How Nota is using AI to spring an oasis for our news deserts
Episode Details
Transcript
Local journalism has long been the lynchpin that connects people to their communities and to the nation at large. Those diverse local perspectives are critical for providing a sense of place and including everyone in the national dialogue. But across the U.S., journalism has become imperiled as news outlets dry up and go out of business — and those remaining are being asked to do more with less. In this episode, Josh Brandau of Nota talks about his lifelong passion for the news, and how Nota is using AI tools to help newsrooms thrive in the digital age and allow journalists to focus on their craft.
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:19 The Role of AI in Business Transformation
00:53 Demystifying AI through Innovators
01:21 The Concept of News Deserts
02:08 Josh Brandau's Journey into Journalism
03:58 The Struggles of News Organizations
05:12 The Impact of AI on Local Journalism
05:31 The Challenges Faced by Small Newspapers
06:16 How Nota is Assisting Newsrooms
07:40 The Role of AI in Journalism
10:16 The Importance of Human Control in AI
11:07 How Nota's Tools Work
14:36 The Impact of Nota on Local News
23:03 The Future of Nota and AI in Journalism
30:35 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Link to full episode transcript.
Produced by Larj Media.
Hayete
Welcome to Pivotal. Hayete Gallotcorporate vice president for commercial solution areas at Microsoft I work with customers around the globe to transform their business through technology. At the center of every transformation are people give technology its purpose, and that doesn't change with the advent of AI. It's actually being accelerated. People spark visionary ideas for leveraging technology. The release of AI technology like Chad GPT this year is exciting, but it has led to big question as we grapple with the best way to harness those tools to enhance and support the call behind the work. We like to talk about technology. I love to talk about it, but we often forget that technology is most effective when it supports people with purpose. This season will demystify AI by talking to the innovators using new AI technology to uplift their industries and augment their people from educate to journalism, to surfing, and it just illustrates what AI is about. Everybody thinks it's about tech. No. Everybody using AI. And that's what we're gonna show you on this season. You've probably heard the term news desert. A news desert is an area in which there are no local journalists organization that have the means to survive. News deserts are found particularly in rural and economically distressed areas of the country. Where for so long local newspapers were the main source of news for small communities. Studies show a strong correlation between the presence of local news outlets, with a thriving democracy. Local newspapers are unfortunately disappearing at an alarming rate with an estimated twenty percent of Americans leaving without a local source of credible and comprehensive news. Our guest today had a front row seat to the plight of struggling newsrooms. Speaker 1
Josh Brando, the CEO of Noda, were an AI assisted software as a service company focused on content creation, specifically news publications. Speaker 0
For Josh, the passion for journalism run-in the family. Speaker 1
My dad was the editor of his college newspaper. I was the editor co editor rather of my high school newspaper. It seemed at the time, like, it was no big deal, but clearly it was creating some sort of desire within me to serve a a larger community and kind of provide some perspective on what was happening at least at our very rural high school. I grew up in a town that is about an hour north of Tampa in Florida called Newport Richey. So it was one of those towns that was growing as I was growing up from orange groves to what it is today, which is a pretty bustling kind of ex ex suburb or expert of the Tampa area proper. As we grew, stowed at all the schools, I think we were the first or second class to go through my middle and high school, certainly the first class to have a journalism department that I was aware of within the county. So it was really exciting to you know, go to all those other games that I, you know, I didn't play and report on those or talk about, you know, the new pizza issues that we were facing at lunch and a few other more serious topics that we address, but it was a really formative kind of fun way in which to spend my time in high school. Speaker 0
It didn't realize it at the time. But writing for the high school newspaper in trying to understand and analyze the world around him inspired a lifelong interest in journalism. Speaker 1
I took a circuitous route, was within advertising and media and consulting for quite some time. And then I found myself as the CRO and the CMO of the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego union tribune at a very unique time in the history of both of those news publications. Speaker 0
Josh experienced firsthand the ways in which news organizations were struggling to adapt to meet the moment. Speaker 1
