"Over the past year, major newsrooms across the country have rolled out generative AI chatbots. The Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle came out with its Chowbot for foodies and a Kamala Harris "news assistant" for voters. The Washington Post launched Climate Answers, its first-ever chatbot fueled by reporting from the climate desk. And chatbots that help readers navigate article archives have gone live at both Forbes and the Financial Times."
"A new report from the UNC Center for Innovation & Sustainability in Local Media (CISLM) documents what building a chatbot looks like for these newsrooms. CISLM gave four small local newsrooms across the Southeastern U.S product development support and financing to launch their own chatbot. The program, called Local NewsBot Studio, launched four products back in May and ran them on each publisher's website for 45 days, collecting feedback from the newsrooms throughout the process."
Four small local newsrooms in the Southeastern U.S. received product development support and financing to build chatbots and deploy them on their publisher websites for 45 days to collect reader feedback. Development moved quickly: initial conversations to live deployments took under a month, with many initial demos running within one week. Teams used Zapier to create low-code chatbots, keeping monthly operational costs near $40 per bot. The process emphasized pragmatic, scrappy development and allowed each newsroom to customize its chatbot for specific audiences and use cases despite limited staff and engineering resources.
Read at Nieman Lab
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