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Imagine an understaffed and overworked local newsroom has no one available to cover a town board meeting. A TV news producer proposes to place a camera in the meeting room, record the meeting and then have generative AI transcribe highlights, surface what it judges to be the most important and newsworthy elements in the meeting and then pull them together into a first draft of a story. An editor then puts eyes on this draft, makes a few changes and hits publish.
This scenario was posed to a news organization leader, a news technologist and a news ethicist. Their task: hash out the viability of the process and examine whether it is possible today.
“We have a tool in place called SearchMinutes.com that’s going to be integrated more into workflow solutions with the NPS, but it does exactly that,” said the news technologist, Aimee Rinehart, senior project manager for AI strategy at the Associated Press, speaking at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum conference on Tuesday. “It takes recordings of any public meeting, does a transcription of that, can identify key words that a reporter has said they’re interested in — maybe it’s ‘pothole repair’ — and it will take you right into the video where they take place.”
Rinehart pointed out that there are a lot of issues with the tool. Sometimes the microphone doesn’t work. People forget to hit record. However, with newsrooms across the country lacking resources, the technologist said this tech can help the newsroom “try and close a gap.” Instead of zero