At Stuff Digital, the largest news publisher in New Zealand, the editorial and product teams are building and shipping user-facing tools in days because the newsroom has been reshaped around ways to be “incredibly nimble, particularly around the use of technology,” Editor-in-Chief Keith Lynch told the master class.

This includes building a “liquid content CMS, where we can deal with commodity news and breaking news really, really fast so we can free up our journalists to do more valuable work,” Lynch said. “What this has looked like is a small handful of leaders, three from our product team, two from editorial, and a score of agents which have been building processes for us in the background, which we can test and run at scale.”

The team created an AI pipeline that reads public documents, such as police press releases, lottery press releases, court decisions, and coroners’ inquests, and drafts news articles. 

“There are thousands of public decisions that we just can’t get to every single day. There are stories being published all the time that are really interesting,” Lynch pointed out.

For example, nine different agents work on a police press release, auditing the source, checking it for newsworthiness, verifying the facts, drafting a story and reviewing it, before handing it off to a human editor. The first stage of this is text-based, with video coming up next, Lynch said.

Stuff had a messy video workflow — one for its television product and one for the rest of the newsroom. The team is working on overhauling that to remove unnecessary and challenging steps so all video can be produced in one spot, he said.

Journalists can upload their raw assets and work with the tool to generate a video and then publish it to the site directly. 

“If we’re able to democratise video and make it very easy for all of our journalists to produce video, it means our TV bulletin can be produced a lot differently. It can be assembled by what the newsroom produces on a day-to-day basis. We don’t have to necessarily commission a range of stories just for a television product. It means far less duplication and a menu of video content that can be used at a common platform for much more,” he said. 

So far, Stuff has focused on video, live blogging, and building community participation with its audience. Going forward, the team is thinking about how to build communities around its reporters to ensure there is a strong, direct relationship between journalists and readers. 

The news brand is “challenging our journalists to think about themselves a little bit differently, ” he said. “We have a really high-calibre team of really excellent investigative reporters. Some of them are very naturally able to connect with their audience and do it in their storytelling, and they foster a following or a fandom … so they just want to come back to Stuff when every one of these journalists produces a story, hosts an event, or publishes a piece of content.”

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Banner photo: Adobe stock image by DBFilms.

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