Join us for this under-the-hood session with the team behind iTromsø’s Djinn, an AI-powered tool designed to streamline research and news gathering. Djinn uses custom-built scrapers and APIs to gather data from municipal archives, collecting over 12,000 PDF documents monthly, then ranks documents based on relevance and generates auto-summaries as well as extracts key information, enabling journalists to make informed decisions about which documents to investigate further. Djinn’s AI algorithms detect patterns and trends within the data, recommending potential issues and stories for journalists to pursue, and allows journalists to create custom searches to follow key issues. The tool has drastically cut down the time journalists spend reviewing potential stories and has helped enhance the quality of news stories.
We featured iTromsø’s work on Djinn in our AI in the Newsroom email newsletter series. Sign up for more newsroom AI case studies to be delivered straight to your inbox through October 2024.
Speakers:
Lars Adrian Giske is the Head of AI at the local Norwegian 
newspaper iTromsø. He led the Djinn project – where iTromsø, IBM, and the IBM-partner Visito built a groundbreaking AI solution for sourcing possible news stories in large amounts of public data. The project started in April 2023. Today the solution is used by 35 papers across Norway and covers over 130 municipalities.
Giske has a background in philosophy, and a keen interest in the intersections where science, technology and ideas meet. After more than ten years as a journalist and editor, he is well-versed in investigative and data-driven journalism.
Rune Ytreberg has worked with data-driven journalism for 30 years, first at the investigative 
newsroom in the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) and then at the daily business newspaper Dagens Næringsliv.
Since 2020 he has headed iTromsø’s data journalism lab, which uses AI to develop new editorial tools for 70 local newspapers in the Polaris Media Group in Norway. He has a master degree in business journalism and has received several awards for investigative data journalism and product development.
Ytreberg has significant experience in product development in journalism and teaches AI-supported and data-driven investigative journalism at several universities. This year, he is one of 25 media leaders participating in the global AI Journalism Lab at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
Registration
Anyone is welcome to attend. Tickets are free.
Where will the meetup take place?
This event will be hosted on Zoom. For this particular event, you’ll have the best experience if you join via the Zoom app on a desktop or laptop computer so that you can see the presentation on a larger screen. You can also join using the mobile app, although the presentation may be harder to view.
Can I dial in by phone?
We recommend joining from your computer, tablet or phone using the Zoom app. You won’t be able to access the presentation slides, chat and exercises if you’re dialed in via phone only. If you’re unfamiliar with Zoom, we’ll have staff on hand to troubleshoot, and we also suggest checking out the Zoom support site for more help.
Will this event be recorded?
The event will be recorded and made available to registrants at the end of the session.
Will closed captioning be available?
Yes, we will enable Zoom’s closed captioning tool, which now supports closed captioning in both the main room and breakout rooms.
Funding for ONA’s AI in Journalism Initiative is generously provided by Microsoft, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and The Joyce Foundation. To learn more about supporting ONA’s AI programming, contact Hanaa Rifaey, Head of Strategic Partnerships, at hanaa@journalists.org.
