How Journalists Can Use AI in 2025

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In an era when misinformation can be rampant around the web, it’s so important to have trusted sources you can turn to for accurate news. One of the most credible sources, that you know you can trust, is quite simply your own team.

John Byrne, founder and CEO of Raw Story, approached us with an interesting idea. He wanted to build an AI editorial tool from the ground up that was based on their content archives. The independent news website, which recently turned 20 years old, is based on delivering news and insights at the breakneck speed of today’s political news cycle. It’s endless. Time is of the essence, as new content is pushed out constantly, so becoming more efficient is really important to their team.

Enter the AI chatbot that our team built in partnership with them. Trained on more than 300,000 posts in their archives, it has encyclopedic knowledge of political events, important people, key organizations, and mainstay topics over the past two decades. It has the ability to write up high-quality background on issues that Raw Story has previously covered, all in a fraction of the time it would take someone to do the research.

“It’s best at generating more background copy, and historical information, that we can put into breaking news to make it longer, more cohesive, and more understandable for our readers,” said Raw Story Executive Editor Adam Nichols.

It’s not only based on the text of Raw Story’s articles, it’s much more intelligent than that. It has authors completely indexed, so you can search for content written by a specific journalist. It has publish dates for every article, so you can set timeline filters to find the exact context you need. It provides links to stories in Raw Story’s archive, so it’s a copy and a paste away for better linking of all of their content together in a smart way. And, of course, this is Raw Story — it builds upon itself nearly in real time. You can search for relevant content from today, or this week.

It is conversation-based and extremely intuitive, so it knows the ways it can best help an editor or writer on the fly.

  • Need to add background to a breaking news story? Easy.
  • Looking for context on that court ruling today? Simple.
  • Trying to build a timeline of events for a complex issue or topic? Done.
  • Seeking links to improve the reader experience? Sure.
  • Want to proofread an article and make suggestions for improvements? All set.

Has it been useful in accomplishing the goals they set out for it? “Unquestionably,” said Nichols. “It is accurate and it is very easy to edit down.”

Between its assistance with copyediting and adding context, Nichols estimates that the tool cuts out a solid five-to-six minutes for Raw Story’s editorial process, which in the minute-by-minute political world in which they race to beat competitors, is extremely significant. “Quite substantial,” he said.

Byrne said that one use case he’s seen is utilizing the bot instead of Google Search to quickly find content Raw Story has previously written. It identifies the right links and context for newer stories.

“It does a better job of taking all the articles together, condensing it to a short thing, and giving you the background,” he said.

It’s a great editor, too.

“It helps speed up the editing process by correcting grammar in a more sophisticated way than tools have before,” Byrne added.

All in all, it makes the team at Raw Story much more efficient.

This article originally appeared on Rebelmouse.com and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org

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13 Things You Can Do Now to Improve Your Web Vitals Scores

13 Things You Can Do Now to Improve Your Web Vitals Scores

Here’s a brief checklist of how we structure our technology to be highly iterative and lightning fast.

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  • Definition by Google.
  • Why Core Web Vitals are critical to your ranking and SEO success.
  • Performance is the only way to create a user experience for users to engage longer, convert more, and come back often.

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  • Ultra-Light JavaScript Application
    • Using popular frameworks like React.js and Bootstrap speed up development, but require significant overhead.
    • It is imperative that you don’t have nested resources and minimize the main thread work. This is one of the largest and hardest engineering tasks because it requires senior engineering and a lot of code rewriting on most websites with any history. 95% of websites suffer from the inability to solve this problem.

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  • Manage third-party JavaScript libraries.
    • A progressive web app approach to third-party libraries is essential.
    • Ads and other key resources can come right after the critical elements upon load.
    • It is vital to use passive listeners to improve performance.
  • Lazy load all images below the fold.
    • Load images ahead of time for certain screen sizes depending on network speeds.

Manage Fonts

  • Preload fonts.

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  • CDN level.
  • Origin level.
  • To optimize performance, it’s important to define caching policies so that you can put almost all resources into super-long cache policies. This is vital to get high scores, and it’s important so that users don’t end up downloading resources that haven’t changed. It’s also important to have smart server-side technology to know when to reset cache and make sure users see new content when it’s available.

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  • Use next-generation progressive images.
  • It is important to use video formats for animated content.
  • Every image has to have explicit height and width settings. This is best done through a dynamic image sizer and smart CMS technology that applies the right editorial and design crop with the right sizing to the front end.

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  • It is extremely easy to end up with massive HTML and CSS bloat over the years on a website. To perform well against Google’s Core Web Vitals, your legacy code needs to get cleaned up and be optimized heavily.
  • Site HTML and CSS has to be constructed in a way that allows for the delivery of above-the-fold images and text to preload before the rest of the page. Bad HTML constructs will force the browser to process many unnecessary site elements that are below the fold in order to render what is above the fold in your first viewport. This is a fatal flaw that will destroy your site’s performance.

Minify Your Code

  • It is vital that you minimize your site’s JavaScript and CSS.

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    • By default, your site’s codebase will have nice line spacing for developers to write code that is easy to maintain. This creates lots of extra whitespace characters, so it’s important to use Gzip or a similar compression logic to optimize your code..

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    • Social embeds like YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok will absolutely crush your LCP and CLS scores.
    • To protect your LCP, embeds need to be set to lazy load.
    • For CLS, you have to dynamically find the size of the embed with server-side technology, and insert it into your own storage of the properties of that embed. Then, the embed needs to be delivered to your front end to prevent the layout shifting upon load.

