What is the AI & Local News Challenge? Over the first half of 2022, five dynamic teams built AI applications for local news to support quality information for local news audiences and sustainable news outlets.

Demo Day: At our virtual Demo Day, each team will present their work and receive feedback from a panel of local news innovation experts.

Join Us! Explore the the opportunities and challenges of working with artificial intelligence and automation for journalism. Learn about applications relating to story pipelines, social media, curation and misinformation.

Our Teams The teams represent a dynamic mix of technological and journalistic backgrounds, ranging from news organizations to startups to university research and development.

• Information Tracer (Zhouhan Chen, Joshua Tucker) Information Tracer is a real-time, cross-platform information gathering system that contextualizes and quantifies information spread.
• Localizer (Jessica Davis, Steve Dorsey, Danny Sanchez, Mike Stucka, Eric Ulken) At Gannett, news automation is the fuel that helps achieve greater relevance by delivering hyperlocal information at scale to drive digital subscription growth. Localizer uses news automation techniques, such as Natural Language Generation, to parse data into local stories.
• Overtone (Philip Allin, Christopher Brennan, Natalia Gutierrez, Reagan Nunnally) Overtone has built a Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool that finds and sorts online content by quality.
• SimPPL (Harshit Agarwal, Swapneel Mehta, Surabhi Ranjan, Shwetanshu Singh) SimPPL (read: sim-people) is a simulator of user activity on social networks. It tracks engagement with news stories, develops a model conditioned on individual attitudes toward news-sharing, and measures user behavior to guide content generation and digital distribution.
• Social Fabric for Publishers (Brad Friedman, Evan Friedman) Social Fabric for Publishers helps publishers bring the social conversation directly to consumers. The team’s technology makes it scalable to share topical conversations across a publisher’s article pages, giving media outlets new ways to drive engagement in addition to personalization features that tap into users’ social graphs.

The AI & Local News Initiative The AI & Local News initiative–supported by Knight Foundation–helps local news organizations harness the power of artificial intelligence to drive success through projects with the Associated Press, Brown Institute’s Local News Lab, NYC Media Lab, and Partnership on AI.