AI to save local news, w/ Nano Media co-founder Winston Chen
Using AI tools to revitalize and save struggling local newsrooms.
Guest
Winston Chen
Co-founder, Nano Media
Winston Chen is co-founder of Nano Media, a nonprofit technology initiative using artificial intelligence to support local journalism. Its tools help newsrooms process public information and experiment with formats such as meeting-video summaries, while keeping editorial judgment, verification, and the economic realities of local reporting central.
About this conversation
Will AI kill the newsroom? Possibly. But today’s guest has a different goal. Winston Chen, the co-founder of Nano Media, is using AI to try and *save* the newsroom, or at least to save local newsrooms.
The fact is that over the last 20 years, local newsrooms have been gutted — most are no longer economically viable. So Winston is using AI to create tools to help revitalize the nation’s network of newsrooms… and it has already started.
In this episode we cover:
How a loss of local news leads to tribalism and polarization (5:00 ); How a morning walk with his dog sparked the idea for AI experimentation (14:30); How the team began experimenting with using AI to summarize YouTube videos of local meetings (23:00); Whether AI should “write” a news story (29:00); Why the AI tool is designed to be boring (32:00); Future types of AI-empowered content for the newsroom (43:30 ); Predictions for how AI will impact the media industry (54:00 ).
For any fellow media nerds out there, this one's for you!
NanoMedia:
https://nanomedia.org