‎USA TODAY: US & Breaking News on the App Store

Today, USA Today Network published an op-ed by Governor Kathy Hochul on the importance of Red Flag laws to prevent gun violence in the wake of the tragic shootings in Nashville and Louisville. Text of the op-ed is available below and can be viewed online here. At the same time, the USA Today Network won’t be trying to copy television news when it tries to make stories for the web. They’re different mediums with different opportunities and different expectations from viewers, Lipman said. On average, the company produces 4,000 videos across its owned and operated channels each month. Last year, it garnered 866 million video views across the network, and it’s projecting a 38 percent increase this year.

A key factor of the Localizer project has been our strategy to use Natural Language Generation tools to deliver targeted content to readers and grow subscriptions. Our participation in the NYC Media Lab’s AI & Local News Challenge offered a chance for us to deepen our efforts around automating real estate trend reporting. These “Snapshots” graphs employ icons roughly pertaining to the graph’s subject (using the example above, the graph’s bars could be made up of several TV sets, or ended by one). Snapshots are loosely based on research by a national institute (with the credited source in fine print below the graph). Working with the agency Diffusion, USA Today Network recognized (through research) that 80 percent of Americans get their news via a mobile device through push notifications, leading to the decision that the campaign had to be ahead of the technology curve. Diffusion and USA Today Network applied these principles in pursuit of three distinct goals, then executed by using national media-intensive events like the presidential inauguration, the Super Bowl, Women’s Month and the total solar eclipse.

Inspiring America: James Webb telescope team

We’re not using automated story generation to create most of the content. We analyze and tweak the stories after each project cycle to ensure continued relevance for ongoing projects. There are different degrees of News Automation, ranging from assistive to fully automatic. At Gannett, our Localizer stories  receive an  editor review before publishing. This is important to us to ensure quality and that we uphold our journalistic standards. We start off with structured data, the kind of stuff you’d maybe see in an Excel spreadsheet.

USA Today Network in 2016 started categorizing its content by topic and tone, and scoring it based on the emotions it’s believed to most evoke. Last year, it started to sell advertising based on that knowledge with a product called Lens Targeting. Kelly Andresen, svp and head of Get Creative, USA Today Network’s content studio, said the publisher is trying to show a link between the emotions a story is likely to evoke and ad performance. An ad campaign for a nonprofit that was targeted to people reading inspirational stories resulted in a 25 percent higher donation rate than ads that weren’t targeted, she said. The restructuring enabled journalists working at the local level to share resources and stories and deliver content in exciting new ways (such as virtual reality). Letting key stakeholders know about the network’s capabilities was a challenge, given the crowded marketplace and the perception that nobody reads newspapers anymore.

In the News

The team is a mix of experienced journalists and product partners with backgrounds including data reporting, software development, product management, audience development and content strategy. The current cross-divisional effort is comprised of and draws on experience from previous automation efforts at GateHouse Media and Gannett prior to the companies’ merger. Gannett newspapers have been around a long time, but most people are aware only of the publisher’s flagship property, USA Today. To maximize its brand, Gannett restructured its broadcasting and publishing businesses under the new USA Today Network, made up of 109 local newspapers (including the Detroit Free Press and the Indianapolis Star). The effort has taken first place in the “Brand Messaging or Positioning” category of PR Daily’s 2018 Media Relations Awards. The New York Times rolled out a tool earlier this year called Project Feels that lets advertisers target ads to content based on emotional responses the content is predicted to have.

Hitting people with a message when they’re likely to be receptive is as old as advertising, but using artificial intelligence to target people based on their mood is another level of manipulation. Publishers and agencies say they draw the line at using personally identifiable data or data without saying what it’s being collected for. “This is really about focusing on finding better-qualified audiences, but this is not at a point where we can manipulate mood through content,” Andresen said. ESPN’s Somaya said it won’t use information it thinks people don’t feel should be publicly revealed, keeping in mind its family-focused Disney audience, which means everything from health to political preferences to sexual orientation. That data isn’t as commercially valuable as information they willingly provide (like sports interests) anyway, he added.

