Nota is building specifically for news publishers to provide the latest breakthroughs to your team.
Local news organizations are one of the pillars of American democracy. They keep people informed about what’s going on in their own communities and they hold government accountable. But as of this writing, local newsrooms are threatened.
According to a study from the National Trust for Local News, 53% of small outlets are convinced they’ll fold in five years if something or someone doesn’t intervene. But one intervention is already here: assistive AI for journalists.
Nota is building AI-enabled technology to help all local media. Nota uses AI and large language models (LLMs) to handle meta-data, SEO optimization and all the back-end work so journalists can focus on what they do best: actually reporting the news. By creating efficient capabilities for journalists to focus on sharing the news, Nota believes it can pave a brighter future for not just journalism, but American democracy at large. Now collaborating with the Local Media Association (LMA) and Microsoft to do it, this partnership is an opportunity to generate valuable feedback that can help Nota improve their current tools and build new ones to meet the needs of journalists and newsrooms most at risk of being left behind.
With the biggest and best innovations in AI and machine learning, Nota is tailor-making tools for publishers that are specifically designed to help journalists. AI is transforming every industry, and Nota is working to ensure that transformation is bold and bright for local media.
Embracing AI to Benefit the Future of Journalism
As the former CMO at the LA Times, Nota CEO Josh Brandau saw the challenges facing newsrooms firsthand. He witnessed the production hassles, the SEO scrum and all the small-but-necessary details of publishing that took time away from the most essential job of newsrooms: reporting. Brandau founded Nota to remove those obstacles.
Currently, Nota has five beta tools: SUM, VID, BRIEF, SOCIAL and IMAGE. These products are assistive, not generative. They’re taking complete articles written by journalists and building new things from them, not taking the place of reporting and writing. SUM, as its name suggests, is a summary tool. Journalists can pop their article directly in the Nota tool suite or use within their existing CMS, and the AI will read it, analyze it and generate suggested headlines, SEO tags, key points and pull quotes. VID uses an article written by a journalist and converts it into a short branded video, one that pulls images from your own content library or taps AI to create new ones. Similar to SUM, BRIEF’s use-case is in its name. BRIEF creates short overviews of full articles for social posts, newsletters or for previews at the beginning of the articles (as seen at the beginning of this article). SOCIAL uses the same AI technology to analyze long-form text and optimize it for post copy on a variety of platforms. IMAGE, much like VID, converts text into branded images.
Nota is not generating news coverage—they’re expediting the production process so journalists and editors can move from draft to publication faster and make their content go further. That won’t just save time—it’ll generate engagement and revenue.
Seamless Integrations that Make an Impact
Nota currently works with Newspack and WordPress, with more CMS integrations on the way. Their product suite is expanding to now include a journalism-specific AI model and will soon include automatic newsletter formatting, audio-to-text conversion, distribution assistance and archive search optimization. All these tools are designed to lift a burden from journalists, removing manual tasks to allow more time for researching, reporting and writing.
This should be especially beneficial for smaller and local newsrooms. Nota doesn’t require any extra infrastructure or manpower—it plugs into your CMS and lets writers, editors and audience teams get right to work. Operations that traditionally require big budgets and large staffs can now do more with less. Nota can also update your content archives, letting smaller outlets get more out of their back catalog. The future of journalism looks a little brighter with the potential to triple your ad revenue with the content you already have.
What’s Next?
This collaboration with LMA is an exciting opportunity to see how AI can assist newsrooms. Nota wants to get their assistive tools into the hands of local journalists so they can use them on the ground—and so they can update in real-time with firsthand user insights. It’s a way to improve the state of local journalism while building the future of AI-enabled media.
Nota plans on partnering with more media outlets—those with a deep interest in technology, collaborative team members and a willingness to provide feedback and help improve their technology. Their cost structure is broadly accessible, giving any newsroom an efficient means to incorporate AI into their daily work. This technology is coming, and Nota is working to ensure that it assists journalists instead of undercutting them and hopes you’ll join them on their journey.
Stay tuned for more as Nota’s partnership with LMA continues. As Nota releases new tools to the world, they’ll be collecting feedback from partner outlets to help further innovate and share everything they help newsrooms achieve. Watch this space for further updates.