Our in-house developed editing tool helps ensure stories are free from grammatical and spelling errors and that they conform to NZ Herald editorial style for things like titles, currency and macrons.
The tool is available to all editorial staff and is comparable to an internal version of the popular AI tool Grammarly.
Journalists are also able to use it to generate headlines, summaries and categorisation tags for our publishing system.
It can also summarise full press releases into articles, under the direction of an editor or journalist. For example, a theatre group sends a press release to the editor of a community newspaper who then processes it for publication using our tool to summarise the text into a succinct news article, write a headline and add the tags and metadata our system needs before publication. The article is then carefully reviewed by the editor before being edited by another of our journalists.
AI recommendations
We have an award-winning AI system that we primarily use for recommending stories to readers. This includes the homepage “Hello module” which suggests articles readers have not yet read, but which we think will interest them.
The system also runs some of the slots at the top of the homepage, allowing us to suggest articles based on where a reader is located, the types of stories they have previously read and stories we think may be of most interest to subscribers and free readers.
We do not personalise our homepage based on what we think you will most likely read. Our belief is this creates an “echo chamber” where readers no longer see views or articles they will disagree with.
But we do use AI to determine “top news”, which is then shown to all readers.
Investigations
The ability of AI tools to quickly process large amounts of data, and then to highlight patterns, connections and interesting stuff, can help our journalists to reveal things people don’t want you to know.
BusinessDesk NZX announcements
Our specialist business news website BusinessDesk uses a system we internally call Bidi to process NZX announcements into articles. Bidi allows us to re-write and publish an article within about 30 seconds.
Bidi processes what is effectively a statutory announcement. It does not add context or any other information to the article.
Our journalists still monitor NZX announcements and select the ones where we can add value to spend time on.
Images
We do not use AI to generate photo-realistic images to accompany news stories. We also attempt to weed out any AI-generated or enhanced stock images.
We may use AI illustrations on things like opinion or feature articles. When we do this, we will acknowledge this in the image caption or credit.
