Hyper-Local Newsletters Come to California

Nowhere News is promising to bring AI-driven newsletters — custom-tailored for cities and regions — to California this year.

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The startup will be using data found in public records, government meetings, local school sports and online social media to generate news stories using AI.

In practice, Nowhere’s AI writes draft stories for human reporters, who pick-and-choose which stories are published – and add some stylistic flair to the final text, according to Nowhere News Editor-in-Chief Nathaniel Barling.

Barling says he hopes to have the AI-driven service covering news stories in 44 cities and regions across California by the close of 2021.

Nowhere News is a close replication of another hyperlocal news service in Britain — Radar — which has been auto-generating hyperlocal news from public databases since 2017.

In other AI-generated writing news:

*Another Swedish Sports News Outlet Opts for AI: EverySport Media Group has inked a deal to publish AI-generated sports stories using an AI-generated writing system from United Robots.

The sports publisher plans to auto-generate news stories on ice hockey, football and floor ball.

And it’s overall goal is to effectively report on all leagues within its coverage area, including junior leagues, according to Hannes Andersson, ESMG’s CEO.

Says Andersson: “The strategy is to offer comprehensive coverage.

“We believe publishing thousands of articles with a dozen or so views each generates value in a couple of ways.

“Firstly, it’s about reach — which is the foundation of our current business model.

“Local sports articles often go viral in small clusters, which means we reach big audiences on hyper-local level.

*Automated Sports Reports: A Q&A with a Publisher User: German news media outlet MSU says it has been able to generate thousands of sports stories for its publishing clients during the past six months using AI.

“Currently we work with a small team of three people — a copywriter, a software developer and myself as project manager and copywriting support,” says Harald Salg, who oversees MSU’s AI news project.

Salg says the automated software enables MSU to produce many more stories than humans could possibly write using the same data.

“It is not possible for our customers (sports news publishers) in the traditional environment to produce sports reports themselves or to acquire them from freelancers,” Salg says. “We close this gap with our service.”

The Q&A with Salg offers valuable insights for anyone interested in how AI is changing sports writing.

*Using AI-Powered Summaries to Peak Reader Interest: AI journalism think tank JournalismAI Collab has released an in-depth report on how to peak news reader interest with automated news summaries.

The research team drew its insights from several tests of automated news summaries conducted by five media outlets:

*Bavarian Broadcasting (Germany)

*Der Spiegel (Germany)

*Jagran Media (India)

*TX Group (Switzerland)

*Swedish Radio (Sweden)

The upshot, according to the researchers: ” AI-powered summarization works and is getting more sophisticated.

“The knowledge that you can get summaries in different formats – like short, speakable summaries, bullet points — and more innovative formats like automated Q&As – opens up to exciting prospects for innovation.”

*Success Stories in AI-Driven Fundraising: Gravyty – an AI-generated writing company that offers software that auto-creates email drafts for fundraising – has put together a handy sampling of companies that have had success with its tool.

Pace University, for example, increased its average ‘gift size’ from donors by 15% using the software, according to Adam Martel, CEO, Gravyty.

And Towson University was able to build a ‘major gift pipeline’ using the tool, he adds.

The software works by drawing on info from donor databases to auto-generate fundraising pitch letters.

Says Martel: “Fundraising has always been driven by in-person relationships between donors and fundraisers.

“The beginning of this decade showed us that not only can digital engagement drive giving — but that the practice has a much-needed space alongside traditional in-person relationship building.”

*Charming Customers with AI Personalized Chatbots: Companies have the opportunity to charm customers with personalized help chats that draw on customer info companies store in their databases.

Says Panagiotis Angelopoulos, chief data scientist, Persado: “This is where AI can work its magic: delivering high-impact conversations that can help millions of customers solve their problems through digital self-service channels.”

Overall, AI-driven chatbots offer better customer experiences as compared to human customer support — and also result in lower contact center costs, according to Angelopoulos.

*The Danger Of Auto-Complete Writing: Software tools that finish our sentences for us – like Google Docs’ auto-complete – could be dumbing-down our ability to think, worries Mariano Blejman.

He’s chief digital officer at Argentina’s Groupo Octubre.

Says Blejman: “This world of auto-complete is incredibly efficient, statistically relevant, remarkably innovative — and potentially dangerous.”

Indeed, Blejman says he has become so accustomed to allowing Google Docs to help him write posts, he has a hard time discerning which thoughts are his own — and which are generated by the machine.

Blejman candidly admits: “In the end, I no longer know who or what is writing or thinking.”

*New Google Tool Enables Anyone to Be a Poet: Google has come out with new, experimental AI software that enables you to write poems in the style of 22 poets, including Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.

Observes Aditya Saroha, a writer for The Hindu: “To build the tool, Google’s engineers trained models on a large collection of classic poetry.

“They fine-tuned the models on each individual poet’s body of work to try to capture their style of writing.

“Additionally, the system was trained to have a general semantic understanding of what lines of verse would best follow a previous line of verse — so that even people who write on topics not commonly seen in classic poetry can be fed with relevant suggestions.”

*AI-Generated Digital Signage Arrives: Narrativa — a major player in AI-generated writing — is partnering with digital signage company Array to produce digital signs driven by artificial intelligence.

The signs will rely on the same technology used to auto-generate writing for newspapers, company reports and social media posts.

The only difference is the final display: Instead of popping-up on a smartphone, the AI-generated writing from the partnership could be projected on a stadium-sized electronic billboard.

The two companies stressed their joint venture will also result in more traditional applications of AI-generated writing, including news stories and automated company reports.

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*OpenAI Flips-the-Script with a Text-to-Image Generator: While many AI-generated writing companies are working furiously to describe images with text, OpenAI has come out with a new, experimental tool that does the opposite: generate images from a few lines of text.

Dubbed DALL-E – in homage to the surrealist Salvador Dali – the software was trained to auto-generate images based on text input using 400 million pairs of images and text, according to Venture Beat writer Khari Johnson.

Some of DALL-E’s images can be unexpected to say the least — such as a baby radish in a tutu taking a dog for walk.

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Grammarly
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Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.

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