How The Hindu is using AI to help boost engagement

The Hindu has a strict policy to ensure that a human is in the loop for all published content, but are using AI to help fine-tune and develop content and services to appeal to specific audiences.

One example of this is personalising the way they produce some newsletters, Nagaraj Nagabushanam, The Hindu's Vice President, Data and Analytics, told participants at our AI Summit in Bengaluru last week.

Nagabushanam noted the newsroom produces several kinds of newsletters, from ones around alerts or breaking news, to digest-style ones built around specific topics to others that are curated by journalists or editors with topical expertise.

See also: How The Hindu increased audience engagement by 21% in 6 months

The Hindu's AI newsletter project doesn't pertain to ones curated by journalists, he said. "We're very clear that is something that an editor with all their experience and world views is going to curate for us."

However, AI can be useful for digest style newsletters that include links to a variety of stories. AI can produce a list of articles around a given topic, and then for each article provide a brief summary. "You could say it's something like a mini-digest," Nagabushanam said.

Creating segment-based newsletters

Another variation, which he said is the most recent one they have used, and which is also being used by The Hindu's subscriptions team, is where a newsletter is created with only one URL based on the kind of audience they want to target.

For example, he said, The Hindu had a special story around elections, and a newsletter was created around it to explain why the story was important, and why the recipient should read it.

"That is the content of the newsletter itself. The newsletter doesn't give away the story," Nagabushanam continued. "It only says 'Here is the story,' and 'This is why it is important for you,' and 'This is why you should click through and read this.' "

Likewise, The Hindu is working with ways to customise content for specific audiences.

For example, they have a business newspaper called the Business Line.

Nagabushanam noted they have a fair number of chartered accountants who are reading it, so if they wanted to, they could create a newsletter aimed only at that target audience.

"We have a model where we could ask chartered accountants to choose stories they liked, and we input it into a model. And then we have a story model that says out of the 800-900 odd stories we published in the last week, here are the 25 stories that are most attractive to chartered accountants," he said.

A related possibility is to create content based on a target group or segment.

"Segment-based means that you could write a story and then you can say 'How can I make this story more attractive to say chartered accountants?' The AI would make subtle changes to the text, but it would have references and possibly jargon that was very specific to the target audience," Nagabushanam said.

"You can do this for multiple personas, multiple segments," he added. "You can actually score every article for different segments and then have a cut-off score, cut off number and use that tool for sectors."

Integrating AI solutions into the workflow

During a panel discussion later at the event, The Hindu Group's CEO, L V Navaneeth, noted that for reader revenue, retention is important. "And a big part of retention is engagement. So we use AI in notification models. What kind of notifications should go to what kind of reader on the app to enhance engagement. We also use AI to inform propensity models, dynamic paywalls and pricing. Some of these work as piecemeal pieces of software, but I think it works very well when you integrate these pieces of AI into the workflow itself.

"For instance, one of the things we have tried to do on the content side is to integrate every solution into our CMS either inside or on the edge," Navaneeth said. "Similarly every AI solution to enhance reader revenue or advertising revenue we try to integrate with our subscription management system, which is the heart of it."

Brian Veseling

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