Mediahuis strengthens its commitment to quality journalism with Google Cloud's AI
MediahuisVertex AI · Gemini · Elasticsearch +3Mediahuis, a European media group publishing more than 30 news brands including De Standaard, NRC and De Telegraaf, built NewsSearch, an AI assistant combining Elasticsearch with Google Cloud's Vertex AI and Gemini models to let journalists search millions of archived articles, verify facts, generate summaries and suggest story angles. Research that sometimes took hours is now done in a few seconds or minutes, and the tool is being extended to other publications in the group after a successful pilot.
Overview
Mediahuis, a European media group publishing more than 30 news brands including De Standaard, NRC and De Telegraaf, built NewsSearch, an AI assistant combining Elasticsearch with Google Cloud's Vertex AI and Gemini models to let journalists search millions of archived articles, verify facts, generate summaries and suggest story angles. Research that sometimes took hours is now done in a few seconds or minutes, and the tool is being extended to other publications in the group after a successful pilot.
This entry has 14 published fields tied to exact passages in an immutable source capture.
Inspect the highlighted sourceThe challenge
Our methods for accessing our archives clearly lacked efficiency. For example, a simple search could take up to 30 minutes while the most complex could take more time.
The solution
Mediahuis, with Google's News Partnerships team and partner ML6, built "NewsSearch," an assistant combining the Elasticsearch search engine to identify relevant articles with Google Cloud's Vertex AI and Gemini models to summarize information, answer journalists' questions, and suggest editorial angles.
Reported business value
The time it takes to find information has been drastically reduced: what sometimes took hours is now done in a few seconds or minutes, freeing journalists for value-added tasks. Encouraged by the success of NewsSearch in its first pilot newsrooms, Mediahuis plans to extend the solution to other publications in the group starting next year.
Sources
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