Driving sustainable AI use in news-academic partnerships

The JournalismAI Innovation Challenge, supported by the Google News Initiative, announced The Oglethorpe Echo as a grantee in its 2024 cohort to partner with YESEO, a tool I built during my 2022 RJI Fellowship.

The Echo proposed a project to provide “tangible pathways for AI integration and local journalism sustainability for our news-academic partnership in rural Georgia (USA) and other local newsrooms by partnering with YESEO, a well-loved AI and Google Trends-powered product, so The Oglethorpe Echo’s reporters can gain effective and ethical workflow efficiencies to allow them to better serve their community.”

The JournalismAI Innovation Challenge awarded 35 winners out of the 712 grant applications they received. The Echo is one of only five grants given to organizations in the United States and one of nine selected in the category of “Identifying ways to grow subscriptions and support diverse forms of revenue.”

The Oglethorpe Echo was founded in 1874 to serve Oglethorpe County. In 2021, when the owners planned to close the newspaper — which would have created a rural news desert — a University of Georgia alum, Dink NeSmith, turned it into a nonprofit, and UGA journalism students became its newsroom staff. The Echo has been running as a news-academic partnership ever since.

“The Echo is a learning lab for our journalism students, and in the past three years, it’s provided endless opportunities for students to grow as reporters, editors and producers for local news,” Amanda Bright, assistant editor and instructor for The Oglethorpe Echo, says. “However, this opportunity to work with a YESEO expansion will allow students to now only have a front-row seat to product development — it will also help local newsrooms and news-academic partnerships to think beyond surviving and toward innovations that help them thrive.”

I built the YESEO app, a free Slack-based SEO tool, when I was a Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow in 2022. Today YESEO has been installed in over 500 workspaces and was a finalist for the 2024 Online Journalism Awards in the new category of Excellence in AI Innovation. 

Dr. Bright is one of the sharpest people I’ve ever been fortunate enough to talk to in my time as a Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow and beyond. I am motivated to empower newsrooms by building practical innovation that solves workflow inefficiencies and allows them to extend their reach and engagement. I am excited to put my energy towards supporting The Oglethorpe Echo and with the students in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.

Academic partnerships are important to the original values of YESEO. Over the last year I have taught students to use YESEO in programs at Northwestern University, the University of Southern California, the University of Missouri as well as Syracuse University to help introduce this innovative tool to young journalists across the country. 

YESEO is about helping journalists deliver vital information better to serve their communities. I believe we will be able to unlock additional opportunities that will help move journalism forward through this exciting partnership with the Echo. 

Over the course of the nine-month program we will look to work with students at the University of Georgia to find ways to optimize their workflow as they learn the basics of reporting their beats. We will seek to share what we find with the broader community and look to provide students with hands-on experience in innovating the future of journalism. The goal will be that solutions created over the course of this program can be extended to other news-academic partnerships as well as industry wide.

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Cite this article

Restivo, Ryan (2024, Dec. 10). YESEO partners with The Oglethorpe Echo on JournalismAI Innovation Challenge. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/yeseo-partners-with-the-oglethorpe-echo-on-journalismai-innovation-challenge/