A year ago, The Defiant started publishing AI-generated stories provided by DeepNewz.
Exactly one year ago, The Defiant began a collaboration with DeepNewz, and it’s no understatement to say that it’s been the most fruitful partnership we’ve undertaken.
The Defiant is a media company focused on decentralized finance. As a niche content producer in the crypto space, we have a small editorial team of ~7. Before our partnership with DeepNewz, our team was constantly faced with the challenge of deciding whether to spend our resources covering the big breaking stories in the general crypto category – which, while not in our specialization, would bring in more traffic – or spend time working on DeFi and web3 stories that are core to our area focus and audience.
Now, we let DeepNewz cover general crypto breaking news, while our “human reporters” can spend all their time on stories that are specific to our niche. This has allowed us to level up our journalism by easing the expectation on story quantity, and focusing more on story quality.
Strengthen Brand, Boost Traffic
The partnership has thus strengthened our brand, as our DeFi and web3 stories now have more depth, due to the fact that our reporters can spend more time working on them.
Key to the success of the partnership is that our traffic has increased thanks to the boost from DeepNewz articles. DeepNewz has not only allowed us to publish more stories, but it has also boosted the number of “viral” stories, due to the speed and more general audience focus of the content.
Overall, we find DeepNewz model can correctly identify the most relevant breaking news in crypto, and does a great job in summarizing the key aspects of those stories. Mistakes have been very rare. Out of thousands of stories published, we only identified a handful of inaccurate stories, which we corrected.
The DeepNewz AI model scans all the information from X and gives a concise view on what is happening. It doesn’t miss major news and helps discover more niche stories too. In crypto, they cover everything, from regulation news and token prices, to hacks, token and NFT sales, company launches, to even gossip and controversy. We then curate what pieces are suitable for our audience.
Approach & Implementation
As for how we integrated DeepNewz into our operations, we began with a manual approach, where an API fed DeepNewz crypto stories into a feed that connects to our CMS. On that feed, our editors click on an “import” button on the stories that we want to publish. That would populate our CMS, and we’d proceed with our usual publishing process.
Stories are published in a dedicated section on our site. DeepNewz is the author on the byline and a disclaimer on each story makes it clear that the content was AI-generated.
To further simplify the process, DeepNewz built a suggestion pipeline trained on our preferences. Those articles are automatically imported to our CMS, where we select the stories we want to publish.
We tested the automated publishing process for about a month but have ultimately gone back to manual publishing as we prefer to have more control over what goes on our website.
Strategic Value of DeepNewz
DeepNewz has been instrumental in optimizing our content strategy, particularly in the following areas:
Breaking News Coverage: The system enables rapid content publication, which is good for SEO purposes and ensures that our audience receives timely updates on critical events.
Short-Form and Factual Reporting: News items that are concise, data-driven, and announcement-based are efficiently processed and published, allowing us to maintain a high volume of relevant content.
Our partnership with DeepNewz has driven measurable improvements in both efficiency and audience engagement. By integrating intelligent automation into our editorial workflow, we have not only expanded our content reach but also strengthened our ability to deliver timely and high-quality journalism.
By automating routine news updates, DeepNewz has empowered our editorial team to focus on in-depth, long-form feature articles, enhancing the quality and analytical depth of our journalism while ensuring real-time updates for our audience.
News leaders and journalists often view AI content as the enemy. After our collaboration with DeepNewz, I’m more convinced than ever that AI can help improve journalism and can be a great complement to newsrooms, cutting costs in content production and allowing reporters to focus where humans can deliver the most value.
