KUALA LUMPUR: From creating customised reader personas to utilising an artificial intelligence-aided therapist for readers, news organisations from across the Asia-Pacific region have shared their journeys in adopting AI within newsrooms.
Organised by the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), an AI Showcase: Best Case Studies from the WAN-IFRA AI Catalyst Programme saw three news organisations presenting their prototypes at WAN-IFRA DIgital Media Asia 2025.
The Star’s senior news editor Razak Ahmad said the news organisation is working to create an AI-enhanced therapist based on 39 years of columns from the newspaper’s weekly advice columnist, Dear Thelma.
He said The Star has a rich dataset to train an AI that could authentically capture her voice and perspective.
AI insights: Razak, Kwok and Tam sharing insights at the 2025 Digital Media Asia Conference by WAN-IFRA at Pullman Hotel, Kuala Lumpur. — FAIHAN GHANI/The Star
“Since April 1986, Thelma has guided readers through relationship troubles, career challenges and life’s many other dilemmas.
“An AI-enhanced Thelma means we can respond to more reader submissions, potentially increasing reader engagement, especially among our younger, tech-savvy audience,” he said.
A guiding principle for the project would be to ensure that any AI-generated content is clearly labelled and moderated by a qualified person before publication.
Senior tech coordinator Kyle Kwok said it was important to continuously fine-tune the AI training model used in the project to ensure that it could accurately reflect Thelma’s voice and perspective.
“We will have to continuously feed the most recent Dear Thelma articles to the AI model so that it will be up to date,” he said.
Fellow editor Michelle Tam said time and tests would determine if the advice generated by the AI therapist can adequately help The Star’s readers to navigate the complex landscape of their personal lives.
She emphasised that the AI tools to be integrated with Dear Thelma would have human supervision to maintain the high level of credibility and readers’ trust that The Star enjoys.
She welcomed readers to share their problems with Dear Thelma by emailing lifestyle@thestar.com.my.
“In addition to our wonderful human shoulder to cry on, you might even encounter a trained ‘Ther-AI-phist’ to lend you a helping hand in future,” she added.
Session moderator, journalist and media innovator Fergus Bell said the newsroom AI Catalyst is an 18-month programme to support 128 newsrooms in their AI adoption journey.
“These experiments reveal what works, what doesn’t, and what’s next for newsrooms serious about AI,” he said, adding that these projects span multilingual, multiplatform, and resource-diverse newsrooms.
Taiwan’s United Daily News Group data development general manager Anson Mok said its organisation is creating a prototype exploring Gen AI’s potential to offer content recommendations based on the readers’ persona, which includes their demographics, behaviours and preferences.
“We defined 20 personas and use AI to analyse which type of content fits the personas,” he said.
He said this prototype helps enhance audience segments, news value and content quality, as well as understanding and expanding the target audience.
Sports editor at the Philippine Daily Inquirer Francis TJ Ochoa presented their prototype called the Newsroom Elves, which aims to improve efficiency in the print newsroom.
“The Editor’s Desk Elf converts press releases into stories with headlines and summaries.
“It copyreads articles to check for spelling, grammar and punctuation and edits for clarity and brevity,” he said.
He said it would leave the editorials with more time to focus on the narrative of news stories.
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