Journalism Center Awarded $1M Grant for New AI Tools

The Scripps Howard Foundation is giving $1 million each to the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland and Arizona State University to empower journalists with artificial intelligence tools. The three-year grants will allow the centers to build, test and pilot several AI applications to support local news.

UMD’s Howard Center in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, launched in 2019 and funded by the foundation, trains investigative reporters by producing major investigative projects in partnership with faculty and staff and news organizations across the U.S. With this new grant, Merrill College will develop a series of AI tools:

• The Beat Book will help local news organizations assess and improve coverage of their communities, using AI to scour a cooperating publication’s archives to identify how that publication has covered a particular beat in the past.
• The AI Reporter’s Tool Box, an idea developed by students at Merrill College, will use AI and machine learning technology to make reporters’ workflows — such as transcribing interviews, summarizing the key points and developing follow-up questions — more efficient and their reporting more accurate.
• AI Meeting Watchdog will monitor live-streaming video of government meetings and provide timely notifications of newsworthy events, story idea tips and summaries of key action.
• The Visibility for Local News Project aims to amplify local news in search engine results and on social media by examining AI algorithms to understand why news sites are underrepresented on these platforms. The insights from this project will be used in courses for Merrill undergraduate students, who will collaborate with Maryland local news organizations to help them improve digital visibility and track changes in audience.

“Our students and faculty will help local newsrooms implement tools that will transform journalism and journalism operations, while also reimagining journalism education,” said Merrill College Dean Rafael Lorente. “Like other revolutionary technologies, we can make choices about how we use AI. Our faculty and students have chosen to create and deploy tools that make journalism smarter and better. We are incredibly grateful to the Scripps Howard Foundation for making this work possible and for their continued support.”

The UMD Howard Center has won more than a dozen of the nation's most prestigious professional journalism awards, and been a finalist for several others, primarily for innovation and collaboration.

For one project, Howard Center students built temperature and humidity sensors to help understand what it was like to live in Baltimore’s hottest neighborhoods, and show the disparate effects of climate change. For another, they conducted a first-of-its-kind analysis of mobile-phone location data to prove the majority of customers at lottery retailers come from nearby neighborhoods and, using census data, that those neighborhoods are disproportionately home to Black, Hispanic and lower-income people. The Howard Center also used AI to create an unprecedented database of travel by U.S. House of Representatives members, finding and mining documents that had been removed from public view.

The center has collaborated on its investigations with a variety of professional and academic partners, including The Associated Press, NPR, “PBS NewsHour,” PBS’ “Frontline” and universities across the country.