At the Manchester Evening News we like to innovate, and we're about to try something different.
Like many media organisations, we’ve been experimenting with AI to see if it can help us provide a richer experience around subjects we know you want to read. We're now starting to publish a small amount of content that uses these new techniques.
It's not a radical move for us. During the pandemic we produced our daily Greater Manchester borough-by-borough Covid stats with the help of a 'robot' which converted the source data into an article. This was highly-commended in the digital initiative of the year category at the Society of Editors awards. More recently we have experimented with AI-generated quizzes.
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Storytelling is very important to us and we're always looking at new ways to reach our readers. We hope this trial will teach us a lot about how AI technologies can assist our journalists with their day-to-day work. We also hope to learn more about what our readers do (and don’t) want to read.
However, there are clear boundaries for us. Any and all experiments, from using AI to probe spreadsheets and data, to using AI to help us speed up editorial research, will always be overseen by our journalists. We will always declare in an article where AI tools have been used.
We will be led by our journalists as we judge the outcome of these experiments - the aim of our trial is to help them do their job and serve our audiences in the most effective way possible.
As ever, honest feedback from our readers will be essential and very welcome.
Meanwhile our journalists will keep telling the stories that matter.
Sarah Lester
Editor, Manchester Evening News
You can write to me at: sarah.lester@reachplc.com
Some of our strong reads from the last week:
- A life in poverty, a death in poverty
- “You shouldn’t be expected to live like this”
- Farewell to a much-loved bakery shutting after 94 years of ‘blood, sweat and tears’
- I saw all sorts in Strangeways. One thing scared me more than anything.
- Seven years on from the day Britain decided its fate, people across Greater Manchester are still divided
- Everything you need to know about the Manchester International Festival
