Behind the AI in the Newsroom: The Washington Post’s Vineet Khosla

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
How can AI help companies meet customers where they are, especially when their behaviors and needs evolve quickly? Find out how one news outlet turns this challenge into an opportunity on today's episode.

**Vineet Khosla** (0:15)
I'm Vineet Khosla from The Washington Post, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:20)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review, exploring the future of artificial intelligence. I'm Sam Ransbotham. Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I've been researching data, analytics, and AI at MIT SMR since 2014, with research articles, annual industry reports, case studies, and now 13 seasons of podcast episodes.
In each episode, corporate leaders, cutting-edge researchers, and AI policy makers join us to break down what separates AI hype from AI success.
Hi, listeners. Today, we're joined by Vineet Khosla, Chief Technology Officer at The Washington Post. The Post isn't just a newsroom. It's a giant technology machine that delivers journalism to millions of people around the world every day. And Vineet leads the teams that build those systems behind the breaking news and the audience experience and security and AI, we're hoping, based on the discussion today. So we'll talk about how technology is shaping journalism, and maybe a little bit about what audiences don't see behind the scenes, and what the future of news might look like. Vineet, thanks for being here.

**Vineet Khosla** (1:31)
Thanks for having me, Sam. Been listening to your podcast for a while, so it's a pleasure to be finally on the other side of it.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:38)
Maybe we can talk a little bit about what happens behind the scenes with the podcast. Let's start with something that many listeners feel. I think consuming news in our modern world can be pretty overwhelming and fragmented and tough to understand.
That may be especially true for younger audience who are more raised in a different digital world than I was. From your side, what's maybe currently broken about how we're experiencing news and what needs to change?

**Vineet Khosla** (2:07)
The way I view it is there is not something broken about news. If we zoom out, we should think about journalism as a discipline, not a format.
When you start to think about it solely as a format, it may seem broken to the younger audience. The difference is they're just consuming it very differently than you and me. I use this example of we used to just read the news, then came radio, we heard the news, then came TV, we watched the news, then came AI, we started talking and asking to the news. Then all of these changes, the consumption of news actually increased, the value of news in our society actually increased. We are just consuming it very differently at different times of the day.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:55)
That consumption is a big deal. I want to know only the news that I care about. I want to hear stuff I don't care about, but I want to be aware that the stuff I don't care about is happening. I don't want to be in a bubble.
Other industries have really struggled with this. If you think about the streaming industry and retail and music, what is personalized news going to be for The Washington Post?

**Vineet Khosla** (3:19)
That's a question I've grappled with for the last two and a half years. I'm not from the news industry, I come from outside. When I landed here, I realized there are two things news does that is very important. One is, it tells us what is important in the world, and then it tells us why it is important. That's the sense-making, right?
The personalized aspect is taken over by social media. They already tell you what's important, so by the time they come to us, there are very few things we are telling them different than they already know.
But the why, that is the core value that we provide. And that's where I think we have to have a balance of personalized. You need to be data-driven, but you need to use your data almost like a compass, not a GPS. It is still the owners of the newsroom, a responsible, ethical newsroom with journalistic standards, to make sure the news we give out to the people is not so personalized, that it becomes an echo chamber and a reinforcement of their beliefs. And it's a hard thing to balance, because we understand looking at big tech outside. If you go deeply personalized, you will have audience, you will have clicks, you will have money, you will have revenue. And for our industry to balance both of these, meet the consumer where they are, give them the news they actually need, don't give them too much when they're not ready for it. But at the same time, make sure we are being very even and our perspective and our opinion is coming through is very important.