Summary of the project

The aim of the JECT-CLONE project is to deliver new computational creativity capabilities as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) that will autonomously generate novel themes, angles and voices for stories and send them regularly using existing channels to journalists and editors who are subscribed to the service. It will provide an innovative new form of smart assistance to newsrooms.
Journalism is one of the creative industries, yet journalists and editors often fail to embrace its full creative remit. As a consequence, different digital creativity support tools for journalists have emerged. One, called JECT.AI, provides creative intelligence to journalist. However, the current version of JECT.AI only generates creative recommendations in response to stories already being written. Feedback from newsrooms has revealed the need for a more proactive service that autonomously generates recommendations for new stories and investigations yet to be written. Therefore, this JECT-CLONE project will develop and launch a new SaaS that will apply different computational creativity algorithms to news content to generate these recommendations. To do this it will exploit an important existing asset of JECT.AI – its semantic landscape of news content. Operating continuously since 2017, JECT.AI manipulates content from over 25 million news stories published in multiple languages in the form of a computational news landscape. In JECT-CLONE, this landscape will be the input to six new algorithms that journalists and editors can request multiple recommendations for more creative new stories and investigations from via the new service, at different intervals, using only a small number of initial input values. The JECT-CLONE project will also explore markets for the new service. These markets are expected to be news businesses seeking original content, and will include broadsheet publishers, monthly magazines and scientific titles.

The team: