Offering readers expanded coverage and greater context with collections

As one of Argentina’s oldest legacy news organizations, LA NACION offers readers access to exclusive content and comprehensive news coverage. Content Data Lead Santiago Nasra wanted to give consumers more context and expanded content surrounding popular news stories, by compiling LA NACION’s most recent, exclusive coverage of important events into collections. But the volume and length of background materials proved to be a challenge. Nasra was looking for a way to quickly summarize large documents and transcribe long audio/visual files, so journalists could devote more time to writing articles and building the collections.

Nasra and his team turned to Google’s Pinpoint platform to speed up the creation of their collections. The summarizing feature helped them condense articles and extract common themes, while the tool’s transcription capabilities made short work of lengthy audio files and videos. Pinpoint’s highlighter feature was especially helpful: When searching for a specific word, the tool highlights exactly where it’s used in the document. Similarly, automatic indexing creates a list of the most commonly mentioned people, locations, or organizations in the material, allowing the team to quickly locate where specific entities are mentioned.

With Pinpoint, Nasra says that the LA NACION team was able to save “a large amount of time” summarizing information, and he estimates it took two to three hours less than before to transcribe each longer video. Pinpoint even helped them discover specific mentions that had been buried in the large amount of source material. “Pinpoint organized the documents for easy access and saved us having to manually analyze them,” Nasra says. “It helped us build collections that gave our audience the entire context of what was happening.”