Five questions with AP’s Aimee Rinehart
Aimee Rinehart is senior product manager for AI Strategy at the Associated Press. She spoke recently at the LMA Local News Summit about what news leaders need to do to take a strategic approach to artificial intelligence. In this Q & A, Rinehart addresses the biggest opportunities, and the most pressing concerns, about AI for local news.
What are the biggest opportunities for local newsrooms when it comes to incorporating AI into their organizations?
As Paris Brown of the Baltimore Times said during her presentation at LMA’s Local News Summit in Austin in February, using AI in a newsroom can feel like having an intern, that second set of hands to fill in and churn tedious tasks. Some local newsrooms are at the front of AI innovation because there are fewer dependencies in their workflow streams. The operations with the most innovative experiments are ones like Brown’s Baltimore Times, the two- to three-person newsrooms that feel lucky to have help. Chatbots and image creators are also on sale right now as companies vie to be the top AI developer, so prices to use these tools are low and sometimes free to use.
What new issues does AI pose that news leaders need to be managing, and thinking about?
Technology brings disruptions and people begin to cling to a primary concern: is my job safe? News leaders should address the anxieties that come with change and provide reassurance when they can that human journalists are still very much needed in the newsroom.
What are the easiest and most high-impact opportunities to leverage the benefits of AI in a newsroom right now?
The latest Reuters-Oxford Institute innovation survey reports that 56 percent of newsrooms see content creation as carrying the greatest risk with AI, while 11 percent see less risk with back-end automation. It’s clear that news leaders feel that they’re on safer ground with workflow efficiencies, and so that’s where many newsrooms are starting to experiment with AI. If newsrooms can save time on repetitive tasks, the goal is to free up staff time to pursue deeper level work.
How important is it for news organizations to establish and communicate policies – to both employees and audiences – around AI use, and what issues should be addressed in an AI policy?
Communicating internal policies and expectations to staff and external guidelines for audiences is critical during this digital disruption. It’s important for news operations to be clear with what and how they are experimenting, using and avoiding AI in outputs. AP issued a new chapter in the Stylebook recently to help orient journalists on terminology and framing of reporting about AI. The AP Stylebook chapter on AI will be reviewed every six months to see if anything needs to be updated or changed. During this time when things are moving quickly in the AI space, an evolving set of guidelines for internal staff and external audiences is essential.
What are the issues that newsrooms should be collaborating with each other on to protect a healthy local news ecosystem in an AI-disrupted future?
Newsrooms can help one another by sharing best practices, newsroom guidance, the tools that they find helpful or useless, and the prompts that yield the best results. Basically, anything that helps to provide a head start or cautionary tale to others in experimenting with AI is helpful and provides agency for how our industry will use this technology.
Learn more: Local News AI Resources from the Associated Press
More AI resources from Local Media Association:
Creating a culture of AI innovation in a news organization
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