We're at a inflection point effectively for all news within the United States where maybe the worst responder to technology has been the news organizations. And if you look back, the rise of the internet, the rise of search, the rise of social, the rise of video first, the rise of mobile, name a technological innovation, and find me a newspaper that was quick. To respond to that. It hasn't really been the case. The Brookings Institute came out with a statistic last month that has bothered me since. Sixty five million Americans are living in what we define as a news desert at this time. So a county that has no really news organization representing that county or reporting on that county. And as we all know, when that happens in any capacity, all of civic engagement goes down, awareness goes down, graft increases, crime increases everything, gets a little bit worse. So we wanna really endeavor to create a lot of tools to ensure that the future of news is one that will be around for quite some time. Helps communities very small and large moving forward. So part of what we're trying to do now is advocate pretty dramatically for the adoption of AI and from an assist of perspective so that news is not left behind. And if we do it the right way, we really believe that these tools can really generate the next generation of news. And really address the problems that we're faced with today. Speaker 0
The decline of local newspapers has been driven largely by sharp losses in revenue as advertising, moved online and increased cost of production. Over the last decade, more people turned to social media for news. And small newspapers run by locals with a stake in their communities have been bought out by larger organization. Or are unable to keep up and keep their business model profitable enough to sustain long term. Journalists and editors at smaller organization are often also responsible for marketing their work, often leading to catchy clickbait headlines to get readers to click on their articles. More views equals more profit, leading incentives to be out of alignment. Josh and his co founders looked at the landscape of tools available to assist newsrooms, and they found that it was a great need. Very few tools were actually tailored to support news organizations. Speaker 1
We really looked at the space that all content creators are are faced are are faced with in terms of what tools were available at the time and there was not any that we would say were of the highest quality. So we said, hey, there's an opportunity here not just to serve one or two news organizations. Really, the opportunity is to serve the entire larger ecosystem of news, let's go out and start creating these tools. So we endeavored to do that. We started pretty small, and then we got very lucky. So that was September, October of last year is when we were in the Microsoft Star's program and we were identified by a few folks there from an issue and advocacy perspective and shown what Open AI had the capability of doing. What AI is really from an application perspective capable of. And we immediately saw the ways in which we could apply that to local journalism, and we've been doing it since then. So It's been a a very exciting ride with Microsoft, helping us along in that capacity, and it wouldn't be possible without a lot of the work, that we've done together to ensure that we're creating the right tools that are very assistive, not generative, content creators, at large overall. Speaker 0
Combining AI and journalism might make some understandably wary And Josh explains the important distinction to look out for. Notice tools are there to assist journalists, not to do the work for them. Speaker 1
The keyword there is assistive. Everything that you that we generate for you in the terms of utilizing machine learning, natural language processing, some AI components, large language models, is there to provide you with suggestions. So if it's a pre published tool, one of our five or six, that looks like, you know, you're creating something in your own CMS and you click on our plugin and it provides you with SEO optimization it provides you with headline recommendations, all completely editable meta tagging structures. Really a lot of the stuff that we have from a lot of downward pressure force journalists to get okay at, I would never say good at it. It's certainly not their passion. They should be reporting on the world around them and not ensuring that a computer can effectively talk better to a computer, which is what a lot of this stuff is. Speaker 0
You know, the thing that's cool about this example is You can see how those AI tools are enabling the journalists to really focus on their craft. The things that they're passionate about, instead of all this work that they kind of don't care for, but they have to do. Speaker 1
Generative in this respect means a net new article created out of some facts that exist. Really bypassing a lot of, I think, what we would consider journalistic integrity, that's a place where we don't ever wanna go. I think all we wanna do is provide journalists with the ability to tell more stories to more people in a more efficient way. As soon as we cross that Rubicon, I think we get into a very ethically morally nebulous confusing, probably not awesome state. So what we're trying to do is take a lot of those pain points, those friction points between the creation of an article, video, podcast, anything to that effect, and the world. So why don't you just no matter what kind of framework you wanna put on it or what kind of platform or construct you need to construct to tell your story as a journalist we wanna make sure that we can transmute that into anything else. So if you're really very comfortable as a journalist writing articles, we wanna ensure that that article can also be seen as a video because we know a lot of people don't read articles. And certainly, almost no one reads the entire article anymore, unfortunately. So how do we get the story out there in other ways other in other platforms and do it assistively so that it's there to just speed up the process of you doing that as opposed to you having to do it. Speaker 0
This is a very great point by Josh. AI should be used to assist humans, and it needs to be guardrails against passing the human review. In particular for a field like journalism, where accuracy and integrity are paramount values, Having people in control is fundamental. It's just so important. And, you know, for us at Microsoft, we're building this technology. And we really had to think through what is it about? Right? And for us, it's really about building assistant, building co pilot. You continue to be the pilot. We're just assisting you, and it's fundamental. Cause if you get confused and you start thinking, the tools can replace the humans, He don't get it. We can't replace the human. We can inform, we can give them the data, but the humans have to do the work. So rather than writing news articles, notice tools are designed to support content creators through a specific and tailored large language model, working off content that has already been written by the journalist. And in that context, because it's about how this journalist has been writing in the past, is gonna have its tone, it's gonna have its style. So it doesn't feel foreign to him as he's picking up the work and then adjusting it. With his own perspective. Speaker 1
Really, what you start all of these tools with is a large language model. And what we've constructed within Azure in its own instance is our own large language model. So we effectively take very high quality content very transparently from our partners, you know, thirty plus forty plus publishers at this point. And it really helps us feed into the model to create a better output for the content that we're creating. And we can talk about some and Vid and how that is reflected in that. With the tools. So, really, the large language model is the engine underneath the hood of the car as it goes, and that's the, you know, applications. That's some and that's VID, and that's social, that's a lot of other applications that we create. But functionally, the the real differentiator here is that we're creating tools by journalists for journalists that are trained very transparently on journalistic quality content so that the output is while assistive very accurate to what I think you would want to achieve. The sum tool effectively is either integrated within your CMS structure. So Imagine you're typing in WordPress, an article that you're writing for your local paper. Again, you you press a button and then we provide you pretty much auto it reads. We read the article, and it provides you with SEO optimized headline, observations. Or four of them, five of them, six of them, however many you want, a summarization of your article that you can utilize to push on other platforms, the top quotes from your own article, key points from your own article, categorization of that article, tagging structures for your internal use, Speaker 0
It's all about automating things, and then giving you the time back so that you can really be creative. By connecting to digital, Nota is helping newspapers adapt. People consume content differently through SEO and video, and they're enabling them to match that new demand. And they can't compete with the big guys. So it's really making them feel like and look like the big guys. The thing about co pilot or similar technology is when you build it, you have to really understand the workflow of the individuals. In this case, they build an AI app an AI tool that really is targeted to the journalists and how they work and how to make them better along the way. It's not only about making the journalists more effective and more creative, but it's also helping them with their business model and profitability. Because it's helping them being discoverable. The industry is embracing AI. Everybody's saying should AI happen. Let's just be clear. It's happening. Think about it. Journalist in local areas, somewhere in the US are already using this technology. Nota is a great illustration of the speed at which AI is happening. It's not a question of whether it's gonna happen. It's how we harness this technology to make people better, and that's what Nota is doing. Speaker 1
It really increases your organic reach because you're optimizing your article in real time. The same tool exists in a dashboard. So e if you even if you're not within the newsroom itself, that you're on the audience team or branded content team or sales team, you can use these same tools as well to generate more optimized versions of whatever you're creating for the internet. That's what some does. Vid is a tool that effectively takes your article and makes a video out of it, whether six seconds long or three minutes long, it summarizes your article, provides you with a bunch of transition effects, music that we create with AI, which has been a bunch of fun, and really a lot of visuals, whether that's generated by AI, which is a tool that we have, a capability we have within the tool, but isn't used very often or you can use your own images from your own content library. Speaker 0
