In September, INMA awarded 30 young professionals around the world with its fifth “30 Under 30” award as part of its Young Professionals Initiative. This is the 16th in a series of 30 features about the impressive rising media stars who are shaping our industry.

As director of product, analytics, and data science at MediaNews Group, Vadim Radinsky is excited about what the proper use of technology will allow news media companies to accomplish in the future. Already he has led his team in building a digital advertising suite of custom reports and created monetisation reporting, saving over US$300,000 in costs by operationalising reporting code.

The news media industry as a whole could benefit by “opening up to new technologies and means of data management,” Vadim said.

“AI is capable of helping more than hurting our companies, and we have quite a few use cases on the team where AI algorithms help editors without replacing them or generating garbage algorithm-generated content.”

The key, he said, is for companies to provide the right training to help people understand how to use it: “The biggest part of learning the new is getting used to it.”

His team at MediaNews Group has launched new data science initiatives, including AI Image Research for published articles and WordPress tag recommenders for editors. Those prototypes revolutionised news publishing for the company’s newsrooms.

One of Vadim’s notable — and ambitious — initiatives was to unify the current reporting and services provided across the company into a single client-friendly repository. One of the key data products delivered as a part of that database was the AI Content perspective report developed by the data science team.

“The report analyses the past performance of specific articles and uses monthly trends to predict future content performance,” Vadim explained. “This allows our managing editors to gauge the future content trending coming up in the next month by the past trends analysis and including the best-suiting content in the article pages.”

The project has resulted in increased user engagement with the article pages, more time spent on a page, and an increased number of pageviews per session.

In the future, Vadim looks forward to reigniting the interest in local journalism and once more make it an integral part of communities:

“We have the data to find the right content to place on the page, and I’d love to be at the tip of the spear of using data science to bring our neighbors the most relative news of high quality.

“I hope to be able to strategically devise the paths for local media companies to act more independently ... . It is vital for journalism to be independent, and I have the ability to be at the very heart of it.”

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