Using AI to double your newsroom efficiency and engagement

View the recording of the Nov. 16, 2023 broadcast

Posted Thursday, December 7, 2023 7:22 am

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An "E&P Reports" Sponsored Webinar

Much of the world is abuzz about generative AI. It allows users to generate text, images or other media quickly and simply. Understandably, the effect of generative AI, good or bad, is causing skepticism and concern in newsrooms across the globe.

Too many news outlets and jobs for journalists, editors and media content creators have disappeared with or without generative AI, creating more news deserts across the United States. Journalists and editors’ biggest fear is that generative AI will replace them. As the technology rapidly evolves, however, visionaries and entrepreneurs are developing more specialized forms to serve many industries, including news.

Journalists and editors want to preserve the human element and protect the integrity of their reporting. Assistive AI and not generative AI is one of the specialized forms that can help journalists and editors retain control of their content while creating new subscription and revenue-generating opportunities from that human-created content.

Leading the development of assistive AI for the newspaper industry is Nota and its SaaS (software as a service) technology. Its tools and LLM “provide a foundation for any business in any media vertical to build their story.”

Nota was founded in October 2023 by Josh Brandau, CEO and former CRO/CMO at the Los Angeles Times; Evan Young, COO, who has been a management consultant and involved in helping technology startups build to scale; and Ben Gerst, CPTO, who had similar roles at the Los Angeles Times and Tribune Publishing Company.

“We realized there’s just not many true technology companies serving this industry. We vowed we would try to do our best to create tools that are accessible to the smallest newsrooms in the smallest markets as well as the very largest,” Brandau said during a November 2023 Editor & Publisher Webinar hosted by Mike Blinder, publisher.

Nota’s suite of six tools include:

SUM – Generates headlines, summaries, top quotes, key points and categories.
BRIEF – Produces short overview of news articles and other long-form content.
VID – Generates and edits content into video formats.
IMAGE – Create images quickly.
LETTER – Builds newsletters with headlines, images and copy from links.
SOCIAL – Creates captions from copy for a variety of platforms with suggested tags.

During the Webinar, Young showed viewers how to use Nota tools via its dashboard by inserting the URL of an editorial team’s created content from its website.

Here are real stats from newsrooms already using Brandau’s Nota solution:

“I’m using the URL for this demonstration of the SUM tool but you can also copy the text of content written as a Word doc and paste it into Nota’s article analyzer. It will generate a high-level article summary in terms of how you want to structure it in your content management system,” Young said.

“The SEO tab will allow you to create good page titles for discovery on Google search. The tool also helps you with the web link to leverage for a particular article and be discovered with that method. It creates a meta description that allows readers to learn about the article’s content at a high level on Google search and some keywords you can use as well.”

Brandau emphasized that Nota tools don’t pull data from Wikipedia, Reddit or other sources to create content. It’s only pulling content from the human-written article and reconstructing it with the best practices for each of those platforms.

“Every Nota tool is completely editable. What it creates isn’t automatically published. Our clients are already saving 70 percent or more of the time it would take to put an article on all of these social platforms. We created these tools so the expertise of journalists and editors is not just desirable but necessary. We’re very adamant about it. This is our mission, our passion and our belief that these tools can help accelerate your workflows,” Brandau said.

Brandau added that many of its beta partners are reporting as much as 50 percent in time savings and as much as a 40-percent increase in page views.

During the Webinar, Brandau and Young announced an end-of-the-year introductory offer for Editor & Publisher readers on a 20-percent discount of the monthly fee, reducing it to $280. All signup fees are waived for a one-year contract is required but has a 30-day out. Those taking advantage of this offer must also provide Nota with feedback and ideas as it moves from its beta version to a general market product during early 2024.

If you're ready to embrace the power of assistive AI technology to take your publication to the next level, email us at ep@heynota.com to set up a demo and get a 20% discount on our toolset through the end of the year.