Not Just Another Newsbot: How VRT uses AI to grow its audience

News was ever a fast and feverish undertaking, a relentless, high-speed dash to outrun the clock, the competition, and audience inattention. 

It’s a business whose freneticism is born of a fundamental tension that all news practitioners have to live with. For gathering, processing and serving up news demands immense quantities of time, energy, and resources, yet it goes out of date faster than oysters.

The consequence is an eternal pressure on newsmakers to keep the stories flowing and find ways to make their blink-and-you-miss it product go further for longer.

Rolling, multiplatform news has jacked up this pressure because of the need to repurpose the product and deliver it to multiple platforms at once.

Today’s journalists have to be like those mystifying chess kids who take on 10 adults simultaneously and emphatically checkmate the lot of them.

Luckily, there’s hope for frazzled newsmakers everywhere, because artificial intelligence is galloping to their rescue, as a project by Belgian broadcaster VRT proves.