The International News Media Association (INMA), a global community of market-leading news media companies reinventing how they engage audiences and grow revenue in a multiplatform environment, has launched a Generative AI Initiative as part of its five leadership projects unveiled Wednesday for 2024.
INMA in a news release said Amalie Nash, a former Gannett | USA Today Network editorial and audience development executive, and Sonali Verma, a former Globe and Mail editor who moved over to the newspaper’s AI team, will be joining INMA to lead initiatives.
Nash will head up INMA’s Newsroom Transformation Initiative. Nash also leads transformation efforts for the National Trust for Local News and is a coach for the Local Media Association (LMA). She spent 12 years at Gannett, most recently as senior vice president of local news and audience development.
Verma will lead the Generative AI Initiative. Prior to her 15-year tenure at the Globe and Mail, she worked at Bloomberg, CNBC, and Reuters. She will be a Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute at Oxford this year, studying generative AI and the business of news.
First launched in 2018, INMA initiatives rally association resources around passion subjects, cultivating and distilling practical best practices based on original insights. Each initiative is reviewed annually.
The Generative AI Initiative was created by the INMA Board of Directors to surface practical news media use cases around GenAI to strengthen their businesses. Notably, the initiative will focus on GenAI use cases in the newsroom, advertising, and marketing. It will look at business efficiencies, revenue generation, data, and product development.
The two-year-old Newsroom Transformation Initiative aims to help bring newsrooms closer to the business of news. This year’s focus will be on practical tools and guidance on defining newsroom transformation, understanding the value of journalism, establishing newsroom-wide KPIs, and creating a data-fluent newsroom culture.
In addition to the Generative AI and Newsroom Transformation initiatives, INMA will continue its popular Readers First, Product & Tech, and Digital Platform initiatives in 2024 under the leadership of Greg Piechota, Jodie Hopperton, and Robert Whitehead, respectively.
