in part. But he’s far from the only journalist to come to Nuzzi’s defense, as Stephanie Kaloi and Ross A. Lincoln report for The Wrap. I don’t care what went on between Nuzzi and Kennedy; that’s between them and their significant others. But whatever that relationship may have been, it compromised Nuzzi’s independence and thus her journalism. Good for Folkenflik for reminding us of that foundational fact.
Failing the stress test
Angelu Fu of Poynter Online reported this week on a survey by Muck Rack showing that “more than half of journalists in the U.S. considered quitting their job this year due to exhaustion or burnout.” She writes:
The report, which was released Tuesday, examines the state of work-life balance in journalism. Muck Rack surveyed 402 journalists in August and found that 40% have previously quit a job due to burnout. That statistic, along with the finding that 56% of journalists have thought about quitting this year, was “staggering,” said the report’s author, Matt Albasi.
“It means we have to have half as many journalists in the wings waiting to move in next year,” said Albasi, a data journalist at Muck Rack. “And we’re going to lose all this institutional knowledge if these people actually do leave.”
This is a massive problem in journalism. To some extent, the “always on” nature of the news business has always led to an undue amount of stress. But as jobs are lost and the pressure to produce keeps getting ratcheted up, the situation is only growing worse.
To compound matters, only 24% of survey respondents said they have access to mental health services.
Media notes
• My former Northeastern j-school colleague Dina Kraft has a fascinating story in The Christian Science Monitor about cooperation between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis. They’re part of a movement called Standing Together, which Dina writes “is attracting record numbers of new members with its simple and direct calls for peace and its belief that Israeli-Palestinian partnership, starting within Israel, is not just aspirational, but essential.”
• ARLnow, a network of digital news outlets in the Arlington, Virginia, area, has done something unusual — it’s acquired a print newspaper known as the GazetteLeader and is converting it to a digital-only operation. Scott Brodbeck, the founder and CEO of ARLnow publisher Local News Now, said he’s adding staff as well. (Disclosure: I’m quoted.)
• Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab has a chilling look at what could happen to journalism if Trump is elected and Project 2025, the blueprint put together by his supporters, is put into effect. Benton has read the report, and he writes that punitive action could range from removing reporters from the White House, to cutting all funds for public broadcasting, to getting rid of Section 230, the federal law that holds web publishers harmless for third-party content.
• New England Public Media, which serves Western Massachusetts, has announced a partnership with The Latino Newsletter to train three high school journalists. The students will provide multimedia coverage of the election as part of the Latino Election Project.
• A distressing note from the Boston television scene: NBC Boston has laid off five people who work for the operation’s special-projects team, according to Boston Globe reporter Dana Gerber.
