I’ve been working in the news industry for almost 35 years. 

Amid all the advances in technology, it’s remarkable how little the typical reporter’s daily workflow has changed. Journalists still largely find and write stories as they always have. 

Yes, reporters now monitor social media where they once scoured newswires like the Associated Press. 

And yes, media companies equip their staff with content management systems that fix typos, make style recommendations and adjust headlines to be more SEO effective. 

But most journalists still manually monitor news sites and talk to sources to come up with the ideas they pitch. And they still gather background by hand and call experts to comment. 

We think that is going to change and Pricing Culture, a company I joined recently as a co-founder, is working on a data-driven solution to increase efficiency. 

Imagine coming to work and instead of staring at a blank page you saw ideas for possible stories. These pitches would alert journalists to anomalies in data that could be stories. 

In addition, imagine the alerts already included the predictable background information that the journalist would normally spend hours looking up. 

In finance, this could mean an alert pointing out stocks that are outperforming industry peer groups. Each pitch would include the name of the company, history of the share price, name of the CEO and other data a journalist would typically need to research. 

All of that work is currently being done by hand.

It helps to understand the extent of the opportunity by comparing reporters to other white collar professionals, such as sales representatives. 

An extraordinary amount of effort and investment has gone into creating databases of qualified leads so sales professionals can generate more business. 

Sales reps aren’t required to use sales leads; but quality leads make them more effective.  

Reporters would use similar tools to deliver qualified story leads. 

These tools don’t replace journalists or limit their news judgement, they enhance it. 

Obviously this data solution doesn’t apply to many stories journalists write.

But, imagine you cover art auctions at Sotheby’s and could get alerts on outsized sales that include all the context and background about the artist and their price history. 

Imagine you write about footwear and you could get an alert that showed the average price of Nike sneakers was trending lower. 

Imagine you cover the automobile industry and you could receive a warning about fluctuations in vehicle registration data broken down by region and car company. 

Pricing Culture can leverage AI to find patterns in large datasets. We can then compile all the requisite background information and push it to reporters. 

Sometimes the anomalies aren’t a surprise. The pattern may already be widely known and not worth a story. That’s why human judgement is still critical. 

But other times it can help writers see around the corner, identifying trends before their sources notice. 

DM me if you are interested in learning more.