Fox News hires Palantir to build AI newsroom tools
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Fox News Media has been working with Palantir for the past year to build a suite of custom AI newsroom tools alongside its journalists, Fox News Digital president and editor-in-chief Porter Berry told Axios.
Why it matters: The Palantir relationship is strictly commercial, granting broad access to Fox News Media's workflow to facilitate the AI transformation, without giving up its proprietary intellectual property.
- Fox News has also struck other enterprise software licensing deals with firms, like OpenAI.
- Unlike most newsroom AI deals, Fox News' agreements are structured to prevent its AI partners from training on or otherwise exploiting its content.
Of note: For many newsrooms, strictly commercial deals with AI companies are too expensive. Fox News, which is the most profitable arm of Fox Corp., can afford to pay for enterprise AI tools without giving up its IP.
How it works: About a year ago, Fox News hired Palantir to essentially "build a digital twin" of its business, mirroring the workflows, data, tools and systems the company uses to produce and publish its digital journalism, per Berry, who is also president of new media at Fox News.
- The companies then enhanced those processes by building new tools and processes, embedding Palantir engineers into the digital newsroom's daily workflow.
- They initially focused on addressing the repeatable, mundane tasks that AI could help journalists improve — "things like SEO keywords and tagging," Berry said.
- Now, the companies have progressed to building proprietary tools that help journalists discover, produce and distribute stories across Fox News' platforms and social media.
Zoom in: Fox News and Palantir have built three main tools to improve efficiency. The first, "topic radar," helps reporters quickly get up to speed on a particular story through a custom briefing.
- The second, "text editor," is a word processor-like tool that evaluates copy for style and efficiency, like checking for broken links and adherence to Fox News' style guide.
- The third, "article insights," analyzes the performance of Fox News digital articles to provide insights into how the stories could be optimized or improved.
- Like most newsrooms, Fox News won't use AI to generate editorial copy, Berry said. "This is a human end-to-end process and in the middle is AI."
Zoom out: While dozens of text-based newsrooms have struck licensing and training deals with AI firms, those with a large broadcast or video business have typically been more reluctant, mostly due to legal complications surrounding AI copyright and news video.
- For Fox, the Palantir deal represents a commercial exchange in which it can reap the benefits of working with a sophisticated tech firm to build AI tools without the headaches that come from licensing its IP.
- "It's a business arrangement," Berry said. "We hired them."
Between the lines: Berry said the company is also leveraging other AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
- Teams are expected to constantly experiment with the tools to find ways to optimize their workflows, per Berry. Now, many are starting to build custom GPTs to help their respective teams better mine stories and streamline processes.
