A new Journalism Hub from Microsoft, launched Wednesday in honor of World Press Freedom Day, is designed to connect newsrooms with digital tools that can offer a boost in what’s otherwise a fraught moment for the free press.

Among those tools is Microsoft’s AccountGuard for Journalists cybersecurity package, the Microsoft Start news feed to provide revenue for news organizations, and a new AI tool called Nota that can help newsrooms quickly craft headlines and short videos based on their existing stories.

The Hub aims to help combat the decline of local news and the accompanying rise of misinformation, says Ginny Badanes, senior director of Microsoft’s Democracy Forward initiative, which is operating the Hub.

“The Hub is pulling together all these different resources that we know about because we work here,” says Badanes. “We’re pulling those resources together to a single place.”

The project comes at a time of uncertainty in many newsrooms, where closures and layoffs have turned more and more U.S. communities into “news deserts,” with little or no local coverage.

“We really cannot separate the role of journalism from democracy and the information ecosystem,” says Badanes.

NOTA SAYS ITS AI CAN SAVE JOURNALISTS TIME, NOT TAKE THEIR JOBS

Among the most interesting technologies in the Hub is Nota’s AI platform. Microsoft chose Nota, in part, because of its high-quality design and ease of use, Badanes says.

Nota’s platform, currently in beta, allows journalists to quickly generate summary content based on their existing stories. That includes search-engine-optimized headlines, metadata for search engines and social media sites, and summaries to post on social media. Nota is designed to let journalists focus on the reporting and storytelling they’re trained to do, rather than coming up with content for social sharing, which could prove especially valuable for small newsrooms where every journalist has to wear many hats.

“Everyone’s expected not just to be journalists—they’re expected to be generalists,” says Brandau, who was previously chief marketing officer at the Los Angeles Times and recalls staffers there pitching and debating headlines in a Slack channel. In February, Nota announced a partnership with The Arena Group, owners of TheStreet, Sports Illustrated, and Parade, but founder and CEO Joshua Brandau says the tool should be at least equally valuable for smaller news organizations.

Nota can also generate short videos based on stories, using its own summary text and generated imagery or images pulled from newsrooms’ existing libraries. Those videos can then be posted alongside stories for readers who prefer video or can be shared to social media platforms. As Brandau points out, video can also often command higher advertising rates than print stories, ideally boosting advertising revenue for users.

As of now, the system relies on AI models custom-trained for individual newsrooms, which helps ensure training data stays private and optimizes Nota’s output for each organization’s style. The company is working on integrations with popular content management systems to provide users a more streamlined access to Nota-generated materials.

In the future, the tool will likely also be able to automatically optimize video for different platforms, saving time spent adjusting aesthetics and aspect ratios for, say, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube, Brandau says. He also expects Nota will eventually be able to summarize and tag newsrooms’ legacy archival content, which is often difficult to navigate, and even generate notes from events like city council meetings that journalists can craft into stories.

“So, you don’t haze a junior reporter by sitting through five hours of that; you get a summarization of that automated,” he says. But, Brandau says, he doesn’t envision Nota replacing journalists, only enabling them to focus on their core reporting more efficiently.

That fits in with Microsoft’s goal of enabling local newsrooms, which Badanes says the company will continue to work on after the current launch. “It will be a living site,” she says.