NZME, NZ Herald and our use of AI
NZME publishing’s AI editorial principles
Generative AI can provide journalists with powerful tools to support their work. The Herald and other NZME publications use AI to improve our journalism.
Adhering to ethical standards and journalistic principles must always be our highest priority, irrespective of whether AI tools are employed in article production or processing. As such, we remain committed to our Code of Ethics, to the integrity of our journalism and to ensuring we earn the trust of our audiences.
Key points:
AI technology: Our newsrooms are encouraged to use NZME-developed and/or approved AI technology as it evolves, in accordance with our trust, quality and ethical standards. This may include the use of tools for research purposes and editing copy, including generating headlines and summaries. AI may also be used to process publicly-available information such as press releases — all with appropriate human oversight.
Transparency: We will disclose if generative AI is used to write an entire article, or to produce graphics or illustrations. In the Herald and associated platforms/mastheads, this will be done by use of a line at the bottom of the article or caption: This story/illustration/graphic was produced using generative AI. BusinessDesk has its own attribution rules for AI content relating to NZX articles. We do not use AI-generated photos or videos to accompany news content.
Oversight: Use of AI technology must be overseen by editors and/or senior staff. Team leaders and production staff must be notified if AI has been used to help produce material. All work must be checked before being filed for further review. All work must adhere to our editorial principles.
Human expertise: While AI can play a valuable role, it cannot replace human empathy, expertise and judgment.
Here are the main ways we use AI tools:
AI editing
Our in-house developed editing tool helps ensure stories are free from grammatical and spelling errors and that they conform to NZ Herald editorial style for things like titles, currency and macrons.
The tool is available to all editorial staff and is comparable to an internal version of the popular AI tool Grammarly.
Journalists are also able to use it to generate headlines, summaries and categorisation tags for our publishing system.
It can also summarise full press releases into articles, under the direction of an editor or journalist. For example, a theatre group sends a press release to the editor of a community newspaper who then processes it for publication using our tool to summarise the text into a succinct news article, write a headline and add the tags and metadata our system needs before publication. The article is then carefully reviewed by the editor before being edited by another of our journalists.
AI recommendations
We have an award-winning content recommendation system that promotes stories to readers based on factors such as the types of stories previously read, the regional relevancy of the story and which stories we think may be of most interest to subscribers and free readers.
The system delivers some of the content on the homepage, however the top positions are manually curated by our editorial team, which guarantees that the most important stories of the day get the most prominent coverage.
Investigations
The ability of AI tools to quickly process large amounts of data, and then to highlight patterns, connections and interesting details, can help our journalists reveal things people don’t want you to know.
BusinessDesk NZX announcements
Our specialist business news website BusinessDesk uses a system we internally call Bidi to process basic NZX announcements into articles. Bidi allows us to re-write and publish an article within about 30 seconds.
Bidi processes what is effectively a statutory announcement. It does not add context or any other information to the article.
Our journalists still monitor NZX announcements and select the ones where we can add value to spend time on.
Images
We do not use AI to generate photo-realistic images or video to accompany news stories. We also attempt to weed out any AI-generated or enhanced stock images or video.
We may use AI illustrations or graphics. When we do this, we will acknowledge this in the image caption or credit.
In summary
NZME newsrooms will make use of AI technology as it develops and in accordance with our trust and quality standards. This may include the use of tools for research purposes and editing copy, including generating headlines and summaries. AI may also be used to process publicly-available information such as press releases. We disclose if generative AI is used to write an entire article or to produce illustrations or graphics. We do not use AI-generated photos or video. AI is also employed to deliver personalised article recommendations to digital readers. Use of AI technology is always overseen by humans. Our newsroom AI technology has been developed in-house making use of third-party tools and is ring-fenced to NZME.
* Updated on September 11, 2024