Breaking big news to broadcast and digital viewers first is what newsrooms everywhere strive for. It can come with major wins, but especially increased engagement.

A part of that is through social media, and in today’s climate, newsrooms must plan and generate multiple social media posts to different platforms.

TVNewsCheck recently gave a nod to Graham Media Group’s Social News Desk as a smarter way of managing social media, allowing integrated and streamlined solutions that reduce “tool fatigue.”

The website credited SND’s automation as one of those tools that reduces fatigue and repetition.

“We’ve seen newsrooms go from 100% manual publishing to pushing the boundaries of automation and doing as much automation as possible, and then starting to pull back from that,” said Kim Wilson, the founder of Social News Desk. “They’re saying, ‘We’re journalists and subject matter experts. We don’t want to turn everything over to a place where journalism isn’t part of the decision-making process.’”

In order to provide newsrooms looking for some assistance with decision making, yet still give journalists some control, SND developed a hybrid automation.

It “blends artificial intelligence with good old-fashioned journalism,” Wilson told TVNewsCheck.

The result? A tool that allows a blend of data science and artificial intelligence to find content that’s overperforming on a website, social media or within a media group. SND makes a suggestion through the dashboard and the journalist can decide how to move forward.

“It takes some of the manual work out of it to make the most out of some of the content they’re creating,” Wilson says.

SND’s hybrid automation is currently in the beta phase, but it is expected to release widely in the first quarter of 2021.