Your Questions Answered: A Live Q&A Session in Collaboration with the Online News Association
Newsroom RobotsShow Notes
In this special episode of Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy steps into the spotlight to answer your pressing questions about AI. Recorded during a session with the Online News Association (ONA), this episode covers a range of topics, from ethical considerations in AI-generated content to practical tools that can elevate your work.
AI Tools Mentioned: Perplexity - A generative AI search engine that provides quick insights on any topic. Wobby - A data journalism tool that connects to open datasets, where you can ask questions in plain language and get clear AI-generated insights, reports, and visualizations OpusClip - Converts long-form videos into short, engaging clips for social media, ideal for repurposing content. YESEO - A Slack-based AI tool for generating headline suggestions and SEO metadata, widely used in local newsrooms. Google's Pinpoint - A tool for investigative journalists using AI to search through massive amounts of documents, including handwritten ones. Natural Reader - An AI tool that reads text aloud with natural-sounding voices, perfect for those who prefer listening over reading. Whimsical AI - Creates diagrams and visualizations from your data inputs directly within ChatGPT. Elicit & Consensus - AI-powered search engines for academic research, useful for journalists covering specialized beats like health and science. Nota - A versatile tool for creating SEO content, summarizing articles, and even converting articles into videos. GPT for Sheets and Docs, Claude for Sheets - These tools bring AI directly into your Google Docs and Sheets, enabling you to draft, edit, and generate insights without leaving your document or spreadsheet.
If you're interested in learning more about how AI is being implemented in newsrooms, sign up to receive a series of case studies on AI and journalism, researched and written by Nikita in collaboration with the Online News Association.
Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Newsroom Robots
For most of journalism’s history, the article has been the atomic unit of news: a fixed container, written once and served the same way to everyone. That’s beginning to change. AI is moving out from behind the scenes, where it quietly powered efficiencies, and into the interface itself, where it can assemble, personalize, and adapt the news to each reader.
At The Seattle Times, an AI tool identified a new prospect and helped close additional ad revenue in a single day. The Seattle Times is one of 11 news organizations participating in the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, funded by OpenAI and Microsoft. Through this initiative, AI engineering fellow Rajesh Barade worked with the advertising team to address their challenges and developed a prospecting agent. This tool enables sales representatives to enter a category or focus area, identify businesses spending in that market, find decision-makers, access advertising spend data, and generate personalized outreach.
For years, the aggregator model was simple: curate the best journalism from thousands of publishers and send audiences their way. Now that contract is being rewritten, and Yahoo News is one of the most interesting places to watch it happen.
AI is settling in as infrastructure within newsrooms, a layer quietly reshaping how journalists discover information, how stories move through production, and how audiences increasingly expect news to reach them.
Most major newsrooms have now moved beyond early experimentation with AI. The main challenge now is determining how to govern effectively, scale consistently, and strategically position AI across the entire organization—while maintaining public trust as a central priority.