MANSFIELD — Richland Source Publisher Jay Allred believes the news industry is at a crossroads.
Artificial intelligence will inevitably change the way news is created and shared, he said. It’s up to today’s journalists to take charge of how that change unfolds.
Allred will focus on this topic in the coming months through a fellowship with Columbia Journalism School. He and 23 other applicants were recently selected for the Sulzberger Executive Leadership Program.
A press release from Columbia describes the fellows as emerging leaders at a wide range of news organizations, including media start-ups, nonprofit newsrooms and large international publications.
Fellows use the 21-week program to launch, accelerate and implement a real-world project that is critical to the mission of their organizations and integrate it into their day-to-day work.
As a Sulzberger fellow, Allred will participate in a two-week intensive immersion at Columbia in January. He’ll then return to Mansfield but continue receiving virtual support as he develops his project. Each fellow will return to Columbia in May to present their final product.
“It’s an incredible opportunity to be around really, really smart people in an environment where what I learn will benefit the brand and our work here in Mansfield and around the country.” Allred said.
Allred’s project will involve developing artificial intelligence products that enhance the ability of local newsrooms to serve the communities around them.
“It’s not AI for AI’s sake, its AI for journalism’s sake,” he said.
The project won’t be Allred’s first venture into the world of AI. In 2018, he co-founded Lede AI, an artificial intelligence startup that builds reliable, easy-to-use AI for newsrooms. Lede AI was developed inside the Richland Source newsroom.
The program combines thousands of pre-written variations with verified, crowd-sourced data to create hundreds of sports briefs in seconds. Today, Lede Ai is primarily used for post-game write-ups of high school athletic competitions.
“It creates the ability for sports journalists to do really impactful sports reporting, to spend more time with players and coaches to do deeper stories around the world of high school sports,” Allred said.
In the future, he hopes to expand this concept beyond the sports section, using AI to publish information that is valuable for readers but time-consuming for newsrooms to find and publish.
Building a program that could automatically publish data on things like property transfers, school closures and weather would free up reporters to cover more complex stories, or cover those issues with greater depth.
After seeing the impact that social media has had on local news, Allred believes it’s important to be ahead of the curve on AI. His goal is to create a product that can be informed by the needs of the community it serves — not by Silicon Valley.
“I think most everyone in the news industry would agree that there were a lot of unintended consequences with social media platforms and the news business around polarization,” Allred said.
“We’re in a place right now, in our business, where we have an opportunity to get AI right — to make it responsive to the needs of newsrooms, readers and communities. That’s what I’ll explore during the fellowship.”
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