Sophi, an artificial intelligence tool developed in-house by The Globe’s data and digital science teams, takes home the top prize for Technical Innovation at the Online Journalism Awards
Canada’s national newspaper has a secret: The Globe and Mail’s digital properties are powered by an artificial intelligence engine called Sophi that autonomously curates 99 per cent of our content. The result has been a dramatic improvement in our business and a chance to free up our valuable journalists to undertake ambitious journalism.
Sophi understands how much a story contributes to subscriber retention, subscriber acquisition, registration potential and advertising dollars – looking beyond just page views, thus avoiding simply viral content.
Our Editor-in-Chief, David Walmsley, believes the newsroom of the future is one where journalists can focus on finding and telling great stories – something that the machine can’t do. As Sophi searches for new stories to show our audience and updates our site to reflect stories that deserve further promotion, it improves the experience for our readers and helps showcase our best and most valuable journalism. Using Sophi’s AI to curate our news stories — always with editorial oversight — means our journalists and editors can focus on the stories and investigations that our readers want.
On the advertising side of the business, Sean Stanleigh, head of Globe Content Studio, shares the ways in which the content marketing arm leverages Sophi: “We use intel gleaned from Sophi to learn about the type of content that is resonating near-, mid- and long-term, which not only helps inform our editorial work, but the topics and approaches we take to our content marketing efforts. In other words, we use newsroom storytelling, combined with its audience data, to help predict better outcomes for clients.”
To learn more about how The Globe and Mail’s proprietary technology is driving innovation in the application of data science in the publishing industry, visit Sophi.io.
