A B2B SAAS company, HeyWire AI, is in the process of developing an AI news engine that could free up journalists to focus on original reporting. HeyWire AI founder and CEO Von Raees said the product is called Wells in honor of 19th century journalist Ida B. Wells.
Raees said that Wells will be able to automate aggregation, freeing up journalists to focus on more original stories.
Raees founded a publishing company in 1996 and that is where he noticed that aggregation was a drag on resources.
“Our journalists are spending a lot of time on the internet, looking for leads, researching stories, and then writing their own versions of that,” Raees said. “That takes away from them being out in the field doing like, true journalism, like original content, investigative work that’s out there in the world – not so much on the internet.”
“The purpose of Wells is to do the mundane work of research, finding leads, researching various stories, and generating articles from those stories, submitting that to editors for publishing,” Raees said. “If we allow Wells to take care of that, then journalists can actually be in the field, doing what they’re passionate about doing.”
Wells is still in development, but Raees hopes to launch it sometime in mid-2024. Raees said HeyWire AI has spoken with multiple national and local publishers about beta testing the engine.
“We’re going to spend some substantial amount of time and volume testing, testing, testing, trying to break it, see what we come up with, and make all of those changes and corrections, before we ever launch a product for general market,” Raees said.
The development of Wells comes at a time when smaller digital outlets continue to struggle competing with legacy media. AI tools like Wells can automate tasks like aggregation, freeing up resources to focus on better reporting.
An AP-NORC poll from early 2023 shows 57% of respondents found deeper reporting to be “very helpful” in trying to understand current events.
“Our intention is to sort of democratize the use of journalism tools, and empower small to medium size news organizations, and to enable small organizations like ourselves to, like our own publishing company, to be able to compete with the larger organizations on scales that they currently are not available to compete,” Raees said.
Wells is just one example of artificial intelligence tools that are entering newsrooms nationwide. Ultimately, it’s up to each newsroom to decide how comfortable they are with AI and how they will use it. The Radio Television Digital News Association has issued guidance encouraging newsrooms to consider these issues as AI inevitably enters the industry.
