Nota strengthens local news—and American democracy—with Azure OpenAI Service

Robust local news drives a robust national democracy

For Nota Chief Executive Officer Josh Brandau, empowering local newsrooms with AI-assisted technology is about more than just increasing the availability of local news content—it’s about protecting the future of democracy. The AI-enabled SaaS startup is committed to leveling the journalism playing field and making the publishing process accessible for all newsrooms.

“Journalism—and the accountability it provides—is extraordinarily important to our democracy overall,” says Brandau. “Communities that still have a small-market newspaper have a better understanding of the democratic process and higher levels of civic engagement across the board.”

There’s little question that local news is in trouble. According to the National Trust for Local News, 53 percent of small news outlets in the United States are convinced that, unless major changes occur, they won’t exist in five years. “It’s already too late for a lot of markets that have become ‘news deserts’ with absolutely no local content production,” says Brandau. “We’ve already seen the closure of many institutions that have been around for decades, if not longer.”

Consolidation of news organizations is putting more power in the hands of a few big industry players, while local budgets and staffing levels are shrinking. And the increasingly important role of social media in news dissemination means that local journalists need to become experts in a wide range of publishing formats and platforms—a time-consuming task that draws their energy away from the actual work of researching and reporting on important stories.

“Local reporters used to be specialists—they focused their time on investigation and writing,” says Brandau. “But now they need to be generalists who can create both written and video content and who know how to maximize viewership on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and potentially many other distribution channels.”

AI news tools let journalists focus on what they do best

The founders of Nota—with decades of news experience between them—were determined to find ways to reverse the negative trends in local news and develop tools to help remaining newsrooms survive and thrive in today’s complex media environment. Nota connected with the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub, and were soon introduced to Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, which helps organizations build cutting-edge applications that take advantage of large-scale, generative AI models with built-in responsible AI and enterprise-grade Azure security.

“Once we realized the full range of capabilities within Azure OpenAI, we immediately saw that it could be an invaluable tool for what we were trying to do,” says Brandau. “It gave us the ability to achieve tremendous progress in a very short period of time.”

Nota has built two easy-to-use news creation tools called SUM and VID incorporating multiple large language models within Azure OpenAI, along with Azure API Management, Azure Cognitive Services, and third-party solutions from Hugging Face and others. Both tools work by adding value to an article already written by a journalist. SUM generates SEO-optimized headlines, extracts key points, selects key pull quotes, and creates an overall summary for meta-tagging structures. 

“Nota SUM does a lot of the heavy lifting from an automation standpoint to ensure that there’s much more organic traffic going to your article when you publish it—and it does that almost instantaneously,” says Brandau. “That’s very important, because small newsrooms can live and die by how quickly they are able to break stories.”

VID takes the same article and quickly summarizes it in a video format, dynamically combining images and text with AI-generated music and exporting the video in different lengths and aspect ratios using templates that make it ready to publish on a variety of websites. As with SUM, the videos are tagged and structured in a way that optimizes organic traffic, and all of this happens without the need for a video studio or any video production or editing experience. 

“Tools like these exist on the market to some degree,” says Brandau. “But they’ve never been combined into a platform like ours, and they’ve never before been within the reach of smaller newsrooms. The video assistance, in particular, is crucial in today’s news market, because videos typically generate 3 to 10 times as much revenue as static articles, and they’re the preferred format of younger audiences.”

With both SUM and VID, the journalist stays in control at all steps of the process, approving the output and making final editorial decisions before publishing. “We’ve worked hard to make our tools user-friendly,” says Brandau. “Once they’ve been added to the content management system, it typically takes a journalist about 10 minutes to get up to speed and start optimizing articles and creating videos.”

A personal mission with national implications

Although Nota has initially focused on aiding small newsrooms, the innovation coming out of the company has already caught the attention of large news organizations during the beta phase of development. Feedback from users who’ve tried SUM and VID has been extremely positive, and the company plans to expand its suite of products over the coming year with several new applications that help make journalists more productive. 

“We have plenty of experience with the pain points that exist within the news industry, and our goal is to help mitigate those through technology,” says Brandau. “We want journalists to be able to publish a lot more engaging, revenue-generating stories with a lot less time and effort.”

Throughout the genesis of the company and the development of its first two products, Nota has found Microsoft to be a supportive and valuable partner. “Microsoft has shown us that we don’t have to be a gigantic organization with a huge research and development lab to make exciting and meaningful AI applications,” says Brandau. “And the power of Azure OpenAI and the overall Azure platform has significantly accelerated our work. By helping companies like ours, Microsoft is supporting the advancement of local journalism and democracy.”

For Brandau, his work with Nota isn’t just a professional effort. “This is incredibly personal to me, because we get to use technology to help save a dying industry that has been a major focus of my life,” he says. “We have an opportunity to affect the lives of literally everyone we know, and I can’t think of a thing to be more passionate about.”

Find out more about Nota and how the company is partnering with the Microsoft Journalism Hub to bring AI-enabled tools to publishers of all shapes and sizes. 

Learn more about Nota on LinkedIn.