MSNBC Daily

One key to increasing video throughout USA Today properties will be making traditional print reporters more comfortable with the medium, Torres said. He called the cultural clashes between text-minded journalists and their video-focused colleagues “the elephant in the room,” an obstacle that has to be surmounted for the company to be successful. The USA Today Network (neé Gannett) has made moves in recent months to turn its sprawling empire of more than 100 local media organizations into a single, cohesive whole — and video is a central part of that strategy. When USA Today was introduced nearly 40 years ago, its short articles, copious charts and detailed weather coverage were disdained by the staid newspaper industry, which nonetheless quickly found itself copying many of the upstart’s novel features.

On October 4, 1999, USA Today began running advertisements on its front page for the first time.[14] In 2017, some pages of USA Today’s website features Auto-Play functionality for video or audio-aided stories. We’d be particularly skeptical about news content — are we going to guess that because someone’s in Alabama they’re angry about something versus someone in New York? The biggest challenge is proving mood-based targeting works and at scale.

Degrees & Programs

We transform that data and turn the text and numbers into stories, much like the Mad Libs you may have done as a kid. Looking for additional details on our company and events or just want to say hello? Contact us using the form below and someone on our team will respond as soon as possible.

• Some examples of its divergence from tradition include using the left-hand quarter of each section as “reefers” (front-page paragraphs referring to stories on inside pages[50]), sometimes using sentence-length blurbs to describe stories inside.
• That could mean showing ads for travel or other celebratory experiences to people whose team is on a winning streak — or not advertising to them at all if their team is losing.
• More than that, it’s an engine for delivering repeatable and sustainable journalism by telling stories like we couldn’t before.
• DENVER — Don’t expect the country’s biggest newspaper publisher to ignore the tectonic shift toward video.
• Lately, media companies, including The New York Times, ESPN and USA Today, have rolled out ad products that they say can match ads to people in certain moods.
• We transform that data and turn the text and numbers into stories, much like the Mad Libs you may have done as a kid.
• They’re different mediums with different opportunities and different expectations from viewers, Lipman said.

Advertising is often covered in the Monday Money section, with a review of a recent television ad, and after Super Bowl Sunday, a review of the ads aired during the broadcast with the results of the Ad Track live survey. As readers have flocked to smartphones, laptops and tablets, causing print readership and the overall value https://turbo-tax.org/ of advertising to decline, newspapers’ most important revenue stream increasingly consists of charging digital readers. The News Automation Team has been at the forefront of pilot concepts through our Localizer Project, producing hyperlocal articles for COVID-19 case and vaccination trackers, hurricane coverage, a U.S.

AI & Local News Challenge, Gannett/USA TODAY Network’s Localizer news automation program

The series distributed by the NPR Network is available wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. ‘The Last Ride’ follows the story of two young men of color who went missing in Naples, Florida, nearly two decades https://turbo-tax.org/a-message-from-usa-today-network/ ago. Felipe Santos and Terrance Williams vanished three months apart, on the same road. They were last seen with the same, now-fired sheriff’s deputy, who said he gave them each a ride to a Circle K convenience store.

• These “Snapshots” graphs employ icons roughly pertaining to the graph’s subject (using the example above, the graph’s bars could be made up of several TV sets, or ended by one).
• Chris Davis, an investigative editor formerly of the Tampa Bay Times who’s shepherded Pulitzer Prize-winning projects to completion, joined this summer to coordinate deep dives across the country.
• ESPN has been pitching a tool to target sports fans on its digital properties based on their changing emotional state during a game.
• This is a good start; but states need to step up in the absence of a national Red Flag law.
• There are different degrees of News Automation, ranging from assistive to fully automatic.
• We have journalists committed to building a sustainable future for local journalism.