How Way2News is leveraging AI for faster, smarter hyperlocal reporting

Way2News, an app-only hyperlocal news platform, was started in 2016 to make new-age media inclusive by serving highly localised and relevant information in vernacular languages to targeted communities. In less than a decade’s time, Ways2News has managed to reach out to a large chunk of the audience, about 13 million users a month, especially from the hinterlands of the two Telugu-speaking states and Tamil Nadu.

The app is available in eight local languages and has over 50 million downloads. Going forward, the company aims to expand its service further in Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati, and Bangla, Raju Vanapala, founder and chief executive officer, told TechCircle. “We delve deeply into each vertical, particularly every language vertical. Unlike other players, we don't compete only with digital entities; instead, we target the largest newspapers in each state within their respective language categories. Our goal is to attract all habitual local language readers which is over 400 million.”

Way2News aggregates information from wire agencies as well as does exclusive reporting on local issues through its wide network of stringers (freelance journalists) and citizen journalists. The publisher also has an in-house newsroom comprising 20-odd members who do the final refining, selection, and rewriting work. Way2News competes both with the likes of DailyHunt and Inshorts, and traditional media publishers.

Technology particularly artificial intelligence (AI) has been a useful aid in providing stories that matter most to a local audience and also enhancing the overall news consumption experience, said Vanapala. 

“Internally, we use a custom-built AI tool that automatically summarises long stories into short formats for our resident editors. This allows them to quickly determine whether a story should be selected for what kind of audience. Once decided, they further summarise it,” said Vanapala.

“This process has significantly saved time for our editors and improved our discovery of unique, differentiated content. Our editors can now efficiently navigate through hundreds of articles daily, selecting the best and most relevant pieces for our audience. This is one of the key use cases for our resident editors.” Vanapala said that AI is further used to enhance content quality.

Way2News receives 15,000 news articles spanning beats such as political, entertainment, trending, crime and city, and others. About 50% of these news pieces are filtered out based on factors such as duplication, promotion content, and other editorial guidelines. The platform uses AI tools which are trained on its historic and proprietary data to perform this filtering. 

Regular stringer contributors are also assigned ‘trust scores’ by Way2News’ AI systems. Reporters with a high trust score have a higher chance of getting their reports published.

All said, Vanapala maintains that AI cannot entirely automate a newsroom. “I don't believe that AI can completely eliminate the need for humans. It's crucial to have that element of creativity in content, which only people can provide. Humans understand the context much better than AI. I'm not a great believer in relying 100% on AI, as such content might not excite the audience. We've tried using AI alone for a few days and realised that while AI can handle certain tasks, the human touch is very important. Further, all news snippets undergo manual scrutiny. Especially for sensitive topics with a classified risk element, we prefer to have another layer of human inspection.”

Way2News depends on digital advertisers for revenue. Notably, digital publishers around the world are promoting big tech firms like Meta and Google to pay for their news content shared on these platforms. Countries like Canada and Australia were the first to implement such regulations. In India, the deliberations over a legal framework to address publishers’ concerns on this issue has so far been inconclusive. 

“Obviously, the original creators need to be compensated. Currently, many of these systems are unorganised and not widely consumed, so they operate without much oversight. However, as they gain wider adoption, it will become necessary for them to share revenue with the publishers or original creators. That said, we are ad-driven and would continue to operate on such model,” added Vanapala.

To be sure, Way2News in 2022 raised $16.75 million in Series A round led by WestBridge Capital. Vanapala told TechCircle that the company plans to raise other round within this year.