AI Tech in Journalism-Episode 4

On this episode, I got to chat with Sara Miller, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing at Directive. She is a digital marketing professional with more than a decade of experience in SEO, paid media, content marketing, and website project management across multiple industries. She is a Reynolds School alum, and after graduating with her bachelor’s, Sara spent several years in Washington, D.C. working for the U.S. Senate Majority Leader and editing for PR Newswire.

Alayna: [00:00:00] Yeah, thanks for joining me, Sarah. Can you give me some background information on yourself? Were you an RSJ student? 

Sara: I graduated a long time ago. I actually graduated back in 2008, so I went to school here in Reno and then I moved to Washington, DC about two weeks after I graduated.

So I moved to DC and worked at the Senate for a little while and realized working in politics was not for me, and then began down this path of working in digital marketing. So I left. I worked at a place called PR Newswire where I edited press releases all day, and then I went to work for a nonprofit.

 I was working in a nonprofit and I managed our webinars and emails and a lot of our digital marketing efforts there where I was then recruited to go work for a startup. And so I worked at a software startup for about three and a half years, which led me back to Reno. I was working remotely pre-pandemic and I [00:01:00] wanted to be closer to family.

So I moved back to Reno, worked from home, and worked there for a while. Everything from managing our website, social media, and email marketing, to going out and visiting our potential clients and doing product demos. So after working there for a while, I wanted to kind of learn from people who had expertise in the industry.

So I began working in agencies and I've been working in digital marketing agencies ever since.

Alayna: Cool. And how long has that been that you’ve worked here in northern Nevada? 

Sara: I have been working in agencies since. 2017, so I guess going on six years now. And I've worked for a couple of agencies here in Reno, and now I work for an agency that is based in Southern California.

Alayna: Cool. You used to work for Foundry, right?

Sara: I did.

Alayna: We're actually using them at the My office, we use [00:02:00] them for outsourcing some of our marketing stuff. 

Sara: Oh, that's awesome. I loved my time at Foundry. I'm still very close to some of the people that I worked with there, so nothing but great things to say about it.

Alayna: So what is your opinion on the new emergence of chat AI technology and how people are jumping on the bandwagon and using it? 

Sara: Yeah, I think as any true marketer would say, I guess it depends on the situation, but it's something that's been coming up a lot for us in our day-to-day efforts.

So clients are asking about it, and team members are asking about it. We've built out ways within our organization to where we can use the API integrated with Slack. And so even when people are unable to get in to try things out in Chat GPT, we still have the ability to go in and have access. We've been able to figure out ways to use it to help kind of expedite some of the things we're doing whether it's, you know, with keyword [00:03:00] research or different things like that.

But we've also been using it too. About different job functions that we need to kind of answer questions about when we're writing content for clients. So if we're trying to figure out what a chief security officer needs to take care of in their day-to-day life, it helps us better understand their functional job responsibilities and how we can better speak to our audiences.

But I have seen a lot, you know, coming out about things that are inaccurate, that are coming out through Chat GPT and different AI sources. So my team and I have been trying to come up with ways where we can always double-check the content that's coming out because we wanna make sure we are always putting out factual information.

Yeah. So it's been able to help us a lot. You know, tedious efforts, but when it comes to putting in information and looking for a lot of results, we wanna make sure we're able to still fact-check everything that we're publishing. 

Alayna: Yeah, definitely. So what specific tasks have you been utilizing Chat [00:04:00] GPT for?

Sara: Yeah. So figuring out, as I said, jobs to be done or these specific job functionalities for our target audiences. We've done that. We've done it for a little bit of keyword research, but I'd say the main way that we've been using it over the last couple of weeks has been to expedite our process and write content briefs to send to our writers.

So we're able to figure out what type of content is currently ranking for the keywords that we're going after, and then we can better write our content briefs kind of based on what it pulls back for. 

Alayna: So not just putting in a topic and having it just go wild and write something for you guys.