No doubt was founded just last year in twenty twenty two, and already two dozen local news organization are using their tools to amplify their reach. Speaker 1
By local, I mean, very locally focused community driven independently owned very often smaller, less than, you know, two dozen or a dozen reporters and staff. Atlanta Voice is a great early beta partner to us. They've been using us for social extensions as well as the optimization of their articles for a few months now. We're really happy that they're happy. The Sacramento observer uses us on a pretty much daily basis for the same thing. Getting a lot of feedback that there's a lot of other things that they'd like to see and we're trying to create those as fast as we can. So a newsletter tool is coming out in the next month that should accelerate the ability to create a newsletter, really shaving off about, let's say, eighty five percent of the time it takes to currently create a newsletter. That's something that we've heard a lot of feedback from, you know, our customers, but also it's something that was a real big frustration of mine at the Los Angeles Times. Some people just want a newsletter that talks about travel and food and lifestyle and music. Some people want opinion and world affairs and you know, national news and politics. There's dozens of sub segmentations available to you at almost every news organization, but it takes so long to create a newsletter that you really can't serve the audiences in the way in which you want to. And that's really the, again, the crux of what we're trying to do is just create assistive tools that allow you to get to your audience in a more efficient manner. And the newsletter tool will will allow for that. So Hopefully, you'll see a proliferation of newsletters that really are specific to your needs or interests in the near future. Speaker 0
Many of these newspapers have been running lean after years of cost cutting. And the time savings, they are able to achieve with these tools allows them to preserve the quality of their news coverage. These assistive tools serve another important and much needed function for newsroom. They help generate revenue. We get very excited about technology. We get very excited about saving revenue or generating revenue. But really here, if you think about it, with more people to report on news, more local issues receive more comprehensive coverage, And this will lead to a more informed public. And, ultimately, if you think about it, a more robust democracy. The downstream effects really do extend that for. Speaker 1
The more engagement you get, there's a revenue component to this. So it's great that you're telling a story in the format that someone would want to engage with that story. And so say you only like to listen to your news when you're running because you're really frustrated and it's a podcast that you have to listen to. If your local news organization doesn't have any sort of audio, then you're not really engaging with what is happening around you. So we should be able to provide the tool that allows the conversion of, you know, text audio or video to audio or something to that effect, the same goes with any other way in which you'd wanna consume news. But what that also means is that engagement is the equivalent of revenue. I mean, that's the way in which the Internet works at this point. So the more you listen to something engage with read something, watch something, the more they can monetize that. And those are different revenue streams that haven't necessarily existed for a lot of these small and and very large news organizations. So if we can get more information and more formats out to more people in every community, the value is there. So hopefully, that's from a subscription standpoint or donation standpoint. And then the more people come and and engage with these different formats the more revenue you can generate from an advertising perspective, the hope. So ideally, that is the water in the desert. And I it's only possible with these latest breakthroughs in AI. Speaker 0
Any take is about what you do with it. This is what we want with our take. This is our mission at Microsoft. We wanna empower every person to do more. This example is just inspiring because it is technology and action to empower people to do more. And it's interesting because sometimes we don't take the time to reflect and realize that without local news, we have a real threat to a strong democracy. And by the way, research shows that when a local newspaper closes, there is statistically significant increase in corporate wrongdoing and government corruption in that region, empowering local news to do their best work and remain profitable is super important if we want a robust national democracy. There is a lot at stake here. Speaker 1
