Battle of the AI news platforms
Nota and Symbolic.ai are two AI-powered systems meant to accelerate newsrooms. Plus: Google News does more AI, Meta's big pivot, and more.
Today we’re looking at two content platforms built to accelerate news production responsibly: Nota and Symbolic. If you’re a newsroom looking to move from ad hoc use of AI for simple things like research and social copy to embedding AI in real processes, each deserves a hard look. We outline what each brings to the table and the things to consider before taking the leap.
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Nota vs Symbolic: Choosing the right newsroom AI tool
Newsrooms evaluating AI tools face a frustrating paradox. General-purpose systems like ChatGPT and Claude offer powerful capabilities but lack journalism-specific guardrails. They hallucinate facts, don’t understand AP style conventions and require extensive prompt engineering to produce usable output. For publishers where a single error can destroy credibility, these limitations make adoption risky.
Two platforms address this gap by building specifically for journalism workflows: Nota and Symbolic.AI. Both understand that newsrooms need more than generic AI—they need systems trained on journalism data, built with editorial oversight and designed for the specific tasks publishers face daily.
Nota, led by former Los Angeles Times CMO Josh Brandau, focuses on automating repetitive publishing mechanics—headline optimization, SEO tagging, social media formatting. The platform works from articles journalists have already written, reformatting verified content for different distribution channels. Symbolic.AI, founded by former eBay CEO Devin Wenig, positions itself as a real-time writing companion offering suggestions, research tools and fact-checking capabilities.
Both platforms claim journalism-specific training and editorial accuracy. Both target small to mid-sized newsrooms seeking AI assistance without compromising editorial standards. The question for publishers becomes: Do you need help with publishing tasks or writing assistance?
Read the rest at mediacopilot.ai
Insights
The decisions that go beyond AI
From the latest Media Copilot podcast with Taboola CEO Adam Singolda:
Inside the Salt Lake Tribune’s Chartbeat-driven strategy for subscriber growth
When The Salt Lake Tribune needed to understand which coverage areas were worth expanding and which were better left to specialized competitors, the 150-year-old newspaper turned to Chartbeat, a real-time content analytics platform built for publishers.
The result: a data-informed approach to coverage that led the Tribune to double its religion reporting staff while scaling back expectations for outdoor content that wasn’t finding an audience. For a mid-sized nonprofit newsroom balancing editorial ambition with financial sustainability, the platform provided evidence where intuition alone had guided decisions.
Chartbeat’s Essentials plan typically costs around $13,000 annually, with a lower-cost starter tier reportedly in development. Implementation requires adding JavaScript tracking code to the site, with data appearing in dashboards within 10-15 minutes.
Read the rest at mediacopilot.ai
Company news
A new chapter for The Media Copilot
In case you missed my announcement from yesterday, here’s a quick recap: The Media Copilot is expanding. By way of a partnership with RJI, we’re doing more service journalism with respect to AI in media, journalism and PR, including guides, how-to’s, and expert perspectives on strategy and tactics. We have a new website, and you’ll likely be seeing us in your inbox more often. If you’re interested in contributing, sponsoring, or giving us feedback, feel free to get in touch.
Big Tech
So much for open-source AI at Meta
Meta is developing a closed AI model it plans to sell, abandoning the open-source approach Mark Zuckerberg championed for years, Bloomberg reports. The model, codenamed Avocado, is expected to launch next spring and would align Meta with OpenAI and Google, which charge for access to their most capable systems. The shift follows disappointment with Llama 4, Meta’s open-source release earlier this year, and comes with significant personnel changes: new Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who joined through Meta’s $14.3 billion acquisition of Scale AI, advocates for closed models, while open-source champion Yann LeCun recently departed. For newsrooms that had been counting on free, capable AI tools from Meta’s Llama family, the pivot means the field of affordable options just got smaller. (AI-assisted)
Licensing
Google begins paying publishers for news AI
It’s a small step but a big evolution: Google is launching a paid pilot program with major publishers to test AI features in Google News. The Washington Post, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, El País, and The Times of India will experiment with AI-powered article overviews and audio briefings on their Google News pages, with Google promising “clear attribution and links to articles.” The company is also tweaking how links appear in AI Mode, adding more inline links and contextual explanations for why users should click through.
It’s a notable gesture from a company that has spent the past year watching publishers fume about AI search eating their traffic. But the pilot is limited to major outlets with existing commercial relationships, leaving smaller publishers to wonder when, or whether, Google’s olive branch will extend to them. Whether these AI features actually drive clicks or just make users feel better about staying on Google’s platform remains the open, and decisive, question. (AI-assisted)
Really solid breakdown of the automation vs. assistance distinction. The framing around whether newsrooms need help publishing verified content or generating new writing cuts through alot of the noise. What stood out is how both platforms tackle credibility risks differently than generic tools, which is probably the biggest barrier to adoption in traditional newsroms.