Sara: No, definitely not. Especially because so many of the clients that we work with have in-house writers or we've contracted with writers. We're still doing a lot of that with actual writers, but we're just kind of expediting the process by providing better prompts to them and helping them write faster. But we're still using people to do all of our content writing.  

Alayna: [00:05:00] Yeah. So I do marketing for a strategic planning company here in Reno. And we have used it to create outlines on topics. So I'll use it to either, if we're re-optimizing a page, I'll put the old copy into it and be like, ‘Create me a new, expanded outline based on this.”

And then I write it because otherwise, yeah, it still just doesn't write that great... It's like basic, basic seventh grade, you know, five-paragraph format with the intro and topic sentence, but nothing really beyond that. 

Sara: Yeah. One of the things, I have a team member who's been testing it out a lot, and one thing she's tried with optimizations is putting in the paragraph that she wants to either expand upon or optimize and then suggesting it put in additional keywords and seeing what it comes back with. But you're absolutely right that a lot of the content that [00:06:00] we get back is not up to the reading level that we shoot to write for.

Alayna: Yeah, and how do you think it would be beneficial for other kinds of SEO tasks apart from just keyword research? 

Sara: Yeah, we've been using different integrations to see what we can pull back another one of my team members found something through a LinkedIn post to go in and it will pull all of the content from your site and then make recommendations for how to increase performance for those pages, whether it's adding word count to pages it might be restructuring. And so it's giving each page a rank from one through ten.

So we're testing that out because we're not sure what different criteria it's using to come up with this ranking system because we didn't build this tool that we're testing. But it's definitely something for us to do, it's like another thing in our tool belt that we can use to try and improve [00:07:00] performance for different pages.

Alayna: I feel like sometimes the sense that I get from people that I've talked to is it’s easier or there's less of a gray area in relying on Chat GPT for marketing versus for journalism, for journalistic writing. People are like, ‘A person needs to write it how, how else do you get the facts.’ But do you think that there is a difference, or do you think that it should be used kind of with the same sense of standards and principles, regardless of what you're writing for?

Sara: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that it's important to be able to source the data that you're using, whether it is for marketing or like an article in a paper or online. I’m dating myself saying, putting it in a paper. But um, I do think it's really important to have those standards. I actually shared a tweet with my team where I saw that someone had said something like, [00:08:00] “Send me these articles written by this person.” And it came back with five articles written by each of the people that they had put in and none of the articles had ever been written or published. And so there's a lot of false information that's out there. And I think that that can just create this lack of trust. And so make sure that you're able to always cite your sources, no matter where you're using the information. And even with our clients when we're saying that they can like 10 x your return or things like that.

If we can't prove it, then how are we gonna continue building trust with customers? 

Alayna: Yeah. Also, I feel like Chat GPT doesn't really have a sense of discernment between, you know, what it's being asked to produce and what it can actually factually produce. It doesn't have the ability to, you know, find and vet the sources.

It'll just pull up, you know, all the sources that have that bias built in already. 

Sara: Right, exactly. 

Alayna: I mean, [00:09:00] this has only been around for a couple of months now. How has your marketing agency kind of developed best practices? Is it kind of just ever-evolving and kind of changing as you go?

Sara: Yeah, it's definitely something that we talk about on a pretty regular basis. We've done some things like lunch and learn for the rest of the team to kind of learn from some of our quote-unquote experts, people who are using it more frequently than others. But with that, we're seeing different ways to, you know, use it for, I guess, things.

Really tedious tasks. Let's say we had a hundred pages of content and we needed to write meta descriptions. We can also ask it for recommendations for things like that. Giving it those limitations, like, ‘Hey, we need these all written out to be X amount of characters.’ And it'll publish those for us, and that's a lot faster.

And then we can just go in and [00:10:00] edit those. So it's giving us kind of a baseline to work from. But I think overall we're just looking for ways to use it mostly internally before we roll it out to clients. Clients are definitely asking how they can use it, and how we're using it. And there are definitely options out there for AI-generated content, but it's not something that we have started selling as a service.

Alayna: So what are some of your best practices that you guys utilize?

