From Tim O’Rourke, vice president of content strategy for Hearst Newspapers (HNP):
The San Francisco Chronicle today launched the Kamala Harris News Assistant, an interactive tool that helps readers learn more about the Democratic presidential candidate through a chat interface powered by generative AI but underpinned by 29 years of Chronicle political reporting.
The tool is designed to answer your questions about the vice president’s life, her journey through public service and her presidential campaign. Drawing from thousands of articles written, edited and published by Chronicle journalists since 1995, the news assistant aims to give readers informed answers about a politician who rose from the East Bay and is now campaigning to become one of the world’s most powerful people.
“Harris was born in the Bay Area, her career was launched here and her campaign is a massive local story for us, one of great interest to our readers,” said Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, the Chronicle’s editor in chief. “The opportunity to build a new A.I. product to add another dimension to our coverage is extremely exciting.”
The project was a collaboration between the San Francisco Chronicle newsroom and the Hearst DevHub, Hearst Newspapers’ editorial engineering, visual storytelling and audience strategy team. Engineers spent months building guardrails within the system so readers could easily find facts about Harris without encountering misinformation.
The news assistant relies on stories written and edited by the Chronicle’s staff, though it doesn’t always have the most recent news in its database and some responses will reflect the time period when the originating articles were written. For details on our use of artificial intelligence, read our editorial guidelines.
“We took care in developing this tool to ensure that every answer is grounded in the information our journalists have reported over the years,” said Ryan Serpico, the DevHub’s deputy director of newsroom AI and automation. “We strove to avoid common pitfalls by adding a healthy amount of restrictions to the tool's underlying code.”
The team focused on Harris because of the Chronicle’s decades of coverage and deep archive on the candidate from her time in the East Bay and spanning roles as San Francisco district attorney, state attorney general, U.S. senator, and vice president. The team didn’t pursue a similar tool for former President Trump because the newsroom can’t offer the same level of expertise or coverage depth for the Republican candidate.
Hearst’s DevHub works with local teams such as the San Francisco Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News, Houston Chronicle, (Albany) Times Union and groups of newsrooms across Connecticut, Illinois, Texas and Michigan. The team is focused on local news, and its journalists build major projects such as election live results sites, tools such as the the Texas Heat Tracker and California Fire Tracker, data-driven analyses that help readers understand their communities, and a collection of self-service templates that allow journalists to publish interactive stories without having to rely on engineering support.
The news assistant project is the latest in a years-long history of collaboration between the Chronicle and the Hearst DevHub, a team founded in the San Francisco newsroom.
“Our goal with this project was to harness the power of generative AI to give readers access to the Chronicle's deep archive of reporting on Kamala Harris,” said Brittany Schell, the DevHub’s director of newsroom projects and operations. “We are pioneering new ways to deliver news, combining cutting-edge technology with top-quality journalism.”
This is the direct link to the site: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2024/kamala-harris-election-questions/
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