La Silla Rota Uses AI
- Mexico's La Silla Rota is using generative AI to suggest daily topics, story angles and reporter assignments. (x.com) - The newsroom reports the tool has cut research hours by automating story discovery and reporter matching. (x.com) - Other outlets like Gray Media are running similar tools, but reports stress human editorial judgment remains essential. ( )
A Mexican news group is using generative artificial intelligence to decide what to cover each morning and which reporter should take the story. (latamjournalismreview.org) At La Silla Rota’s health site SuMédico.com, manager Mariluz Roldán now gets a 7 a.m. email with trending topics, suggested angles and reporter recommendations before the daily editorial meeting. She told LatAm Journalism Review that a process that used to take up to two hours now takes “nearly half that time.” (latamjournalismreview.org) The system was developed by a team led by Graciela Rock, former director of La Cadera de Eva, another La Silla Rota Group outlet in Mexico City. The prototype uses n8n, a workflow automation tool, and pulls in data from Google Analytics, GA4, Smartocto and RSS feeds from other media outlets. (latamjournalismreview.org, journalismai.info) Instead of one chatbot making every decision, the team split the work into separate pieces, including relevance scoring, sentiment analysis, geographic filtering and author matching. Rock said that modular setup made the system cheaper, easier to tune for different sites and more transparent for editors. (journalismai.info) The project grew out of two newsroom training programs: LATAM Newsroom AI Catalyst, run by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers with OpenAI support, and the JournalismAI Skills Lab, backed by the Google News Initiative. WAN-IFRA said Latin American publishers are moving from AI experiments to tools tied to specific newsroom problems, including workflow and editorial planning. (latamjournalismreview.org, wan-ifra.org) Other publishers are building similar internal systems, but with tighter rules around what the software can do. Gray Media said its in-house tool, “Ask grAI,” is used for tasks such as summarizing long meetings, adapting broadcast scripts for digital platforms and searching large sets of public records. (nationalpress.org) Gray executives said the company built “Ask grAI” as a closed internal system rather than relying on public tools, partly to reduce the risk of exposing sensitive reporting material. The company’s policy says every word that is published or broadcast remains the responsibility of a human editor or journalist. (nationalpress.org) That human-check rule is becoming standard across journalism guidance. A February 2026 briefing from the Center for News, Technology & Innovation said newsroom AI policies tend to emphasize transparency, human supervision and human verification, even though formal policies are still unevenly adopted. (cnti.org) The Online News Association’s case-study series has documented similar uses at Hearst, Der Spiegel, iTromsø and Zamaneh Media, with tools aimed at headlines, fact-checking, story discovery and translation rather than fully automated publishing. The pattern across those examples is that editors keep control while software handles repetitive sorting and search work. (journalists.org) For La Silla Rota, the immediate change is smaller and more concrete: editors start the day with a ranked list instead of a blank screen. The newsroom still decides what runs. (latamjournalismreview.org)