And it's also, I think, important to really think about journalism as a very, you know, the fourth estate, as they say, as a really important safe harbor for truth and perspective in a time when the the various parts of what I've talked about in terms of techno technological breakthroughs are going to be just and phenomena across, like, the entire internet. A stat that I saw this week that was a little harrowing was that ninety percent of content the internet within the next two years, it's gonna be created in some capacity with AI. So while we can use these tools for good, just like it's like great our great responsibility, it can certainly be used for bad bad actors. So there's gonna be a massive proliferation of content that is inaccurate and misleading. And I think that we need to be assistive and help get more content out there for a lot of the bad act or the the better actors rather so that we can combat the the bad actors. I think actually there's a point here that it the Microsoft journalism hub, which we're a part of proudly is sponsored by or supported by the democracy for a team within Microsoft. And they have three pillars that they came to us with, that they really believe in within journalism. The first was to help rebuild capacity. I think we've talked a bit about that. Restore trust, which is a way in which, I think, is really gonna be highlighted in this next election cycle globally as well as by the ability of more community focused news organizations to show the value of what journalists do to those communities. And reduce risk. And I think that is a component. Again, that is a little frightening. So we wanna make sure that we reduce physical harm, obviously, to journalists when where we can, and I think that there's a lot of really good things happening in that respect, but also from, you know, a cyber attack perspective and, a miss information campaign perspective. So I think I would only add to that that generating new revenue, net new revenue opportunities would also be a main goal of of the journalism hub and the democracy forward team. And I think we're all aligned on how we can hopefully push that forward. Speaker 0
I love when he said with great power comes great responsibility. It is so true with AI, even within my own team. When we're rolling out AI, I'm not just giving tools to people because there is anxiety. I am explaining the content I'm explaining how it's gonna help their job on a day to day, why they should use it. And I'm also answering the questions because some of them are like, So what does that mean? And if I use those tools, will I be looked down? And there's a lot going on in people's mind. And so you have to understand With that technology, there's a lot that has to do with humans. And to get adoption, you need to make sure that you have this dialogue. And that you think about the consequences. It's been very interesting to see the evolution in the last nine months. At first, it was like, he's AI evil? Is AI good? Should we use it? I think we've all acknowledged that it's happening. And that is really about a conversation that is becoming much more sophisticated about how we use it. What are the guardrails we need to put in place? What is the goal of this technology in our own organization for our employees, for the way we interact with customers and partners It's been interesting to see the evolution, and it's happening here at Nota too. Speaker 1
It's really been fun over the last six, seven months. To even see how those conversations have evolved from. We should probably talk about how we're never gonna use assistive AI or AI in any capacity. Oh my god. The robots coming to, hey, that's really interesting. Why couldn't we use that? Or it how far should we go with these tools to really make it happen? I think everyone is very right to be extraordinarily skeptical. I mean, that's what journalists are, right, by nature. They're very skeptical human beings, and they should be very skeptical of AI. I think what you what I would caution is just to look back at any sort of really recent history within technology and don't be too cautious. Be super cautious about the application and, you know, how where your lines are and the way in which you wanna utilize this new technology, but certainly know it first before you make a decision is what I would say. Also, the ways in which we're creating a lot of these tools are are ways in which if, frankly, I just call that machine learning, everyone would be so excited. That this was working within their news organization. There's very few parts of what we create that would be, I think, generatively dubious in terms of what I what I'm hearing back from reporter. So use the tools, use other tools, just get informed, understand kind of where the base of all this is coming from, what the large language models mean from a very basic level and how that really can impact bias within what you're seeing generated understand hallucinations as we call them happen. And I think the real thing I would say is just, like, try these tools out, but never assume that they're gonna be perfect or even close to perfect at this point. They're very simplistic in a lot of ways. So just use them as assistive tools and edit them and proceed with caution, but proceed. Speaker 0
It's super consistent with what I tell every customer. Proceed with caution, but proceed. I asked Josh to explain AI hallucinations. Speaker 1
