19 Nov 2019

LEDE AI Claims National Technology Innovation Award

MANSFIELD — Lede AI has won the national Technology Innovation Award from the Local Independent Online News association.

The Ohio company utilized its editorial team at Richland Source, along with software development team at Teammate AI to produce high school sports briefs from crowdsourced data provided by Scorestream, the world’s leader in fan-driven high school sports results.

The resulting technology delivers the data that powers the writing. The combination offers local coverage at scale for newsrooms that need it most.

The national honor, which was sponsored by Facebook, was announced at the annual LION Summit on Oct. 25 in Nashville, Tennessee.

Judges for the national contest included Jim Rutenberg, of the New York Times; Christine Schmidt and Laura Owen, of Nieman Lab; Kristen Hare, of Poynter Institute; Jane Elizabeth, of the Charlotte News & Observer; Reuben Stern, of the University of Missouri; Jessica Pucci, of Arizona State University; Julia B. Chan of Mother Jones; and Amara Aguilar, of USC Annenberg, among others.

While announcing the honor, judges applauded the use of artificial intelligence to enhance local coverage.

“The complete automation of the story creation process is laudable as is its value to the publisher for driving traffic. And let’s not forget that, for many, high school sports coverage puts the L in local. Admirable, too, is the national recognition of the product,” the judges said. “Sales to other media organizations of the technology speak of the value of this innovation for both the Richland Source and other media organizations as well. Well done!

“Good implementation of AI technological solution on local level. Clear potential for this to further organization’s goal of driving pageviews.”

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, also of Shark Tank fame, tweeted about the technology on May 2, 2019.

Currently reading Lede Ai, Scorestream Partner to Write Automated High School Sports Stories @espn_macmahon https://t.co/Msbw5Ip933

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) May 2, 2019.

Lede AI writes and publishes high school sports stories at massive scale immediately after the games end. Richland Source has used Lede Ai for more than a year and has introduced it to newsrooms from coast to coast. The award represents the publishing of 60,000 sports shorts over the past 14 months.

It’s an innovation that’s coming from the bottom-up, designed in a newsroom to fit its coverage needs. A white paper further describing Lede Ai can be found at this link.

For sales inquiries about Lede AI, contact Jay Allred or Evan Ryan. For content questions about Lede Ai, contact Larry Phillips.