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The Washington Post is employing a data-crunching program called Heliograf to help it update stories on Election Day. Photo: Getty Images
Lukas I. Alpert
Oct. 19, 2016 6:00 a.m. ET

The Washington Post plans to cover every House, Senate and gubernatorial race in the country on Election Day with the aid of what it describes as artificial intelligence.

The plan is to use a data-crunching program called Heliograf, which was built in-house, to bolster efforts by the Post’s team of 60 political reporters to provide detailed coverage of nearly 500 contests across the U.S.

Reporters will focus their attention on covering high-profile contests and races expected to be close or pivotal, while the program fills in the gaps.

“This will give readers Washington Post-quality coverage at all levels but will also be used to alert reporters to things that they may not see, or draw their attention to a particular race that they didn’t expect to be a close one,” said Jeremy Gilbert, the Post’s director of strategic initiatives.

The Post first experimented with Heliograf to cover events at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro this summer and will look to expand its use on Election Day.

Using templates and pre-written previews, the program will automatically update stories as results come in, said Sam Han, the Post’s director of data science. Journalists will then add reporting, analysis and color to stories that are deemed to be of particular note, although the program will be capable of inserting some analysis into less prominent stories, he said.

The system will use geo-targeting to bring stories about particular regional races to the top of a page when viewed by a person from that area. For example, a reader from North Carolina will see stories from North Carolina races more prominently placed in the Post’s online election live blog.

Heliograf will also alert reporters if a candidate is lagging behind expectations in a particular race or when a contest has been called.

“This is part of our big data initiative to help readers engage better and help our editorial teams do their job more efficiently,” Mr. Han said.

In recent years, publishers have moved increasingly toward using computers and data analytics to supplement and inform reporting. In 2014, the Associated Press began using automated writing technology to produce some earnings stories. Earlier this year, the wire service said it would use the same technology to cover more than 10,000 minor-league baseball games a year.

When entrepreneur Michael W. Ferro Jr. refashioned the company that owns the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune into Tronc Inc. earlier this year, he said the use of artificial intelligence would be at the core of the new company.

This week, a financial news startup called Money.net announced it had hired veteran media executive Norman Pearlstine to build an automated news feed of machine-generated stories.

The Post—taking inspiration from its owner Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos—has been a big proponent of such efforts.

Executives at the Post say Heliograf takes it one step further by being able to update stories repeatedly and offer analysis, rather than just plug in bits of data into a template.

Shailesh Prakash, the Post’s chief technology officer said Heliograf is one of several “experiments” the paper is trying to better use the data that it already has available. He pointed to a headline testing tool the paper created earlier this year called “Bandito” as another example.

“Can Heliograf be engineered in such a way that it can mine the mountains of data we have and go beyond just doing updates and sending tweets? We hope it can become a little smarter, but the technology is really years away. We are just scratching the surface,” he said.

Write to Lukas I. Alpert at email@example.com





