Public information distributed by various government agencies often leaves much to be desired. Confusing and lengthy texts are extremely common, which alienates the public, especially young people, from the reality of their world. To address this, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) has started incorporating AI-generated summaries into many articles published on their website to capture the attention of younger audiences. These summaries consist of a series of bullet points displayed in a pale blue box below the article's headline and main image. Only the top portion of the summary is visible unless the reader chooses to expand the box. A brief message states: "The summary is generated by an AI service from OpenAI. The content is reviewed by NRK journalists before publication."
The Issue at Hand
Norwegian audiences, especially younger ones, are moving away from traditional news sources. The Norwegian Media Barometer, published by Statistics Norway, shows a continuous decline in the use of traditional media such as print newspapers, television, and radio, while the consumption of audio, video, and internet media is increasing. This trend is particularly pronounced among young people aged 16 to 24, a highly sought-after yet elusive audience segment for traditional media.
Print newspaper consumption is very low among young people, with only 3% reading newspapers compared to 17% of the total population. Television and radio usage is also declining, while podcasts and other digital media are becoming increasingly popular. This trend concerns NRK. "We are losing young readers, and it is very difficult to attract them to our stories and ordinary news sites," said an NRK journalist.
About five years ago, NRK developed user principles based on qualitative information from a target group of young people aged 19 to 29. One of these principles was to divide content into manageable parts to allow readers to quickly get an overview of the content and decide if it is worth their time. However, this additional task would be difficult to fit into the journalists' busy workflow. "I thought, why not use AI as a tool to perform tasks that we can't do ourselves?" explained the editor. The implementation of bullet point summaries helps make stories more accessible to young readers. "Maybe it's a small tool to make stories a bit more accessible to younger readers."
How the Tool Works
NRK journalists can choose whether or not to use the AI system to create a summary. Those who choose to use it copy the article URL into the system before publishing it. The system analyzes the text using OpenAI's technology and returns the summary along with three title suggestions: a regular headline, an SEO-optimized headline, and a teaser title for the front page. The summary is ready to be copied and pasted into NRK's content management system (CMS).
Currently, the system is not integrated into NRK's CMS, but it will be in the next version. According to NRK data from May 9 to 16, 2024, 89 articles included summary boxes. Of the 1.2 million page views of those articles, there were 359,000 clicks to expand the summary box, a rate of 19%.
Sætre points out that "users usually expand very complicated articles." For example, in an article about an agreement for a new city government in Oslo, the summary box listed the agreement's consequences for residents in terms of changes in school policies, toll fees, and taxes. In this story, the summary box expansion rate was nearly 60%.
Readers who expand the summary box tend to spend more time on the page than those who do not. The median time spent on an article with a summary box was 49 seconds, almost double the 25 seconds spent by users who did not expand it. Additionally, readers under 50 were more likely to expand the summary box, aligning with NRK's goal of attracting a younger audience.