Sara: That's a great question. I would say, a lot of it's not even written down at this point because it all is just so we iterate upon it all the time. More than anything, we want to review anything that we're pulling out of there, so make sure that even though we might be copying this information down and pasting it into our own documents, we're going through and checking it for first factuality, but also grammar. We've seen some content come back where if we're asking it to add in different keywords, it might make it sound very [00:11:00] robotic or not flow very well. And understanding that the whole point of what we're doing, and how all content is now being judged is just for that user experience and looking at it from that lens, making sure that it's gonna be a positive experience for anyone who lands on the site and reads that content.

So I think number one, like the user experience, is always gonna be our focus. So making sure that that's what we look at first. In addition to factuality, I think with that we also use a lot of platforms internally already for a lot of the work that we're doing, whether it's for content, if it's for pulling keyword research we like to compare it right now just because it is such an early platform for us to be adopting.

And so we'll look at what we're seeing in other platforms that have been a little bit more tested to see if we're seeing similar results or if they're completely different. Because sometimes we can get some information in one place. Kind of fact-check it somewhere else. It's giving us that sense of security if something is accurate or not.

Alayna: Yeah. So what kind of [00:12:00] programs are you guys using? Apart from Chat GPT? 

Sara: We use SEMRush and Ahrefs for a lot of our keyword tracking or for backlinks. We use something called Content Harmony to help us put together content briefs where we're able to drop in the keywords that we've selected, and it helps us kind of craft that content through there.

 We use Screaming Frog to crawl our sites. We're using things through Google, like Google Analytics. Now we have GA4 that we've had to kind of adopt. Yeah. And learn how to use Google Search Console. There are so many I probably can't even think of 'em all. 

Alayna: Well, and it's so funny because I feel like it's not until Chat GPT came out that I've been more conscientious and being like, “Oh, Grammarly is technically AI.”

Sara: Mm-hmm. Exactly.

Alayna: So where do you see AI going in the next, I don't know, six months to two years, or even beyond that? 

Sara: Yeah, I [00:13:00] think that it's hard to say. I think there's, you know, always people on both sides of the argument, whether it's positive or negative, but I think there's a lot of ways that AI can really help with a lot of the work that we're doing.

And in no way is it replacing people's jobs, which I know there were talks of that when it first rolled out. But I think that there are ways to streamline tedious processes that we've been doing and like freeing up time for more strategic conversations. We're able to, you know, expedite things that previously took hours that can now take minutes or even shave off a couple of hours. And that extra time allows us to think more strategically and provide better results for clients when we have that extra space. Yeah, 

Alayna: I'm still waiting for a fully functioning AI tool that will do backlink outreach for me

Sara: Exactly. 

Alayna: So do you see the changes as an overall positive effect on the [00:14:00] media and journalism industry? Or negative or mixed? 

Sara: I think that, ideally, down the road when it's refined a little bit more, there is gonna be a really positive impact. I think right now it gets messy when things are not able to be sourced or traced back to where it was found. But I think that there is a version of that where it will be really beneficial.

You know, journalism and marketing really benefit from a tool that can save so much time. But it is hard when you can't fact-check the information that you're pulling, or if you find it, you wanna be able to figure out where to source that information. So I think for me, I'm still someone who's on the fence about how it's trustworthy. All is right now because I wanna be careful, and my team and I have talked about this a lot, but I do think that there are so many benefits that they do kind of outweigh those cons right now. 

Alayna: Yeah. And what about people who are gonna kind of [00:15:00] look at Chat GPT and be like, Well, why would I hire a writer off of Fivver or Upwork or hire an agency to do this when I can just plug it in.

Sara: Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that there are people with that mindset now, but for me, I think that there are so many ways that you can build upon what the tools are producing and make it better content, even though, you know, it might look like originally like it's good content. But again, you're always writing for people and you wanna make sure that it reads that way.

So having the opportunity to go in and optimize that and, I've read, I mean, who knows at this point, but I guess there are some things that are kind of built into the tools that people can figure out if the content is written by AI. And so we've actually talked about this a lot with clients and just understanding, you know, with SEO, how important that trust and authority is.

