In the rapidly changing world of journalism, the integration of Artificial Intelligence has sparked both anxiety and excitement among news organisations. While the true extent of its impact is yet to be seen, the key to understanding AI is using it.

Arc XP customer and international media organisation Metro World News saw AI as an opportunity to optimise content workflows and reach new audiences for the 18 Web sites it operates across eight countries in two languages on Arc XP’s platform.

We spoke with Vicente Yarad, head of business development at Metro World News, to learn how the editorial teams are positioning themselves at the forefront of the evolving journalism landscape by adopting a test-and-learn strategy with AI and integrating the technology into Arc XP’s platform.

Adopting AI for content translation

Each day ,Metro World News’ editorial team produces 1,200 stories for its 18 Latin American Web sites, 16 of which are in Spanish and two in Portuguese.

For each of its Spanish-language sites, Metro World News recirculates 40% of the content from one of the other Spanish-language sites. The ability to recirculate that same Spanish-language content to the Portuguese-language sites was significantly limited due to the time-consuming process of translating the content and recreating the story for distribution in Portuguese.

The tool used by Metro World News, the Google Translate API, proved to be inefficient and time-consuming, limiting the company’s ability to recirculate the same Spanish-language content to its Portuguese-language sites.

Journalists spent 20 to 30 minutes translating the content, formatting the story, and circulating it to the appropriate Web sites and sections. Additionally, they spent an extra 20 to 25 minutes editing the translation to eliminate grammatical errors, which results in more than 40 minutes spent translating and circulating each individual story.

Recognising AI as not a technology for the distant future but a viable solution right now, Metro World News took an early adopter mentality to test and learn with the generative AI tool, ChatGPT, to speed up the translation process.

The Metro World News team discovered that, with ChatGPT, it can quickly generate high-quality, natural-sounding neutral Spanish-to-Brazilian Portuguese translations, with remarkable accuracy, requiring little, if any, editing.

Once it proved the efficiency of ChatGPT for translation needs, Metro World News shifted its attention to further optimise content workflows with the goal of increasing the amount of original Spanish-language content available for recirculation to its Portuguese sites. Metro World News achieved this by integrating ChatGPT into its instance of Arc XP.

Metro World News integrated ChatGPT into its instance of Arc XP’s content management system (CMS), Arc XP Content. The team utilised Arc XP application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate ChatGPT into Arc XP Content’s editorial interface, Composer, and workflow planning tool, WebSked.

This integration enables journalists to send selected stories directly from Composer to ChatGPT for translation. ChatGPT processes the translation and inserts the new translated story back into Composer, notifying editors through Slack once the translation is completed.

By leveraging AI as a translation tool, Metro World News’ journalists are now able to produce a highly accurate translation from directly within the Arc XP platform with the click of a button, reducing their individual article translation time from 20 to 40 minutes to just five minutes, increasing content production for Metro World News’ Brazilian sites by 35% after just the first month.

Leveraging AI for production optimisation

Following the success of the Spanish-to-Portuguese language translation pilot, Metro World News expanded its use of ChatGPT to include keyword generation and content variation. To increase content recirculation opportunities, Metro World News created a two-step prompt for ChatGPT. The first prompt was to generate a direct Spanish-to-Portuguese translation of an article for usage on metroworldnews.com.br.

The second prompt was to generate a new version of the Portuguese-translated article for its women’s lifestyle site, Novamulher.com, that contextualised the title and the content with a tone and focus appropriate to the interests of the mainly female audience.

This newfound capability has allowed the company to use more Spanish-language content on its Brazilian sites and tailor it to the two very different audiences. As a result, Metro World News has increased the amount of content delivered to its audiences while presenting a more cohesive reading experience tailored to each audience’s preferences.

“It’s not just about saving time and doing more with less,” Yarad said. “It’s about focusing more and delivering better journalism and deeper content.”

The implementation of ChatGPT and its integration into the Arc XP platform not only brought immediate efficiencies to Metro World News’ newsroom but also resulted in significant growth in audience analytics. In the two months since the company implemented AI into its workflow, Metro World News experienced a remarkable 31% increase in new users, a substantial 38% rise in pageviews, and a notable 10% increase in average session duration.

Metro World News’ use of AI in the newsroom illustrates the potential it holds. By streamlining workflows, enhancing content creation, and overcoming language barriers, AI minimises time-consuming tasks for journalists, enabling them to focus on what matters — producing compelling and meaningful content that resonates with their readers.

As AI technology continues to advance, the future promises even greater possibilities for elevating journalism, and Metro World News remains at the forefront of this exciting transformation.

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