The Wall Street Journal published in late September its first story using Doppler News AI, a custom tool built to help expand the publication’s midterms coverage, reports Andrew Deck of Nieman Lab.
Deck reports, “So far, Doppler has ingested more than 25 million TikTok videos, roughly 500,000 podcast episodes, and thousands of Instagram videos and cable news segments. The Journal uses the tool to monitor trends across the internet and to identify voter priorities, concerns, and sentiments that traditional polling might miss.
“‘We’re not trying to predict the election, but people encounter politics through a lot of different lanes: culture, work, money, family, community. We wanted to tap into that and listen in on those conversations,’ said Aja Whitaker-Moore, the deputy editor-in-chief of the Journal. ‘We’re taking a massive set of information…and telling you, from a statistical standpoint: ‘Here’s what people are talking about. Here are the questions they’re asking. Here are the places where those conversations are happening.”
“Other newsrooms have leaned on AI “visibility tools” in the past to support their reporting. That includes using large language models (LLMs) to transcribe and summarize “manosphere” podcasts, school board meetings, and local talk radio shows. But Doppler goes further.
“Rather than using AI-generated summaries to generate leads or help beat reporters monitor online content more efficiently, the Journal uses Doppler to conduct large-scale AI analyses quickly — and publishes those insights for readers.”
Read more here.