And so when you're writing content that hasn't been written by a person, [00:16:00] Let's say you publish a blog post. How are you going to help the reader and the search engines understand that you are the authority and that you wrote this as the expert? So we've seen clients who, if they have content that's written by AI we can have someone go in and review it. So you can always have a review and you can build up that trust with that real person doing the review. 

Alayna: And um, What do you say about… one of our concerns is we wanna make sure that our intellectual material that we've come up with, also isn't subject to being stolen and plagiarized. Does your organization have any kind of concern with that type of stuff?

Sara: One of the things that we've brought up with a concern is the information that you're inputting, like Chat G P T, the information that you're giving them, and how proprietary it is because what happens when you input that information?

And so we've actually been working on ways to figure out what we [00:17:00] should or shouldn't be putting in for our prompts because we wanna make sure that we're not putting in any proprietary information that could be sent out that we wanna make sure it just stays within our organization.

Yeah, I think there are definitely some legal issues that are gonna be rolling out over the coming months. With like who owns what and how the information is pulled and stored. 

Alayna: I've been listening to a podcast called Hard Fork. It's from a couple of New York Times journalists, and they're diving deep into like the AI stuff. They were talking about the latest episode of that ChatGPT that just came out with a newer version that was scoring in the 90th percentile on the LSATs and GRE tests.

Yeah. It's just really crazy how far that's come. 

Sara: I know, I think about it all the time. Just what it would be like to be a student in today's world and how different it is than when I was in school, and just how you might be [00:18:00] able to use these tools to, you know, get through school. It's amazing that there are so many different ways and it's interesting. I know that teachers are also concerned about plagiarism inside of it at the same time. 

Alayna: Yeah. And this is just gonna get smarter. Ultimately, do you think that these tools are gonna end up getting to a point where they take our marketing jobs? Our journalism jobs? 

Sara: I'm sure that there are pieces of the job that can be done by AI, but I still, don't think that the industry will be negatively impacted by this. I think that everyone's roles are so much more than just the end result. And there's a lot that goes into that. So for me, I don't worry about my position or things that my team is working on, I think that there's just, it's just a piece of what we do and [00:19:00] there are pieces that can be streamlined, and improved the way that we operate.

But I don't know that you know, journalism or marketing or any of these differences, you know, industries are going to go away because we're just improving on how we do them. Yeah. I think that just overall it's, it's interesting to see how much has changed over just the last couple of months, but I think the biggest thing that has kind of piqued my interest is how search engines are trying to incorporate this technology into what they're rolling out.

So there's definitely a market for it and it's not going anywhere. Knowing that B has come out with their thoughts on it, and even Google's talking about how they're gonna be integrating this technology. So I think it's gonna change dramatically over the next six months to see how search engines evolve around this AI functionality.

And you know, that's something that we think about a lot working in SEO is if [00:20:00] this is something that's changing the results, how are we gonna adapt the work that we're doing to make sure that our client's work is always gonna be showing up for their a. 

Alayna: Yeah. If there's an aspect to this AI technology that is just giving you one answer that it thinks is gonna be the best and all of mm-hmm.

and it's gonna answer everything that you wanna know about, you know, vacation homes in Tahoe or something, right? Or one vacation home in Tahoe, like, yeah. How is that gonna change just the whole search engine marketplace? 

Sara: Right, and if users aren't able to find a variety of places to solve their problem that they're trying to achieve by typing in their searches, Are they gonna stay on these platforms?

And I know like we've seen so much come out over the last year or so about searches through TikTok and what that looks like and how that is gonna be impacted by the results that are provided through Google and [00:21:00] Bing. So I think the whole search landscape is changing so much over the next year, and I think AI is gonna be a big piece of it.

Alayna: Cool. Cool. Thank you so much for your time and thank you for the interview. 

Sara: Of course. Thank you. This is fun. Yeah. Talk 

Alayna: to you later. 

Sara: Okay. Bye. Bye.