A Note to Readers about AI
At Bay City News, we believe in a culture of experimentation and adaptation and aim to serve our readers and partners with journalism rooted in the principles of accuracy, transparency and audience trust. This means that we don’t shy away from the changing world around us; we embrace it, learn from it and adapt to it.
We intend to approach AI technology in the same way. This section includes examples of how we are testing these new tools so you can learn alongside us.
Click here to read our motivation for exploring AI and our newsroom policy about its use:
AI in the News
Check out the latest coverage around artificial intelligence tools, new legislation regarding its usage and more updates on the state of AI and technology. Find developments here about how tech companies, university researchers and entrepreneurs in the Bay Area are advancing the use of this technology.
Experiments with Artificial Intelligence
The experiments with AI found on this page serve as a showcase of the innovative work done by our Bay City Labs initiative- the developing entrepreneurial growth arm of our enterprise, which includes the BCN commercial wire and the BCN Foundation Nonprofit. Bay City Labs is a designated space for experimentation, shared learning, and exploration of new ways of producing and sharing content that serves our audience in ways beyond traditional news reporting.
The soft launch of Bay City Labs, started in 2024, has so far involved seven AI projects that were tested and published on our free site, LocalNewsMatters.org. The foundational document was an AI use policy that has been held up as an industry standard for local newsrooms. From there, we explored the use of AI for cartooning; photo enhancement; election data retrieval plus code creation to build scrapers and user-facing dashboards; agents for testing the conversion of structured data into news briefs; agent-led Internet scraping for calendar creation; conversion of original text into new formats like audio; and using prompts effectively so AI can serve as a proxy for news selection. Some of these experiments worked and are helping us build revenue-generating products and workflow efficiencies; some were not good enough to use outside of our sandbox space; all were published and accompanied by playbooks or narratives so others could learn from our work.
While we continue to test these ideas, AI technology is galloping ahead and threatening to undercut audience traffic, IP value and the very existence of many outlets who don’t have the standing, capacity or bargaining power of the big industry players in tech and media. We want to explore some solutions in this next phase of Bay City Labs. The takeaways will be shared publicly with the news ecosystem so others can also benefit and uplift the sustainability of the entire local media network that is facing this existential threat.
Bay Area Election Results: can AI help?
Newsrooms across the country have been facing a daunting task when it comes to election coverage. Local newsrooms struggle especially with limited resources. But what if AI chatbots and other digital tools allowed us to automate this work for the previews and election-night results? How might we put our limited reporting and editing resources to better use by cutting out the manual labor and instead have more time to make sense of the results to inform, empower and engage our audiences? That would be a game changer. We are setting out to try it.
Catch Me Up: An experiment in AI podcasting
Bay City News wanted to test a new workflow that could use AI tools like Gemini and ElevenLabs to convert the text version of our daily news stories into a new audio format. How far could we push the envelope without compromising quality and trust? The project, which spanned several months, was described and rolled out in our “Experiments with AI” section on LocalNewsMatters.org. Read about this experiment and our findings, and give a listen to the podcast!
November 2024 Election: Bay Area Ballots
This Nov. 5, 2024 election dashboard was developed by Ciara Zavala and a dedicated team of journalists and engineers. The data was scraped from official county websites and then coded using ChatGPT and Claude.ai. Every step was carefully reviewed by human editors. While we aim for accurate and timely results, this dashboard relies on government data and automated tools so please allow for slight delays or discrepancies as editors verify the information.
Bay City Sketchbook: Generative AI Cartooning
Read about cartoonist Joe Dworetzky’s experiments with using generative artificial intelligence programs in his editorial cartooning. He details his process as well as his thoughts about the use of AI in image and generation and cartooning specifically.
Using AI tools to enhance photo display
Read about how AI technology is already embedded in existing photo tools and how the latest developments in AI imagery will impact photojournalism now and in the future.
Musk v. Altman: Tech titans battle over the future of all humankind
The most important lawsuit in the history of the world was filed Thursday in the Superior Court of San Francisco County. At least that is how this report would begin were it written in the style of the lawsuit Elon Musk has brought against Sam Altman and OpenAI, Inc. the creators of ChatGPT. This series of articles explores that lawsuit and its possible ramifications for AI technology, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the future of all humankind.
Sharing with Peers and Readers
Bay City News was recently invited to present our AI approach at the Story Discovery at Scale conference at Stanford University, hosted by Big Local News and sponsored by the Knight Foundation. Chloe Lee Rowlands, our technology and data manager, gave this presentation on what we do:
Explore AI
Check out these tools, resources, and reflections on AI to learn how others are making use of this technology, as well as how you can use it!
Agenda Watch
This tool uses AI technology to help keep watch on local government by gathering meeting agendas and minutes from city councils, school boards and other local decision-making bodies from around the U.S. The tool identifies newsworthy items to help streamline reporting and offers alerts when potentially newsworthy items appear in new documents.