So there's a lot of examples of this when people got really excited when chat came out with OpenAI. Open AI famously is not connected to the internet. It stopped, I think, in September of twenty twenty two. So any information about the world that has happened since then, their large language model has not been trained on that information. However, their large language model has been trained on. Billions, if not, tens of billions of pieces of information across the entire internet. And we're I'm pretty confident that not all of that is true. So a lot of the time, it will make some leaps of association and its ability from a natural language processing pattern to kind of guess what the next thing should be or what something is tied to something, and we'll just present you with a very compelling case or a very compelling historical inaccuracy, for example, and it doesn't exist or it never exists or is is wrong. So a lot of things have happened since A lot of that news is broken, hallucinations have been reduced depending on kind of what vertical you're talking about. Our large language model has almost none. Because of the kind of content that we build it upon. And also, we start with something that's already been generated, whether that's an article you're creating within your CMS or one that you're posting to our tools. So it's very rare for the the leap to be made within our own large language model, certainly something that we don't rule out. I I would expect it to happen eventually or occasionally, but that's what we have editors for. That's what we have that's what we have humans for. Speaker 0
At the end of the day, as you can see with this example, with journalists, it is not replacing their judgment. It's just giving them context and information so that then they can go writing their article, but humans are needed. Judgment is needed. That's what those journalists are doing. Everybody is anxious about AI replacing jobs. In this case, interesting, it's actually enabling people to stay in business. Be journalists focused on their craft, making them more satisfied, and hopefully, it's gonna reshape how we've due local news and create new opportunities for a journalist who wanna do local news. Note ties harnessing the power of AI to automate processes that are in the workflow of every journalist in twenty twenty three. Especially at the local level. Speaker 1
Honestly, it's sort of ridiculous the position that we've found ourselves in imagine a reporter in the nineteen nineties having to also sell the advertising also distribute it to all the houses that subscribed to the newspaper to go to the printing press and make sure that they're printing it on the right paper or different kinds of paper for a special section. I mean, really, the that's what we're asking a lot of news reporters and editors to do today from a digital perspective. You know, not only write the article, but make sure that you have a very quirky and interesting social post across, but not the same social posts across all the different social platforms, different ones. Ensure that, you know, you're really good at finding the story here, but make sure that you also put it in video. So we're really endeavoring to provide them tools where they can get back to what effectively they're the best at, which is finding, uncovering, telling us about the communities that we live in. And connecting us to those around us and holding accountable those folks that need to be held accountable. So I think that's the huge opportunity again here that we're faced with, the ability to free journalists to do what they're best at. As opposed to having to worry about what the computers need in order to engage properly with the story. Speaker 0
So here's what's next for Josh and the note to team. Speaker 1
We're getting into a place where we clearly see how these tools can help store up a lot of local regional, even national news publications, as well as local T. V. Stations, local radio stations, we're seeing a lot of success across the board in terms of legacy media as it's called. Right? So what is another area that we think we can make an impact in, and we hope to be moving into, the government vertical at the national level very soon. So we can utilize the same sorts of tools to really help summarize and encapsulate and everyone understand or get their arms around all of these committee meetings, all of these bills, all the amendments to the bills, all of the the minutes from almost anything that you can think of. It's an extraordinary amount of data, extraordinary amount of work that's going on, but very hard to find a way to easily digest. So if we can create tools to help that process along, I think we're serving the larger needs of our democracy as well. So that's what we're going to be focused on as our our our next kind of wave of innovation. Speaker 0
Everybody's convinced that with AI, we're gonna replace job. In this example, we're actually reshaping how people work. We're enabling them to focus on their craft. We're improving how satisfied they are on a day to day basis. And hopefully, we're gonna create more jokes because now more people will be able to do local news. That inspires me. Nota is a great example of what AI can do for good. And in case of journalism, it is at the core of our demo So imagine getting local news to be revived and to get journalists to actually cover local news and help communities, understand what's happening around the world. Can't be more exciting. Can't be more exciting. Thank you for listening to Pivotal. I'd love to hear your story in your pivotal moment, so don't hesitate to follow me and share on LinkedIn. Auto's information is also available in the show notes. Our show is produced by large media. That's L ARJ Media. Special thanks to Lynn Yang and our partners at We Communications. 
