The project, which was completed in close collaboration with German news agency dpa, supports journalists in a variety of tasks. By having trained the model specifically for NTV, the system can help prioritise emerging news, offer topic suggestions and draft text in the language style used at NTV.

The newly developed tool will initially be launched at the NTV news desk and will be used for working with journalistic reports from dpa. While the tool optimises workflows and enables journalists to spend more time on producing high-quality and unique content, all editorial decisions will remain under human supervision, emphasises Sonja Schwetje.

Sonja Schwetje, Managing Director Programming at NTV and Editor-in-Chief of Business & Networks at RTL News, says: “Together with dpa, we are working on the future of journalism in this project. In addition to the exclusively researched reports, the preparation and selection of agency reports is an important pillar of our current news programme. Our new editorial tool enables our journalists to analyse news with high precision and process relevant information more quickly."

Sonja continues: "This allows our editors to focus even more on researching background information and exclusive stories. The key here is that the selection, control and decision on publication lies with the individual journalist. With this support, we are strengthening our news content and offerings, especially in such an important news year, and contributing even more to diversity of opinion and pluralism.”

Under the supervision of RTL Deutschland’s AI Circle, the language model components of the new AI tool were developed by ML6, a global tech company. Long standing NTV partner Ethinking was responsible for the integration into the digital newsroom, while the Google News Initiative also supported the project.

The new system is scalable, and further expansion is planned for other brands at RTL News and Gruner + Jahr as part of RTL Deutschland. The aim is to reduce repetitive tasks and optimise workflows.