Ranging from automated articles on natural disasters to AI anchors, news companies worldwide are tackling common problems news consumers face: how to find what they are looking for on our sites, how to access information when they are tight on time, and how to understand what the news is about.

Other applications help news producers overcome challenges such as making better use of archives, getting breaking news out quickly, and expanding coverage.

Here are five current case studies focused on reaching new audiences I wanted to share:

The Economist in the U.K. is using GenAI to translate text and video on its Espresso app into four languages — German, Spanish, French, and Mandarin — as it offers the product free to students across the world. Its editors, who speak these languages natively, run a final quality check on the translations, and the news brand is now working on automating the entire process. 

Meanwhile, Mexico’s Grupo Fórmula is using three AI news anchors to present five or six news stories a day, each to younger audiences on platforms such as TikTok.

“We have some of the most important news presenters in Mexico. We don’t plan to replace them. The news stories that (AI anchors) present are small stories and very focused towards young people who don’t connect well with the old-style newscast,” said Director of Technology and AI Infrastructure Oswaldo Aguilar Castro.

Turkey’s Hurriyet uses GenAI to monitor data and automatically create articles on earthquakes. Its draws on a public database and uses ChatGPT-4o. The publication hopes to develop further content features, such as a timeline of updates.

The Times of India is using algorithmic distribution to surface archival content on its subscriber-only product, showing sustained growth over 18 months.

“The algorithm is successfully tapping into the archive and getting clicks on older stories: 50% of clicks from personalised push notifications are from stories older than 2 days,” Times Internet Senior Director of Product Ritvvij Parrikh said.

This point “is critical because it demonstrates that tapping into evergreen content is a ‘distribution problem.’”

Thomson Reuters uses GenAI to comb through press releases for news and generate a handful of “snaps,” or alerts, for each. The machine flags which part of the press release it got information for each snap from. An editor looks over the snaps, decides which ones are relevant, and checks the information for accuracy, if needed, before hitting the publish button. 

The tool is 98.6% accurate.

And for anyone interested in modular journalism — presenting news in chunks that can be recombined, rather than the classic inverted pyramid, to drive greater engagement and understanding — there is Reuters’ partner Particle News (h/t Ole Reissmann), which Germany’s Axel Springer recently invested in. 

It uses GPT-4o to present bullet point summaries of key news events, drawn from several sources, and it also lets users ask questions about particular news stories “which are then answered visibly for all and incorporated into the news item,” Reissmann pointed out.

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