In the past few years, businesses across the world have begun to incorporate artificial intelligence into more and more of what they do.
This raises important questions in the field of journalism, where the work performed by human beings is still essential to trust and accuracy.
WTKR News 3 and our ownership group, the E.W. Scripps Company, has developed guidelines for the use of AI on air and online and offers them here in full transparency to viewers.
1. Condensing long documents
Journalists often receive and retrieve exhaustively long court documents and other documents that once took hours to review and search for key information. We now can use AI tools to scan and summarize these long documents to help us better tell the story for viewers.
2. Refining our story ideas
Our AI tools are custom made for journalists, and our prompts are designed with the audience in mind. We sometimes consult our tools when pitching stories to ensure they are audience-focused. In other words, we want to make sure the stories we tell are the ones that matter most to you, told in the way that helps you make important decisions about your life, your family, and your community.
3. Format conversion & copy editing
Writing for TV and writing for web are very different, format-wise. TV scripts — the ones loaded into the teleprompter for the anchors and reporters to read — are written in all caps with minimal punctuation, and not in formal sentence structure. While every story that appears on air and online is first written by a journalist, we often use AI tools to convert from web to TV format, or visa-versa.
We also use these tools to review our copy and help keep it clean of typos, punctuation errors, and other common human errors.
4. FOIA assistance
Requesting documents from public officials, school systems, and other government entities through the Freedom of Information Act is often an exhaustive process. Ensuring we get the documents we're seeking, we often go through multiple iterations of these FOIA requests before the entity will approve and send them. Our AI tools help us refine our FOIA requests to ensure we get the information on the quickest timeline possible.
5. Bias checking
Much as we try to avoid any political bias in our reporting, we are often accused of bias in all sides of the political spectrum. Our bias checking tool reviews our scripts and ensures that our coverage does not give the impression of political bias.
6. Transcribing interviews, meetings & other videos
When we conduct long interviews with subjects, or record long council meetings, AI transcription tools, like Otter AI and others, are essential to condensing time for us in a process that was once done by hand. A three-hour city council meeting can now be ingested by an AI-enabled transcription tool, and then summarized with key highlights, to help is glean the important information from those lengthy meetings into story ideas.
7. Internal needs
We have custom tools that help us to write our indvidiual annual goals, check budget planning work, and other general needs.