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    • You can prioritize the most important code using preconnect tags. These have to be used sparingly, but they can make a big difference in your Core Web Vitals scores.

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    • CLS is one of the hardest penalties to overcome.
    • PageSpeed Insights won’t catch the penalties.
    • Build a custom debugger to catch exactly where breakdowns in your layout are happening.

    Implement HTTP/3

    • HTTP/3 is a new technology that helps you speed up your Time to First Byte (TTFB) scores and should be implemented.

    Implement Signed Exchange (SXGs)

    • Google has recently released a new technology approach called Signed Exchanges, which allows smart caching through their own cloud and reduces TTFB scores significantly.

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    Currently, publishers are trying to build optimized websites that translate easily across devices and platforms, but are failing to also deliver an experience that checks all their boxes and prioritizes their readers. It takes less than a second of delayed load time to turn away a user.

    As you can tell from the checklist above, it takes a mammoth effort to overhaul your site’s entire architecture so that it scores high against Google’s Core Web Vitals. In most cases, it’s simply easier and more cost-effective to move your data to a platform that is already high performing with page speed woven into the foundation of its technology versus reinventing the wheel on your own.

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    First, let’s start with a little background. In the spring of 2020, Google let the world know that its Core Web Vitals would become the new benchmark for measuring a site’s performance in its search results, known as the page experience update. Fast forward to more than a year later in August 2021 when, after much anticipation, Google’s page experience update became official.

    Since its rollout, developers have felt the impact of how their publishing platforms stack up against the new standard. Important decisions around the architecture of your site can now make or break your site’s performance in the eyes of Google.

    The good news is that performing well on Core Web Vitals is possible with thoughtful, strategic changes to your site’s codebase.

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    Let’s briefly define Google’s Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals are three specific metrics that Google uses to determine a site’s overall usability. While these data points will evolve over time, the current version of vitals consists of three specific metrics:

    Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): A website’s LCP is the time it takes to load the main content on a page. Google wants LCP to happen within 2.5 seconds of when a page first starts loading.

    First Input Delay (FID): This metric quantifies a user’s experience when trying to interact with unresponsive pages. You want your FID score to be low to prove the usability of your site. According to Google, pages should haven an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.

    Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS determines how often your users experience unexpected layout shifts or changes on a page. To ensure visual stability, you want your CLS score to be low. Google recommends that pages maintain a CLS score of less than 0.1.

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    Your site’s LCP score is determined by how long it takes Google to load the “above the fold” content of your site. This includes all content in the first viewport of a page, such as images, fonts, ads, and embeds.

    An audit performed by Ahrefs found that only 33% of sites on the web pass Google’s Core Web Vitals. As publishers try to improve their scores, the LCP metric is proving to be the trickiest to turn around. The team at Ahrefs believe this is likely because LCP is determined by the most components, making it harder to address.

    To ensure a good LCP score, it’s important to preload your most important content to improve your site’s performance. Preloading allows you to specify which immediate resources should start loading early in the page’s life cycle by calling it from the cache, before the browser’s main rendering machinery kicks in. Doing so ensures that the critical elements will be available during your site’s initial load, and will be less likely to block the page’s rendering. This reduces the risk of a reader bailing from your page due to slow load time.

    Resources on your site can be set to preload with HTML. You can preload content with theattribute. The preload value of the <link> element’s rel attribute lets you declare fetch requests in your HTML’s <head>.

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    Anything that interrupts a fast load time can drop your LCP score. For example, if you have JavaScript from ads running on your site, Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will penalize you for them if they’re not being deferred off-screen properly.

    That’s why it’s important to use third-party scripts in a way that won’t load completely at the start of each user’s visit. You can prioritize what pieces of your JavaScript load so that only the most important pieces load first.

    Optimized: This priority level will pause JavaScript from firing until well after the page has fully loaded, which gives you the highest PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals scores.

    Load Blocking: This priority level is used for executing JavaScript right away after the page has completed loading, and will generally have a negative impact on your PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals scores.

    Post LCP: As described above, this priority level will cause JavaScript to load immediately after the Largest Contentful Paint event has completed.

    Thanks to our prioritized approach to JavaScript, scores in our site network have largely stayed intact, and many of them significantly outperform the open web.

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    Your site’s FID score will suffer if any elements on a page take too long to load or become unresponsive. This can be caused by large chunks of scripts trying to all load on the same page at the same time. This can be solved with lazy loading, which is a design pattern that allows specific parts of your site to load in a certain order based on what the user needs to see first.

    Sites that don’t use lazy loading will often be slowed down by loading resources that aren’t needed immediately. These elements are called “off-screen,” and can include embeds, images, ads, and text.

    Google will definitely notice if you are unnecessarily loading resources too early. Google’s web quality auditing software, Lighthouse, will specifically look for off-screen images that could be used for lazy loading.

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    Google’s CLS score measures how much a page moves as the visual layout loads. If you have ever visited a site and accidentally clicked onto another page because the site’s layout moved as it loaded, that page probably had a weak CLS score. This kind of poor user experience is often because there aren’t dedicated spaces within the site’s code for image elements.

    The best way to combat this is by adding dimensions to all images, embeds, and iframes. In addition to defining dimensions, it’s important to set media elements to lazy load as well. Also, using Google’s WebP image format makes it easy to compress images so that they can support progressive loading. This means that images on your site load instantaneously with a lower resolution that progressively improves as the page loads completely.

    This article originally appeared on Rebelmouse.com and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org

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