Xinhua teases AI-enhanced newsroom and “Media Brain” platform

Editor’s note: This originally appeared on Radii, a new media platform covering culture, innovation, and life in today’s China.

New China TV — the English offshoot of Chinese state news agency Xinhua that had a hand in that wacky expat propaganda rap a while back —  has just released a new one-minute video about its parent company’s latest technological gambit. According to the video (and this accompanying post), Xinhua president Cai Mingzhao announced Tuesday the company’s near-term plans to increase their use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. Cai is quoted as saying that Xinhua plans to build a “new kind of newsroom based on information technology and featuring human-machine collaboration.”

This announcement — made in the context of “a work conference that maps out Xinhua’s key tasks for 2018” — comes after the December 26 unveiling of Xinhua’s “Media Brain” platform, which aims to apply pretty much every current tech buzzword (AI, Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing) to every step of news production (lead generation, aggregation, editing, distribution).

Watch the short video here: