From NiemanLab, June 5:
Let’s get to the point: Three newsrooms on generating AI summaries for news
“Summaries aren’t a replacement for journalism: they can’t exist without it.” The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Yahoo News on what they’ve learned rolling out AI-powered summaries.
Takeaways. Summaries. Key points. Whatever you call them, bullet point lists summarizing articles are popping up on more and more news sites.
The technology powering these summaries is evolving even as newsrooms find themselves pushed to adopt and adapt. The results have not always been perfect or, uh, bulletproof. But three news organizations out in front on this technology and reliably generating reader-friendly summaries are The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Yahoo News.
I had seen some rumors that this kind of “key point” can help surface the articles in Google and other search engines. Wall Street Journal director of newsroom SEO Ed Hyatt said that there was likely some truth to that.
“We don’t have strong evidence to suggest that the Key Points help with search indexing, but certainly it can help,” Hyatt said. “It’s generally optimized text at the top of the story which is great for both readers and Googlebot to get a quick understanding of what the content is about.”
Primarily, though, news organizations that have rolled out AI-powered summaries see the feature as a service for busy readers. The key takeaway? These newsrooms are seeing enough interest to keep experimenting....
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Unfortunately our lazy-ass A.I. seems to think TL;dr is a summary.
