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Renki: an AI tool transforms journalists' daily work

The Renki AI tool helps journalists work more efficiently, concentrate on high-value tasks, and gives the publisher, Viestimedia, an edge as it competes with bigger players in the field.

Viestimedia started its AI journey with the creation of the AI tool Renki, which helps its employees in broader media work. The tool has achieved widespread usage, with approximately two-thirds of journalists utilizing it daily. Renki has allowed Viestimedia's editorial teams to have significant time savings, leading to a roughly 20% improvement in annual operational efficiency.

Viestimedia is the leading media company in Finland's agriculture, forest industries, and related sectors. It publishes the newspaper Maaseudun Tulevaisuus and two subscription magazines, Koneviesti and Aarre. Despite a relatively small staff, Maaseudun Tulevaisuus is Finland's second most-read daily newspaper, reaching 550,000 people weekly across print and digital platforms. Online, Viestimedia's websites, mt.fi and koneviesti.fi, attract a combined total of over 600,000 visitors each week.

Vision: An AI tool that helps journalists work more efficiently and accurately, offers support for time-consuming daily tasks, leverages data more effectively, and improves audience engagement by breaking down organizational silos.

Viestimedia aimed to update its operational model and integrate AI tools efficiently with a minimal budget. The goal was to compete effectively with the industry's major players using AI solutions despite having significantly fewer resources.

Challenge: improving labor-intensive and time-consuming internal processes and leveraging data using AI — without compromising journalistic integrity or the readers’ trust.

The journalists’ daily work includes time-consuming tasks like transcribing interviews, writing and editing articles, and, in the final stage, proofreading them before publishing. Additionally, journalists in different outlets spent a lot of time searching for pictures to be featured in their articles and further reading ("Suggested articles") related to the material they planned to publish. Another cumbersome task that needed resolution was including video and audio files in articles without involving the photo department each time. Furthermore, many news outlets, including Viestimedia, struggled to find the most efficient way to distribute their articles to the public via social media. For a long time, the people who wrote the articles — who knew the subject best — and the digital news team worked separately, which could lead to discrepancies between the article content and the social media captions.

We don't have a ten-person data team – due to resource constraints, we bypassed the proof-of-concept phase and jumped directly into the tool development phase. From the get-go, our goal has been to create a solution that benefits as many of our employees.
Viestimedia project team

The project kicked off exceptionally without a proof-of-concept phase, moving directly into tool development. The idea was to create a solution deeply integrated into journalists' and other media staff's everyday operations rather than "a nice-to-have” AI tool. A fundamental premise was journalistic ethics and principles; the company didn't want the tool to start producing long text segments and doing the work on behalf of the journalists. Readers need to trust that the journalists are accountable and responsible for the text, sources, and data used in the articles. The tool's very name, Renki, implies it is a helper and that a human is always needed to finish the work.

We started by integrating an existing proofreading system directly into Renki. We then expanded Renki to utilize OpenAI's LLMs, feeding it as much context as possible from the article content and offering journalists prompts such as 'create social media copy,' 'create a headline,' and 'create lead-in text.' Creating an eye-catching, informative, and accurate headline wasn't enough. We wanted to forecast how well the article's headline would perform. To achieve this, we accessed Viestimedia's database, analyzing a year's worth of data that included 45,916 different headlines and the corresponding readership numbers. From this, we developed an algorithm that predicts the potential performance of a headline. Based on this, journalists can decide how they want to revise the headline.

"Renki takes care of the boring stuff, letting journalists focus on what really matters in their daily job." –Futurice project team

The goal is that Renki helps 80% of the way, and the journalists must always do the remaining 20%. Nothing generated by AI goes directly to the reader without consideration, but it helps to think about alternative ways to write some texts.

We also created a feature to search for images to accompany articles. The company maintains a large database of over 700,000 images, half lacking proper descriptions. Among those with descriptions, many were poorly written, particularly from a search perspective. For example, a description might read 'horse race ,' yet the image shows someone eating a sausage at the event. We resolved this issue using OpenAI's Vision model. Now, Renki aids in finding better pictures and even informs journalists if the media company's articles have previously used an image.

Data approaches used:

  • Large Language Models (LLM)
  • Chat
  • Image recognition using multimodal LLM
  • Speech recognition
  • Supervised learning
  • Vector embeddings
  • kNN search
  • Regression analysis
  • Database queries
  • Collaborative filtering

RESULTS: Renki’s rapid integration produces significant time savings, reduces errors, improves the overall quality of articles, and increases audience engagement on social media

We aimed to introduce AI to journalists as easily as possible. Initially, the adoption seemed challenging; only a handful had prior experience with any AI technology, with roughly 2% of the staff showing interest in new technology. However, Renki's impact became undeniable, changing the core work of media — how journalists at Viestimedia created, edited, and reviewed their work.

Renki was quickly integrated into daily operations, with approximately two-thirds of journalists utilizing it daily. The high acceptance rate reflects its effectiveness in improving how teams work. The tool allows journalists to work faster and more efficiently, whether generating ideas, selecting the best images, editing titles, or proofreading content. It has reduced the number of errors and improved the overall quality of articles. Additionally, the improved process for drafting social media posts has enabled journalists to collaborate more effectively with digital news team, leading to better audience engagement. Moreover, with the introduction of Renki, journalists can now independently add audiovisual content, eliminating the need for extra support.

Renki also offers information about how published articles fare regarding audience engagement and easier access to Google Analytics and other data, including trends like search queries and popular articles 12 months ago. The solution also provides reliable data on the amount of articles published behind the paywall and recommendations on whether or not to place articles there.

Overall, the introduction of Renki has allowed Viestimedia's editorial team to increase time saved, leading to a roughly 20% improvement in annual operational efficiency. The realized time savings are produced by:

  • Automatic transcription of interviews across the whole organization.
  • Less time spent per week on proofreading.
  • AI-assisted searching for related content.
  • Quicker drafting of social media posts.
  • AI support in generating new content ideas.

Grandone details:

  • Work (Työ): Renki AI
  • Client (Asiakas: Viestimedia
  • Design (Suunnittelu): Futurice
  • Production (Tuotanto): Futurice
  • Categories (Kategoriat):Best use of AI or other new technology & Best use of data (Paras AI:n tai muun uuden teknologian käyttö & Paras datan käyttö).