ONA has announced the finalists in the 2024 Online Journalism Awards, and we’re excited to share more about the impressive work in the newest award category: Excellence in AI Innovation.
This award honors an individual or organization that has implemented generative artificial intelligence tools to improve newsroom productivity, accessibility, the news gathering process and engagement with audiences. Judges evaluated submissions on the extent to which the use of AI served an identified need, the quality and creativity in the implementation and the considerations for human agency in the design.
Judges selected three finalists from 19 entries:
They Call Us Meat, BBC
This open-source investigation looked into the story of Russia’s 155th Marine Brigade—the “Black Berets”—and their assault on Vuhledar, Ukraine. The BBC team analyzed publicly available materials, including over 300 videos and hundreds of Telegram group messages, to reveal that the unit suffered significant losses due to tactical mistakes and a lack of critical equipment. They developed facial recognition tools to search track soldiers between videos and images and used ChatGPT to sift through high volumes of social media comments and identify leads for further analysis.
We Asked AI to Map Our Stories. Here are the Results, THE CITY
The big task of a website migration prompted THE CITY to experiment with mapping thousands of past stories in order to understand how well the outlet’s coverage represents New York City’s diverse neighborhoods. Chief Product Officer Scott Klein and AI and Data Fellow Tazbia Fatima had the idea to use ChatGPT to scan stories and identify a location for each one. In all, the process successfully pinned a specific place for 2,750 out of 4,159 stories in THE CITY’s archive, which wouldn’t have been possible with more traditional tools that can only recognize a location—such as a borough or city landmark—if it’s explicitly mentioned.
YESEO
Ryan Restivo created YESEO, a free Slack app, during his fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. YESEO uses generative AI to help journalists improve headlines and can process stories in a dozen languages, including Spanish, German and Japanese. Since its launch, the app has been installed in more than 400 workspaces and helped with over 8,800 stories.
Winners in the Excellence in AI Innovation category will be announced Friday, Sept. 20, at the Online Journalism Awards Ceremony & Luncheon, happening in Atlanta during the 2024 Online News Association Conference (ONA24).
See all finalists in the 2024 Online Journalism Awards
Explore more AI innovation with ONA
ONA’s AI in Journalism Initiative offers essential resources to understand and make the most of AI’s potential to serve news audiences and support sustainability in the industry. Over 1,600 people have signed up for our practical training series on AI uses for election reporting, data analysis, audio, grant writing and more. Plus, more than 200 ONA members have connected through the AI Innovator Collaborative, a monthly meetup for people implementing AI in their newsrooms to share ideas, get feedback and learn from each other.
Thanks to generous support from Microsoft, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and Joyce Foundation, we continue to add more resources to support community members who are just getting started AI as well as those focused on deepening their knowledge. Get involved to build your AI skills and find inspiration to improve your work.